"Just following up" is the worst cold email opener. Follow-up is what you do after they reply. Every email in your cold outreach sequence has one job: get them to reply. Telling them you're "just following up" will have the exact opposite result.

Winners enter the conversation. Losers ask for one. "Worth a conversation?" is the worst cold email CTA. Your prospect wakes up thinking about this problem. Drives to work thinking about it. Lies in bed replaying the same frustration. That's the conversation. Your email doesn't have to start anything. It interrupts their internal monologue. And when you nail it, they don't feel sold. They feel heard. That's when they reply. They've now brought you into their conversation.

This shift in thinking will change everything. Stop thinking in campaigns. Start thinking in pipeline generation. Too many people treat outbound like a slot machine. Build one campaign, launch it, hope it hits. That's not how this works. Run multiple campaigns at once. Different angles. Log into your ListKit account and build different lists: Use Intent data for buying signals and target with more product-specific offers and copy. Use the B2B database to pull lists targeting roles in specific industries. Create offers and copy that meet prospects where they already are. The goal isn't "launch and see what happens." The goal is continuously getting people to raise their hand and say "tell me more." Every positive reply has a dollar value. Median LTV for ListKit customers is $8k. So when someone says "that campaign only got 5 positive replies," I hear "$40,000 in pipeline from cold email." Now you have to close 'em. But that's a different post. You're not running campaigns. You're building a pipeline generation machine. Scale winners, kill losers, keep testing. Set it and forget it is for retirement accounts, not outbound.

I hear this ALL THE TIME. "Only 5 positive replies… $900 spent… this campaign sucked!" Step back from the ledge. That's 5 qualified humans who raised their hand and said "I'm interested." At a realistic 20% close rate, that's 1 closed deal expected. At ListKit, our customers' median LTV is: $8k. You just acquired a customer for ~$900 CAC. That's damn near 9:1 LTV:CAC. Most companies would tattoo those numbers on their face. Yeah, we always want more positive replies. Scale the winner, obviously. But calling this "trash"? Insane. Reply rate and positive reply rate are great for diagnosing campaigns and tweaking copy. But for actual business impact: How many interested humans - and ultimately customers - per dollar spent? What's your true CAC vs LTV? Everything else is vanity noise keeping you A/B testing subject lines forever instead of scaling winners.

The silent killer of cold email campaigns (even the “perfect” ones): You’re checking all the boxes everyone swears by: Personalized lines ✓ Social proof ✓ Short & punchy copy ✓ Clear, low-pressure CTA ✓ Yet your positive reply rate is still flatlined. Here’s the part nobody talks about: You’re trying to start a brand-new conversation… while completely ignoring the one already screaming in your prospect’s head 24/7. Fix → Step straight into THAT existing internal monologue. Pro move: If you have existing customers, mine your sales, onboarding, support, and success calls. Pure gold in there. No customers or intel yet? Hit Grok (or your favorite AI) and ask: “Deep dive: psychology of a [role] in [industry]. What’s their constant internal dialogue? What story do they tell themselves every day? What scares them most? What pisses them off constantly? What narrative can we hijack and continue?” Keep probing the chatbot until what you come up with feels uncomfortably spot-on. Then build your emails around those exact triggers. Sanity check the scripts: “If I were a burned-out [role] in [industry] right now, how does this subject line + opener hit me? Does it nail the psychology we uncovered?” Iterate until it’s tight AF. None of this lands if you’re emailing the wrong humans, of course. So if you haven't yet, or in a while, go into your ListKit account and use our new AI search tools and updated filers and build your super-targeted list. Then run these prompts so you can make them think, “Finally… someone gets ME.”