Digital Creativs is a Toronto-based outbound agency co-founded by Preeti Malik, helping B2B SaaS and service businesses reach local business ICPs through email and LinkedIn.
Since adopting Smartlead in 2023, the agency has driven exceptional reply rates across some of the hardest B2B personas to reach—SaaS CEOs and CMOs—while cutting the cost and fragility of third-party automation workflows entirely.
Preeti Malik started in cold email doing influencer outreach for Safety Wing, a YC-backed company, where she used email to acquire 50–100 affiliates per month. That experience shaped her conviction that email is the fastest channel to test value propositions and scale outreach, a principle she built Digital Creativs around.
The agency runs go-to-market outbound for B2B clients across email and LinkedIn, and uses the same infrastructure it builds for clients to power its own growth.
"Email still remains one of the easiest and fastest ways to get in front of customers, test your value proposition, and scale from there. For us, it's our number one acquisition channel—for ourselves and for our clients." - Preeti Malik
Before Smartlead, Preeti was sending from Apollo—using the company's primary domain, paying per inbox, and hitting lead limits that made scaling expensive fast.
"Think about adding multiple domains and multiple inboxes—it would be absolutely ridiculous. We'd end up with a $1,000/month bill just for a sending tool."
Beyond cost, the team struggled with fragile Make + Airtable automation workflows that broke frequently, lacked campaign context, and required an external contractor to maintain.
Diagnosing deliverability issues when scaling client infrastructure was also largely guesswork without the right tooling.
Preeti chose Smartlead in 2023 for three core reasons: unlimited inboxes without per-seat costs, deep API documentation that fit her software engineering background, and sender bounce diagnostics that gave her real visibility into deliverability issues at scale.
"The Smartlead API documentation was super extensive—so much that we could do with the API that wasn't possible with other tools."
When a high-volume client's new inbox infrastructure started showing unexpected bounce spikes despite identical messaging and lead lists, Smartlead's bounce-code tracking helped the team pinpoint misconfigured DNS settings from the inbox provider very fast.
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Digital Creativs runs 90% of its clients on Smartlead, managing inboxes, domains, and sequences centrally. Sender bounce diagnostics have become a critical safeguard whenever scaling new infrastructure for clients with large TAMs.
The team previously paid an external contractor for nearly two months to build a reply agent in Make and Airtable. Smartlead's native reply agent replaced it entirely—with better context awareness and zero maintenance overhead.
The agency now also uses SmartAgents to send daily campaign stats directly to client Slack channels, replacing the Make + Airtable pipeline they had relied on previously.
"Smartlead dropped the reply agent natively in the platform and completely eliminated the workflow we had built, which broke half the time and didn't understand the context."
Using a SmartAgent template connected to AimFox, the team automatically sends LinkedIn connection requests whenever a prospect replies positively to an email—removing an entirely manual step from the follow-up workflow.
Preeti is actively testing Smart Dialer to streamline call follow-ups, with the call transcript appearing in Master Inbox alongside email history—giving callers full context before and after every conversation.
Digital Creativs consistently achieves reply rates and conversion numbers that most agencies consider aspirational:
By replacing their external automation contractor and Make + Airtable stack with SmartAgents, the team eliminated recurring overhead while gaining automations that are more reliable and context-aware—built directly inside the platform where all their campaign data already lives.
"We spent a month and a half paying someone to build a reply agent that broke half the time. Smartlead dropped it natively, and we haven't looked back."
"I've always had a good experience. You guys reply on time, rectify issues immediately, and the team is knowledgeable. When we had the inbox bounce issue, support helped us understand exactly what was going on."
"Nine out of 10. Ninety percent of our clients are on Smartlead unless they come in with an existing setup. That's the default."
Digital Creativs built a high-performance outbound engine on Smartlead—consistently booking meetings with SaaS CEOs and CMOs, hitting reply rates most agencies consider out of reach, and replacing an entire third-party automation stack with native SmartAgent workflows.
By centralizing campaign execution, reply management, and automation in one platform, Preeti's team spends less time maintaining infrastructure and more time building outbound systems that convert.
Your business can do the same and much more with Smartlead’s AI agents and automation features. How? Check Smartlead’s 14-day free trial to find out.
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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.
