The argument in one line.
Cold email stopped working the moment everyone started personalizing it — the counter-move is a no-pitch curiosity email that gets replies by never triggering the guard that personalization now raises.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You run outbound for a B2B service business and your reply rates have been declining despite adding more personalization.
- You use Clay, Apollo, or Sales Navigator to build lists but feel like your targeting is still too broad.
- You want a repeatable cold email framework with real campaign numbers attached, not theory.
- You're considering adding a VSL to your outbound funnel but unsure where it fits.
SKIP IF…
- You sell direct-to-consumer — this system is built entirely around B2B outreach.
- You're looking for email copywriting templates to swipe verbatim; the actual copy is anonymized to protect the client campaign.
- Your ICP is a large enterprise or government — this strategy is tuned for small founder-led businesses.
The full version, fast.
Over-personalized outbound has become the new spam — every inbox is full of emails that technically look custom but read like a pitch. The counter-strategy is to send an email that contains no pitch whatsoever: a short, curiosity-driven message that implies the recipient was specifically chosen, ends with a low-friction CTA asking permission to explain, and never mentions the offer. Once they reply, commitment bias kicks in and the follow-up VSL — which holds the full pitch — gets watched by people already psychologically invested in the conversation. The list-building step is equally important: instead of broad categories, build lists filtered by company size, graduation year, years in role, location, and AI-inferred gender, and scrape niche communities like Skool for segments that don't exist as Apollo filters.
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00:00 – 00:46
01 · Cold open — personalization is broken
Hook establishes that AI-powered personalization has commoditized itself; three boring basics are the counter-move.
00:46 – 01:51
02 · Step 1 intro — list precision is upstream of everything
Most people think their ICP is defined; a category is not a person. The difference affects every line of copy downstream.
01:51 – 04:52
03 · Building the list — filters for age, company size, location, gender
Walk-through of Apollo filters: education year as age proxy, 1-10 employee size, max 5 years in role, US+Canada, Claygent for gender inference.
04:52 – 05:26
04 · Remote closer segment — scraping Skool with Apify
No Apollo filter for remote closers, so Claude identifies top Skool communities, Apify scrapes them for ~$3/1,000 rows.
05:26 – 06:13
05 · CTA for agency help (sponsor segment)
Pitch for the agency's done-for-you service — 3,000 calls booked in the last year.
06:13 – 08:07
06 · Step 2 — the no-pitch curiosity email
Why pitching in the first email fails; the alternative is an email with no offer, no link, and no CTA — just enough specificity to make the recipient feel individually chosen.
08:07 – 09:53
07 · Email teardown — five components
Anonymized copy breakdown: curiosity subject line, belief shift, mirror line, offer reveal, and the money CTA ('you came up because...').
09:53 – 10:52
08 · Follow-up and buyer psychology
Follow-up adds scarcity, reinforces low-friction CTA. Main insight: proven non-mass-targeting triggers curiosity, and curiosity beats resistance.
10:52 – 12:37
09 · Step 3 — VSL funnel and results
First reply triggers VSL send — commitment bias means the video gets watched. Results: 94k emails, 2% reply rate, 587 positive, 41 booked calls in April.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Over-personalized outbound has become the new spam — when everyone uses Clay to personalize, personalization itself is the signal that an email is a pitch.
- List precision is upstream of everything else: vague targeting shows up in every line of copy even when the writer doesn't realize it.
- No database has an age filter, but graduation year combined with company size and years in role is a reliable proxy for finding founders under 35.
- A curiosity-only opening email with no offer, no link, and no CTA to book a call outperformed personalized pitches at 94,000 sends.
- 94,000 cold emails sent in April yielded 1,000+ total replies at 2% reply rate, with 50% positive — 587 interested prospects.
- Commitment bias means a prospect who replied to email one is psychologically invested in watching the VSL in email two.
- The cold email's only job is to get a first reply — treat it like a Meta ad impression, not a sales pitch.
- Scraping niche Skool communities with Apify (roughly $3 per 1,000 rows) surfaces audiences that don't exist as filters in Apollo or Sales Navigator.
- The money line is 'You came up because [specific attribute] — you have something we don't have yet. Happy to share the thinking if you're open.' — it implies specificity and lets the CTA prove it.
- 71 calls were booked over the campaign, of which 40-50 fit the age criteria — quality filter happens after the funnel, not before.
- Running a Claygent prompt for gender inference on every list row was the practical solution to an ICP filter that no database offers.
- The follow-up email didn't need to be elaborate — it just added a touch of scarcity and reinforced the same low-friction CTA.
Three principles that make cold email work when personalization doesn't.
WHAT TO LEARN
When AI tools made personalization trivial, the inbox adapted — the emails that now get replies are the ones that don't look like emails at all.
- A B2B category like 'agency owners doing $30K-$100K/month' is not an ICP — it's a demographic segment; a real ICP includes psychographic and situational context that informs every word of the copy.
- No outbound database has an age filter, but recent graduation year combined with small company size and short tenure in role is a reliable proxy for finding young founders without paying for enrichment.
- Scraping niche skill-based communities (like Skool groups) at $3/1,000 rows reaches audiences that are self-selected by problem-awareness and don't exist as Apollo filter combinations.
- An opening email that contains zero pitch — no offer, no link, no book-a-call — outperforms personalized pitch emails because it never triggers the guard readers now raise the moment they recognize a pitch pattern.
- The 'money line' structure — implying the recipient was specifically chosen and offering to explain why — works because the CTA is a promise of specificity, not a demand for a calendar slot.
- Commitment bias is a funnel mechanic: a prospect who replied to email one has a psychological need to close the loop, which means the VSL in email two gets watched by people already invested in the conversation.
- A 2% reply rate at 94,000 sends with 50% positive replies (587 out of 1,000+) required building curiosity that attracted some non-converting replies — high curiosity and high qualification rarely optimize at the same time.
Terms worth knowing.
- ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
- A precise description of the specific type of buyer most likely to buy and retain — not a broad category like 'B2B founders' but a defined person with specific demographics, psychographics, and situational context.
- Claygent
- An AI agent run inside the Clay data enrichment platform that evaluates each row in a spreadsheet against a custom prompt — used here to classify prospect gender by name inference.
- VSL (Video Sales Letter)
- A recorded sales presentation delivered via video — placed behind the first reply rather than in the initial email to leverage the commitment bias of prospects who already responded.
- Commitment bias
- The psychological tendency to follow through on a course of action once you've taken an initial step toward it — here, having replied to email one makes prospects more likely to watch the VSL in email two.
- Open loop
- A narrative tension device that withholds a resolution the reader wants — used in the subject line and email body to create curiosity that can only be resolved by replying.
- Skool
- An online community and course platform where niche groups self-organize around skills or businesses — used here as a scrape-able source of remote closer communities that don't exist as filters in outbound databases.
- Apify
- A web scraping platform used to extract member data from Skool communities, priced at roughly $3 per 1,000 rows.
Things they pointed at.
Lines you could clip.
00:00
“If you're still trying to use fancy personalization to book more calls from cold email, you're ruining your results.”
01:57
“That's a category, not a person. And the difference matters more than anything else in this entire system.”
10:38
“Curiosity replaced resistance.”
10:52
“The cold email isn't where you sell. It just gets the first interested reply.”
11:42
“We basically created a sales funnel within our cold email campaign.”
Word for word.
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metaphoranalogy
If you're still trying to use fancy personalization to book more calls from cold email, you're ruining your results. Because I managed to get 587 replies from a single campaign without any of that.
I simply just focused on the basics, or in this case, three boring principles that booked over 41 calls in a single month. See, most people doing cold email right now think the only way to get replies is by personalizing more emails or building entire campaigns inside of Clay. However, that process is completely broken because with all the new AI tools, it's becoming easier than ever to make emails look personalized, which means every single person is doing it.
And when everyone is doing the same thing, it stops working. It's as simple as that. However, it creates a massive opportunity to just double down on the basics.
And in this video, I'm gonna walk you through the three boring strategies that I used to generate over 587 positive replies from a single campaign. This way, you'll have a clear framework so you can start applying this to your own cold emails.
Now the first thing that kills most cold email campaigns might just be the most basic step of them all, and it has nothing to do with the actual emails that you write. It starts before you write a single word, and almost everyone gets it wrong. See, most people think they have a defined list, who they wanna target.
They'll say something like b to b founders or agency owners doing 30 k to a 100 k a month. And to them, that feels specific, but it's not. That's a category, not a person.
And the difference matters more than anything else in this entire system because your list precision is upstream of everything else. You can't write copy that feels personal you don't actually know who you're writing to. You can't pick an offer that resonates if you don't know exactly what the reader is struggling with.
Being too vague in your targeting will show up in almost every single line that you write, and the person on the other end can view it even if they can't explain why. So for our client, we knew we had to dig a lot deeper. Their ICP wasn't just founders in a certain age group or industry.
It was young male entrepreneurs between the ages of 20 and 35, specifically in North America in various different spaces like agency, remote sales, and local service business. On top of that, we are looking for people who are going through the grind of entrepreneurship alone.
Those who had plenty of momentum, but we're starting to feel like they were missing something. That level of specificity is what I think made the copy click. But, obviously, Apollo or whatever doesn't have a filter for grinding alone on a Friday night.
So how do you actually build a list for an ICP that's that nuanced? Let me show you exactly how we did it. Now the first list we built out was the broad founder list.
And when I say broad, I mean industry agnostic. So the first thing that we looked for was that they were founder or CEO, whatever their role is. But the important thing here was that they're young.
Right? And no database actually has an age filter. It's just not something you could filter for.
So what we found as a solution was, one, ensuring that they were a part of a small company. Right? One to 10 employee size was the first focus.
But the thing that really cracked open the age side of things for us was the education filter. Essentially, what you're gonna wanna do is increase the year in which they graduated. So, essentially, the safest bet is going to be someone who graduated in the last couple of years.
And that just makes it very likely that they're within that, like, 20 to 30 range. Obviously, there's gonna be some outliers where, you know, people went to school later in life and things like that, but it's the closest thing that we could find to get us there. We also wanted to make sure that they were only in their role maximum around five years just so we know they're in that, like, newer phase of business and not somebody who's been in their business for decades because that's just not the ideal customer.
And then on top of that, we added a location filter, so we obviously wanted to prioritize The US, and then we also did Canada as well. Where this got tricky though was ensuring that the people that we were reaching out to were actually male. And the solution that we found here was simply just running a Claygent, so we loaded everything up in Clay, and then we ran a prompt on gender inference.
So, basically, went through every single row in the list and classified whether they're likely to be male or female. If it was unsure or if there's kind of, like, a gender nonspecific name, we just decided to be a little lenient with it and just allow them into the list. Worst case scenario, they say they're female and it's not relevant.
That's fine. Now that was our broad list. We obviously covered a ton of different industries within that, but we also repeated the process specifically for those in the agency space and specifically for those in the local service space.
But if you remember from earlier, remote closers were also an industry that they wanted to focus on. The reason being that, you know, people are sitting at home taking sales calls all day every day. It gets lonely.
It gets boring. These are the types of people that need something like what our client was offering. Now there isn't a industry filter on AIR or Apollo or Sales Navigator for remote closures.
It's a relatively new role that's kind of popped up in the last, like, ten ish years. So what we decided to do is get pretty creative. We jumped into Claude, and we basically asked Claude to come up with a list of all of the top school communities for remote closers.
If you're not familiar with school, it's an education platform that allows people to join some sort of community. There's an education aspect to it with various different videos, and people generally just come here to learn their craft. Right?
So those inside of school are obviously going to be those that are either a remote closer already or learning to become one. But regardless, they're in that situation that we wanna focus on for our ideal customer.
Once we found a few of them via Claude, you can see here there was four major ones. We jumped in and used Apify and just scraped the school communities that we were in, and you can see here it's roughly $3 per thousand rows. These are a little bit more targeted, and there wasn't that many that we had to pull, so it didn't get too pricey.
And then this even gave us a few ideas for the agency space as well. And again, once scraped, we loaded it all back up in clay, ran our claygent to determine what gender they were, and then built the list from there. Now that was just step one.
And if you're already wondering if there's an easier way to do all of this that doesn't require you to actually learn any of it yourself, there is. And you can access it by booking a call with us using the link in the description below.
Because setting up systems like this is what we do for our clients literally every single day, and we've used them to book over 3,000 sales calls in the last year alone. So if you wanna skip all of this and just have a team handle it all for you, you can book a call using the link below. But either way, having the right list is only the start because now you have to actually write the email.
And here's the issue. Most cold emails, even like the personalized ones, read like a pitch that you can spot from a mile away. There's some compliment on something that they post on LinkedIn, a line about what you help people do, and then obviously a CTA to book a call.
Every potential lead knows exactly what's happening, which puts their guard up even before they finish the first sentence. And this issue has only gotten worse because AI generated outbound is flooding every single inbox right now. The volume of templatized, technically personalized emails has gone up while the actual human quality has gone down.
So the bar for getting ignored is lower than ever, which means you need to get creative if you actually wanna stand out. So what do we do in this case? We sent an email that didn't pitch anything.
No. We help x do y. No offer.
No link. No book a call. It just said something specific enough that the person reading it felt like they were the only one who received it.
And because it didn't pitch, their guard never went up because the . And ultimately, people ended up responding simply asking what the email was about, which is exactly where we wanted them.
Now let me break down exactly how the email actually did that. Alright. So I anonymized the copy just a little bit because we're still running this offer for our client, and I obviously want to protect that for them.
But breaking it down, this is exactly why it worked. So subject line was, like, two to four words, all lowercase, no pitch, nothing about what we're actually offering, mostly curiosity inducing. But the biggest thing with the subject line was that it felt like it was specifically for them.
So I'll say that. On the copy itself, there were probably, like, five main points to email one. First was kind of, like, a belief shift.
Now if you guys have watched any of my other videos, you know I really don't like the idea of trying to, like, paint the picture to the prospect unless you actually know the exact situation that they're in. So the reason why I don't like this is that it's very easy to miss the mark.
But when you've made the list that you have so refined, where you're pretty sure what you're mentioning is something that they're experiencing, it can hit. So, basically, this line went at a certain point, what what you're doing, obviously, this is blanked out, stops being about x and starts being about y.
And then we wanted to use the mirror line. So this is, like, how we got them to feel like they were in this situation. So most founders, in this case, don't notice until x, y, and zed time before it's too late, essentially.
And then the next line is basically the offer. So we're building x, y, and zed essentially to solve that problem, to solve that pain point that they're experiencing. And then this is the money line, honestly.
You came up because a specific attribute about you add something that we don't have yet. So we obviously chose you for a reason. Happy to share the thinking if you're open.
The reason why that CTA works really well is because you are implying specificity in the copy, and then the CTA allows you to prove yourself. So they're like, wait. Are you sure?
And then when they ask for the the specificity for the explanation, you know, that's obviously you getting them to jump on the hook. Now I would say this copy plays a ton on buyer psychology, why they chose to take action, why they chose to say yes.
They're very curious about the reason why they were chosen. They think that they were selected specifically. We're not lying.
Like, they do actually fit the criteria that we're looking for for this offer, and we prove that during the next phase after they actually ask for us to explain. Now the follow-up wasn't really anything special, to be honest, but it built a little bit of scarcity and then just reinforced the low friction CTA.
So, do you want me to explain why I thought this was the case? I think the main takeaway from all of this is that if you can prove to them that you're not reaching out to every single person with a heartbeat and then basically offer the CTA or the payoff to be that proof to show them exactly why they are the right fit, people are gonna be curious.
They're going to wanna know why you chose them, and thus, they're going to say yes in most situations. Now that brings us to the last step in our strategy. And like I said, the cold email isn't where you sell.
It just gets the first interested reply. What comes after that is what actually does the selling. Because even if your lead list, your offer, and script are absolutely perfect, the reality is you can't build up enough trust in just a couple of sentences to sell anything.
So instead of spending half of an already short email trying to convince people we're the real deal, we did something different. The first reply to our low pressure, no pitch email opened the door to get the people who replied to take one step further into the funnel. In this case, that meant getting a second email with a link to a VSL that we recorded.
And a lot more people actually paid attention to it versus if we just try to stuff it onto one email. And you're probably wondering why. Well, two words, commitment bias.
By getting them to reply to the first email, they were already more invested in hearing us out entirely, kind of closing that loop. They had a psychological need to see the conversation through, which meant the VSL was received far better than if we tried to include it in our first message. And once they clicked on the video, that's when we actually pitched them.
The VSL included everything that you would usually try to stuff into a cold email. The offer, the outcome, the proof, the introduction to our client, and exactly what they do, all with the Calendly link to book a call at the end of it. We basically created a sales funnel within our cold email campaign.
The first message only had to get impressions like an ad would on Meta. Then once they replied, they got to the actual pitch. And the results well, let me show you how it went.
So as you can see, we sent 94,000 cold emails on behalf of our client during the month of April, of which 63,000 were unique prospects.
We had around a 2% reply rate, which is solid, over a thousand replies, and 50% of those replies were actually positive.
So 580 overall. If we stretch this out into May, which, like, we continued, obviously, that even jumped up further up to 700 interested responses, which is awesome.
The one caveat with this strategy is when you really, really, really build curiosity and, like, establish that open loop, it does get a lot of people interested that aren't necessarily going to convert. Now the conversions were still high here, but compared to a different strategy where, you know, you're maybe aiming for, like, a 30 to a 50% beating book rate, we obviously didn't book 350 calls for this client.
But if we jump into our call logs, you can see here, there was over 71 booked calls for our client during this time, of which about 40 to 50 ended up falling within their age criteria. I also just wanted to show you guys a quick example walking through the funnel in action here. So prospect responds that they're interested in hearing more and which parts about them caught their attention.
We respond with the video which shares more details about what it is exactly that we're offering. Low friction CTA, we're not gonna shoot another calendar link or anything. We don't wanna force feed them the calendar.
It's basically like, hey, calendar's on the next page if you there's interest. And then you can see here this lead was Michael. You can see after he watched the video, he actually booked through.
And that is exactly how we took a simple cold email campaign and turned it into 587 positive responses and 41 booked calls in a single month. But for your campaign to succeed, even with these three tactics, you need your emails to be impossible to ignore.
Otherwise, none of the work you put into your VSL or your list or anything like that will actually even matter. So if that's something you'd like to learn to do, watch this video next, and I'll see you
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The promise is plain in the title and delivered in the first six seconds: fancy personalization is killing your results. Aaron Shepherd opens by inverting the conventional wisdom — the exact tactic everyone adopted to stand out is now the reason they get ignored.
Named ideas worth stealing.
00:39list
3-Step Cold Email Funnel
- Step 1: Hyper-specific list (ICP precision)
- Step 2: No-pitch curiosity email (open loop CTA)
- Step 3: VSL on first reply (commitment bias)
Three-stage outbound framework where the cold email functions only as an impression, not a pitch.
Steal forAny B2B service business running outbound — the structure applies whether selling coaching, agency services, or SaaS.
02:30model
Age Proxy Filter Stack
- Company size: 1-10 employees
- Graduation year: recent graduate (last 2-3 years)
- Years in current role: max 5
- Location: US + Canada
- Gender: Claygent inference
A repeatable Apollo/Sales Navigator filter sequence to target young founders when no direct age filter exists.
Steal forAny campaign targeting early-career entrepreneurs or founders in growth phase.
08:07list
5-Component Curiosity Email
- 1. Curiosity subject line (2-4 words, all lowercase, no pitch)
- 2. Belief shift line (reframe what they're doing)
- 3. Mirror line (reflect the pain they're probably experiencing)
- 4. Offer hint (we're building X to solve that)
- 5. Money CTA: 'You came up because [attribute] — happy to share the thinking if you're open'
Email anatomy that generates replies by never pitching — implies specificity so the CTA becomes a promise to prove it.
Steal forAny cold outreach that needs to break through inbox fatigue without a hard offer.
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
05:26link
“You can access it by booking a call with us using the link in the description below.”
Mid-roll service pitch for the agency — positioned as skipping the learning curve. Transparent and reasonably paced, not aggressive.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
AFFILIATECommission earned if you click.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Visual structure at a glance.
