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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.
How It All Started: The Story of Jack Hayward and Studio Novus
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.
Challenges Faced Along the Way
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.
Notable Achievements
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%.
Key Factors Contributing to Success
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."
Vision for the Future of Lead Generation Powered By Smartlead
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.
Sattwik Das
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Frequently asked questions
What is Smartlead's cold email outreach software?
Smartlead's cold email outreach tool helps businesses scale their outreach efforts seamlessly. With unlimited mailboxes, fully automated email warmup functionality, a multi-channel infrastructure, and a user-friendly unibox, it empowers users to manage their entire revenue cycle in one place. Whether you're looking to streamline cold email campaigns with automated email warmups, personalization fields, automated mailbox rotation, easy integrations, and spintax, improve productivity, or enhance scalability with subsequences based on lead’s intentions, automated replies, and full white-label experience, our cold email tool implifies it in a single solution.
How does Smartlead's unlimited mailboxes feature benefit me?
Our "unlimited mailboxes" feature allows you to expand your email communications without restrictions imposed by a mailbox limit. This means you won't be constrained by artificial caps on the number of mailboxes you can connect and use. This feature makes Smartlead the best cold email software and empowers you to reach a wider audience, engage with more potential customers, and manage diverse email campaigns effectively.
What do you mean by "unibox to handle your entire revenue cycle"?
The "unibox" is one of the unique features of Smartlead cold email outreach tool, and it's a game-changer when it comes to managing your revenue cycle. The master inbox or the unibox consolidates all your outreach channels, responses, sales follow-ups, and conversions into one centralized, user-friendly mailbox.
With the "unibox," you gain the ability to:
1. Focus on closing deals: You can now say goodbye to the hassle of logging into multiple mailboxes to search for replies. The "unibox" streamlines your sales communication, allowing you to focus on what matters most—closing deals.
2. Centralized lead management: All your leads are managed from one central location, simplifying lead tracking and response management. This ensures you take advantage of every opportunity and efficiently engage with your prospects.
3. Maintain context: The "unibox" provides a 360-degree view of all your customer messages, allowing you to maintain context and deliver more personalized and effective responses.
Can Smartlead help improve my email deliverability rates?
Yes, our cold emailing software is designed to significantly improve your email deliverability rates. It enhances email deliverability through AI-powered email warmups across providers, unique IP rotating for each campaign, and dynamic ESP matching.
Real-time AI learning refines strategies based on performance, optimizing deliverability without manual adjustments. Smartlead's advanced features and strategies are designed to improve email deliverability rates, making it a robust choice for enhancing cold email campaign success.
Can I integrate Smartlead with other tools I'm using?
Certainly, Smartlead cold email tool is designed for seamless integration with a wide range of tools and platforms. Smartlead offers integration with HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Clay, Listkit, and more. You can leverage webhooks and APIs to integrate the tools you use. Try Now!
What is Smartlead, and how can it enhance my cold email campaigns?
Smartlead is a robust cold emailing software designed to transform cold emails into reliable revenue streams. Trusted by over 31,000 businesses, Smartlead excels in email deliverability, lead generation, cold email automation, and sales outreach. A unified master inbox streamlines communication management, while built-in email verification reduces bounce rates.Additionally, Smartlead offers essential tools such as CNAME, SPF Checker, DMARC Checker, Email Verifier, Blacklist Check Tool, and Email Bounce Rate Calculator for optimizing email performance.
How does Smartlead, as a cold emailing tool, automate the cold email process?
Smartlead’s robust cold email API and automation infrastructure streamline outbound communication by transforming the campaign creation and management processes. It seamlessly integrates data across software systems using APIs and webhooks, adjusts settings, and leverages AI for personalised content.
The cold emailing tool categorises lead intent, offers comprehensive email management with automated notifications, and integrates smoothly with CRMs like Zapier, Make, N8N, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive. Smartlead supports scalable outreach by rapidly adding mailboxes and drip-feeding leads into active campaigns Sign Up Now!
How does Smartlead ensure my emails don't land in the spam folder?
Smartlead, the best cold email marketing tool, ensures your emails reach the intended recipients' primary inbox rather than the spam folder.
Here's how it works:
1. Our "unlimited warmups" feature is designed to build and maintain a healthy sending reputation for your cold email outreach. Instead of sending a large volume of emails all at once, which can trigger spam filters, we gradually ramp up your sending volume. This gradual approach, combined with positive email interactions, helps boost your email deliverability rates.
2. We deploy high-deliverability IP servers specific to each campaign.
3. The ‘Warmup’ feature replicates humanized email sending patterns, spintax, and smart replies.
4. By establishing a positive sender reputation and gradually increasing the number of sent emails, Smartlead minimizes the risk of your emails being flagged as spam. This way, you can be confident that your messages will consistently land in the primary inbox, increasing the likelihood of engagement and successful communication with your recipients.
What features does Smartlead offer for cold email personalisation?
Smartlead enhances cold email personalisation through advanced AI-driven capabilities and strategic integrations. Partnered with Clay, The cold remaining software facilitates efficient lead list building, enrichment from over 50 data providers, and real-time scraping for precise targeting. Hyper-personalised cold emails crafted in Clay seamlessly integrate with Smartlead campaigns.
Moreover, Smartlead employs humanised, natural email interactions and smart replies to boost engagement and response rates. Additionally, the SmartAI Bot creates persona-specific, high-converting sales copy. Also you can create persona-specific, high-converting sales copy using SmartAI Bot. You can train the AI bot to achieve 100% categorisation accuracy, optimising engagement and conversion rates.
Is Smartlead suitable for both small businesses and large enterprises?
Smartlead accommodates both small businesses and large enterprises with flexible pricing and comprehensive features. The Basic Plan at $39/month suits small businesses and solopreneurs, offering 2000 active leads and 6000 monthly emails, alongside essential tools like unlimited email warm-up and detailed analytics.
Marketers and growing businesses benefit from the Pro Plan ($94/month), with 30000 active leads and 150000 monthly emails, plus a custom CRM and active support. Lead generation agencies and large enterprises can opt for the Custom Plan ($174/month), providing up to 12 million active lead credits and 60 million emails, with advanced CRM integration and customisation options.