Built a full cold email automation with Claude Code and here's what happened
Our cold email reply rates have been strong lately, averaging around 2 to 4% consistently which doesn't sound like a lot but when you're sending at scale that translates to a serious volume of qualified conversations every month. The way we got here was by building a full automation using Claude Code, Apify, Million Verifier, and Instantly. The part that made the biggest difference was the personalisation layer. Instead of the usual mail merge tokens that everyone can see through, we built custom Claude skills that actually research each prospect and write something that feels like it was typed specifically for them. That one change alone moved reply rates significantly. Most of the cold email problems we see come down to three things. Deliverability issues that mean emails never even reach the inbox. List quality that looks good on paper but is full of unverified or irrelevant contacts. And personalisation that is either too generic to get a reply or too time consuming to do at scale. Curious where people here are running into the most friction with their cold email. Is it getting emails delivered, building the right lists, or getting people to actually reply?