I’m getting ready to launch cold email campaigns across 24 highly segmented data feeds, targeting CIOs and C-suite executives at $1B+ enterprise companies for B2B IT consulting. Because we’re going after high-level enterprise decision-makers, authority and brand image are extremely important. I recently had a custom banner image created (attached below) to build immediate confidence and trust right when the email opens. Years ago, when our business was doing $4M/year, we ran emails through ConstantContact with visual banners and saw great success. However, standard cold email consensus today is: "Never include images in your first email—it will tank deliverability straight to spam." Here is our current setup: Accounts are pre-warmed (purchased directly through Instantly). Extremely low/sparing sending volume per inbox. Highly optimized spintax and copy to avoid traditional spam triggers. Deeply segmented firmographic data. At the same time, I regularly receive newsletter-style outbound emails in my primary inbox that feature visual header banners. I’d love feedback from anyone running B2B enterprise outreach: 1. Have you tested using a header banner or image in Email #1 when targeting enterprise C-suite? 2. Did you notice a measurable drop in deliverability (especially against enterprise filters like Proofpoint, Mimecast, or Microsoft Defender)? 3. If you use visuals, do you keep Email #1 strictly text-only and introduce graphics in follow-up steps, or do you use them from day one? Would appreciate hearing real test data or experiences from the group!

Has anyone used it? Is it a credible substitute for Clay? Any glaring limitations that you've noticed? thanks in advance

Not through personalization. Not enrichment. Not some clever AI angle. They just emailed people who don't get cold emails. Here's the part nobody says out loud. Apollo, ZoomInfo, all of them scrape the same contacts off LinkedIn. Then every single one of us runs the same filters on top. Under 100 employees. Decision makers. Industries you think have money. I'm on that list. I get around 100 cold emails a day and I've got a filter that dumps every one of them into a folder. There is no cold email on this earth you could write me that gets a 10% reply rate. None. A restaurant owner who sees one cold email a day? Completely different conversation. New video is up and it's the full breakdown: 📍 Why swapping Apollo for Google Maps data alone takes you from 1% to 3-4% 👤 Owner emails vs role based emails, and when info@ is genuinely fine 🎥 52,000 YouTubers with a real email attached, filterable by niche 📱 Instagram bio scraping (1.5 million profiles with fitness, gym or health in the bio) 🎁 The easy yes offer behind the 16%: a welcome box, all they do is say yes Watch it here 👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ja1WknkOX-I Copy and offer are still the most important things by a mile. Fix those first. Then stop sending them to people who are already drowning in cold emails. First month on Consulti is free right now and that link expires in a few days. It's in the description.

I wasn't going to post a replay for this one. But.. too many people asked, so here it is. Up for 72 hours and then it's gone. 577 people joined the webinar at some point, and we went an hour over because the questions kept coming. 👉 Watch the replay here Questions in the comments and my team and I get to them.

I was in Montenegro at an AI conference when the reports started coming in. On vacation. Which is exactly when this stuff always happens 🤦‍♂️ Clients telling me replies had gone soft. Not off a cliff, nothing dramatic. Just quietly worse. So I sat in a hotel room with my laptop and Claude Code instead of doing any of the things you go to Montenegro to do, and started running tests. Here's the part that made me stop caring about the vacation. We found domains sitting on a blacklist before they had sent a single email. Not before their first cold email. Before they ever entered a warmup pool. Zero sends. Zero complaints. Already burnt. You cannot burn a domain that has never sent anything. So it wasn't the copy. It wasn't the warmup. It wasn't the volume. We tested all of it and none of it moved. Then we found the cause, and I did not enjoy it. It's a setup I've been telling you to use for years. In this community, in my paid programs, everywhere. Every serious infra provider in the space did the same thing, because it was the gold standard. It isn't anymore. It's now one of the easiest ways to get spotted as a cold emailer, and there's a blacklist quietly picking people off because of it. We ran a clean test that proved it in under an hour. Then we built two fixes and deployed them for all new orders before making this public. Both fixes are in the video, along with how to check if you're already on the list and what to do if you are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYoh_2j6VMg Watch it before your next send. If you've bought domains in the last few months, you're the one this happened to.