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According to various studies, the average cold email response rate is 1-5%. Jack, the founder of the lead generation company Novus, started sending targeted and highly relevant outbound email campaigns for clients, only to face difficulty in scalability.
Upon his friend’s recommendation, Jack started using Smartlead to launch outbound email campaigns.
The result?
Novus achieved a staggering 9.20% reply rate.
In this case study, Jack shares his experiences with Smartlead and how it changed his perspective of outbound lead generation forever and accounted for his business's success.
Jack Hayward is the founder of Studio Novus, which specializes in outbound sales through cold email campaigns for its clients. Novus takes great pride in crafting outbound sales strategies that are not just effective but highly personalized and relevant.
It primarily serves tech and SaaS companies, although they are open to working with clients from any industry. Jack initially started with manual email sending, but soon, upon his friend Rene’s recommendation, he chose Smartlead to send cold emails.
Upon integrating Smartlead into his workflow, Jack experienced improvements in his lead generation efforts. He credits Smartlead with significantly increasing their booking rates, streamlined inbox management, and overall efficiency in client communication and outreach.
Throughout his journey as the founder of a successful outbound lead generation agency, Jack fondly acknowledges the role Smartlead played in his success story.
Before starting Novus, Jack ran a web design business where he struggled to find reliable methods to generate leads. To solve this issue, he considered cold calling and attending conferences but found them ineffective and time-consuming.
Initially, Jack started sending cold emails manually, which, while effective, was not scalable. He started exploring cold emailing tools and eventually started offering cold email as a service, eventually founding Novus.
Jack faced difficulty managing the inbox and effectively moving leads to new campaigns. Also, the process of refreshing leads and integrating them into new campaigns was not as smooth as he hoped.
Additionally, there were complications in deleting campaigns without deleting the associated leads and deleting leads not attached to any campaigns was tiring as he had to do it manually.
Novus uses Clay and APIs to create highly targeted and automated outbound email campaigns at scale using Smartlead. Specializing in SaaS businesses, Novus has been successfully landing high-ticket SQLs for its clients.
Although they don’t track email open rates anymore, they achieved a consistent email open rate of 80% for their personalized outbound email campaigns.
Read why tracking email open rates are not relevant anymore here.
Powered with Smartlead’s Master Inbox 3.0 and robust API support, Novus not only saved crucial time for SDRs but also generated over USD 12 million in the pipeline for their clients in 2023.
Tracking their analytics, Jack revealed that they secured 55 replies out of 598 leads contacted, with their highest reply rate of 9.20%. Moreover, Novus has also generated 124 positive replies from one outbound campaign, with the best positive response rate of 40.32%.
Talking about Smartlead, Jack added, “Using Smartlead has been a total game-changer and has been one of the primary drivers in our ability to generate over $12M in the pipeline for our clients last year. The flexibility of the API has given us a tonne of options when creating our internal systems.”
Jack and his team at Novus addressed their challenges through data-backed strategies and leveraged Smartlead and Clay for their cold email campaigns.
Jack found Smartlead about a year ago and has been using it for approximately eight months. He decided to switch to Smartlead after his friend René, a tech partner with Smartlead, recommended the sales engagement platform to him.
The uni box and tagging features streamlined inbox management for Studio Novus. These features enabled efficient organization and prioritization of emails, making it easier to manage leads and follow-ups.
By leveraging Smartlead's API and the customizations, Jack and his team built automation for many of their processes. Jack highlighted, “The Master Inbox alone has saved us a considerable amount of time, the custom tagging system and subsequences save us at least 2 hours a day. Now that everything appears in real-time, it has become our primary source of truth for email inboxes both for us and our clients who have white-labeled access."
Jack has a clear vision for the future of lead generation, riding on the capabilities and new-gen features offered by Smartlead. At the heart of it lies its innovation, customization, and efficiency, which Smartlead enables through its constant updates and new features. Jack acknowledges how these advancements have allowed Novus to deliver personalized and effective lead-generation efforts to scale businesses in the tech and SaaS markets.
Operational efficiency is another cornerstone of Novus's future plans. With Smartlead's API capabilities, Novus looks forward to leveraging customizations, saving time for strategic work, and automating manual tasks.
Despite their success, Novus also expresses his desire for enhancements in lead management and campaign processes.
In essence, Novus envisions a future where lead generation is more than just reaching out; it's about creating meaningful connections efficiently and effectively. This, combined with technological advancement and strategic insight, set the stage for Novus to ace lead generation and position itself as one of the best in the tech and SaaS sectors.
Join us to elevate your outreach!
Founder, StackOptimise
Smartlead's combination of automation, unlimited inboxes, and easy campaign management has completely transformed how we run cold email campaigns.
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Founder, Cold Email Hackers
We have about 15 companies and we use Smartlead for all of them.
Founder, DutchSave Media
One of the things I love about using Smartlead is the deliverability feature. If they landed in the bounce or spam folders, we could resolve this quickly.
Co-Founder, Growth Today
I want to continue to use Smartlead to make operations more seamless - the plan is to bring more clients here and build more SOPs.
Founder, FueltoFly
Smartlead listens to the agencies and customers and builds according to what people want, that has really made things easier for us.
Founder, OutboundSync
We build an infrastructure product, and OutboundSync communicates with Smartlead itself. I love the webhook and API. They're really well done and keep getting better.
Founder, Axoleads
With SmartDelivery, you can put all of that in the hands of the tool. It ensures your emails land in inboxes, and by running a simple test, you can see if you're hitting the mark.
Founder, Claygen
Deliverability is the cornerstone of cold email outreach. You could have the best email copy in the world, but if no one is seeing it, it's useless. I really love the feature where you can actually give client accesses to your clients.
Co-Founder, Cymate
I do not want to switch to another software. Pick a solution you trust, stick with it, and keep refining your copy.
CMO, Avalanche Capital
Managing large volumes of emails through multiple inboxes used to be a logistical nightmare. With Smartlead, the process is seamless. We book thousands of discovery calls through cold emails. These campaigns are generating leads at a scale we never thought possible.
Founder, Growth Engine X
We came for the unlimited inboxes, and we stayed for the API. 1.5M cold emails/month, 7,767+ inboxes managed.
Head of Community & Ecosystem, TxtCart
You cannot replace having 10,000 touches with potential clients. When you have that much distribution and reach, you really start to see incredible results. The simplicity of Smartlead made all the difference. It doesn't require you to be a technical wizard.
Founder, Hyperke
Smartlead has been a game-changer for us. It increased our appointment volume, improved ease of use, and offered valuable features. 80% increase in appointments/month, peak of 276 appointments in a single month.
Founder, Kinetyca
Smartlead has been our cold email backbone from day one. The platform evolves constantly, keeping pace with how deliverability and personalization need to work today. 21% overall reply rate, $175K in 4 months for multiple B2B clients.
Founder, Reachflow
Smartlead is centered around deliverability and constantly evolving. Their API is not like any other platform. Smartlead covers all our needs. The focus on core features like deliverability and API integration is unmatched.
CEO, Halfwarm
Our approach to crafting conversational emails led to reply rates that many of my peers thought were unattainable.
Co-Founder, letstrike
We've grown on zero capital, zero marketing, purely cold emailing - and that's the story we love to tell. The best approach is no approach if you can't handle domain meltdown. The second best is something like Smartlead that's built from the ground up for deliverability at scale.
Founder, Fenixtal
Smartlead's white-labeling and automation let us punch above our weight. The 12M euros sales potential? That's what happens when you combine human creativity with Smartlead's precision.
Co-Founder, Digital Creativs
Nine out of 10. Ninety percent of our clients are on Smartlead unless they come in with an existing setup. That's the default.
Co-Founder, BuildingReach
At the end of the day, you have to take a bet on one tool or another. It was a no-brainer taking that bet on Smartlead. We had to even turn down the volume of our marketing campaigns - Smartlead was capable of driving more volume than our sales team was able to fulfill.
Founder & MD, Prospectiv
Since starting the business in January of this year, we've already generated $200K in sales exclusively from cold email. Smartlead has been central to our operations and has exceeded our expectations.
Founder, Growthlynk
There's so much stuff built on top of it. I would be dead if I had to rebuild it with another tool. I can manage hundreds of senders easily. I can send hundreds of thousands of emails.
Founder, Corebits
The platform's HubSpot integration, real-time Slack updates, and advanced campaign customization have been game changers for our business and our clients'.
Founder, Apex Ascension
From day one, we've never used anything else.
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