14:58Taylor Haren · Tutorial
How I Get 8M+ Leads Using Claude Code (For Cold Email)
A cold-email agency swapped a $25K/month Clay stack for two free Claude Code skills that process leads locally, no row caps or seat limits required.
September 14thThe argument in one line.
A lead in cold email should be someone who clicks, not someone who replies, because clickers outnumber repliers by roughly a hundred to one and can be retargeted the same day.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You run or buy cold email outbound and your only success metric is positive replies, so you suspect you are blind to most of the interest you create.
- You run a B2B SaaS or services company and want cheaper leads from paid ads by feeding them a warm audience of people who already read your email.
- You send plain text email through a sequencer like Instantly and want to know what you can still do to capture invisible website visitors.
SKIP IF…
- You do small, hyper-personalized outbound to a few dozen accounts, where the volume math in this system does not apply.
- You want a neutral comparison of sending tools, since the core mechanism depends on the creator's own agency infrastructure.
The full version, fast.
Plain text cold email can only measure replies, which are rare and force a sales team to chase each one. Taylor Haren's agency instead emails a client's entire market once every 30 to 60 days, sends full emails with links through enterprise infrastructure so clicks and opens are tracked, and pipes every click into a data platform with a live feed. Clickers get retargeted with ads, cold calls, content, and follow-ups the same day, one client cut cost per lead by 50 percent. Without that infrastructure, you can approximate it with website visitor identification, custom ad audiences of all repliers, and same-day sales follow-up.
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00:00 – 01:07
01 · The invisible hundred
Hook with the 2.11 signups per reply example and the 50 percent ad cost drop.
01:07 – 04:21
02 · Why replies are a bad metric
Plain text limits, 7,317 emails per reply, sales team lag, and costs up 13 times.
04:21 – 07:00
03 · Email the whole market
Hit 100 percent of the TAM every 30 to 60 days and optimize offer first, then copy, then lists.
07:00 – 09:00
04 · Full emails with tracking
Halo infrastructure allows links and buttons, with 72.8 percent opens and 24.6 percent clicks.
09:00 – 10:44
05 · Click feed and data ownership
Outfound stores every event, Slack and webhook feeds, UTM per recipient, and funnel stats.
10:44 – 13:10
06 · What to do with clickers
Retargeting ads, cold calls, follow-ups, content, and AI agents on the same day.
13:10 – 14:28
07 · The results
Lowest uplift of 30 percent and best of 5.1x across clients.
14:28 – 15:28
08 · Build a version yourself
Visitor identification, custom audiences from all repliers, same-day sales follow-up.
15:28 – 16:22
09 · Pitch and wrap-up
WealthReach example and a call to book an intro call.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- For every person who replies to a cold email, roughly a hundred more read it, visit the website, and leave without anyone knowing.
- On one client, every positive reply came with 2.11 signups, which proves most new users never reply at all.
- A 2 percent website conversion rate implies about 105 visitors behind every single reply.
- Plain text email forced the whole industry to optimize around replies simply because replies were the only signal it could see.
- Most outbound targets the roughly 3 percent of a market ready to buy now, and everyone using the same intent signals fights over the same people.
- Emailing the whole addressable market once every 30 to 60 days with a single email, and no follow-up sequence, keeps you in front of everyone without burning the list.
- The offer is the biggest lever in cold email, and a free, no-strings offer beats trials, which beat asking for a call first.
- Testing 25,000 sends per variant instead of 1,000 gives cold email enough time and volume to show real winners, since many meetings book in weeks three and four.
- Open rate tells you about the subject line, click rate tells you about the offer, and time on site tells you about the page.
- Retargeting email clickers on Meta and Google cut one client's cost per lead by 50 percent, from $100 to $50.
- Domain and inbox costs for cold email grew 13 times in a year, which makes counting only replies an expensive way to waste sends.
- Uploading every replier, even the angry ones, as a custom audience trains ad platforms on real humans instead of the junk emails in bought lists.
- Clickers fit your ideal customer profile by construction, because they were on the list and chose to visit.
- Booking a meeting with 80 percent of positive replies needs the sales team to reach them the same day on several channels.
Count clickers as leads, not just repliers
WHAT TO LEARN
Replies are the rarest signal cold email produces, so a system that tracks and follows up with clickers captures far more of the interest each send creates.
- Replies are rare and expensive to work, so a metric built only on replies hides the large group of people who read, visited, and left unnoticed.
- Emailing a full addressable market every 30 to 60 days with one message avoids sequence fatigue and keeps you in front of people who are not buying yet.
- Test the offer before the copy and the copy before the list, and give each variant enough volume and time because many meetings book weeks after the send.
- Click, open, and on-site data each diagnose a different part of the funnel: subject line, offer, and landing page.
- Feeding clickers into Meta and Google audiences, cold calls, and content the same day lowered one client's cost per lead by half.
- If you cannot track clicks, you can still use website visitor identification, upload all repliers as ad audiences, and reach positive replies the same day on several channels.
Terms worth knowing.
- Positive reply
- A response to a cold email that shows interest, such as asking for a call or the link. It is the traditional unit of success in plain text outbound.
- Total addressable market (TAM)
- Every person or company that could plausibly buy what you sell. Here it is the full list that gets emailed on a recurring cycle.
- Halo
- The enterprise sending infrastructure the creator says his agency accesses through a confidential partnership, which lets full emails with links and tracking land without hurting deliverability.
- Outfound
- A data platform the agency built to store its own send, click, and conversion data so a sequencer vendor does not own or delete it.
- More, better, new
- A testing split borrowed from Alex Hormozi: 70 percent of effort on more of what works, 20 percent on better versions, and 10 percent on new ideas.
- Visitor identification
- A tool such as RB2B that tells you which individuals, not just companies, visited your website.
- Custom audience
- A list of people uploaded to an ad platform so it can target them and find similar people.
Things they pointed at.
00:20productFyxer AI
07:00toolHalo
08:00toolOutfound
13:50toolRB2B
Lines you could clip.
00:00
“For every single person that replies to your cold email, there's usually another hundred more who read it, went to your website, looked around and then left.”
08:50
“For us, a lead isn't just a reply, it's now a click.”
10:00
“Their cost per lead dropped by 50%. Instead of paying $100 per lead, they could pay $50.”
Word for word.
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For every single person that replies to your cold email, there's usually another hundred more who read it, went to your website, looked around and then left. These are people in your market who were interested enough to go check you out and then nobody ever follows up with them because nobody even knew that they were there.
We send tens of millions of cold emails a month. So we see this across every client we work with. For example, with Fixer AI, we generated millions in revenue from cold email.
And for every positive reply that we got, 2 .11 people would sign up. How is it possible that 2 .11 people would sign up when only one person positively replied?
It's because most of those new users would never reply at all. They would read the email, they went to the site completely on their own, Googled you, whatever it was, and they signed up. And let's say you assume that Fixer's website only converts at 2%.
That means that there's another 105 people visiting the site for every single person who replied. The big thing that is changing today is how we can track every single person who clicks any of these emails that we send.
And there's a lot of other cool stuff that you can do with this. For example, one of our clients in the B2B SaaS space, they started running ads to our list of clickers. We started streaming all of our clickers over to their ad audience and their cost per lead on Meta and Google dropped by 50%.
That's right, 50, five O percent. So in this video, I'm gonna break down this lead strategy and how we're running it for our clients right now. That includes everything from how we send the emails, how we find every person who clicks, We retarget them with ads, content, and follow -ups so you get way more out of every single email that we send.
For the last five years, cold emails pretty much only worked one way. You send an email. It's a plain text email.
You can't put links. You can't track clicks. You can't track opens.
So the only thing you can do is ask somebody to reply to the email. So you send the email, you hope they open it, and you hope that they reply. If they replied positively, then that was a lead.
It puts a ton of work on a sales team. I know this for a fact because when we used to track the replies of our clients we used to track how long it would take our clients to reply back to our positive replies all of our clients would average four days four days to be able to reply back to a lead that's ready to get their thing one of the number one reasons we used to have churn and this isn't a problem anymore is that we would have way too many leads for a client they'd have hundreds of positive replies but they wouldn't close a single one and it's because we were adding an entire conversion point where the entire sales team would have to work that lead the second the positive came in and of course that's just what you have to do it's the way that everybody runs email to this day.
Because with plain text emails, a reply is the only thing that you can actually see. It's the only thing that you can actually ask for. You can't put a link in your email doing a sign up, directing to your website, going to a lead magnet, directing traffic to your calendar without hurting deliverability.
And even turning on open tracking would hurt your emails drastically. So the whole industry built everything around that one signal it had. The problem is that replies are really, really rare.
And you have to work them a ton. You have an entire conversion window.
Even our best clients would convert 50 to 80 % of our positive replies into a meeting. And so replies can be really difficult. For example, when we were first working with Fixer, their average campaign took about 7 ,317 emails just to get a single positive reply.
That's one data point for every 7 ,000 emails that we send. And everyone who read that email and went to go check out Fixer on their own was completely invisible. And we could only detect it because we were like, wait, we're getting more signups than replies.
So people must be Googling. thing that we could think of. And that matters a lot more now than it used to.
Since last October, exactly a year ago, our costs have grown massively to be able to get Gmail and Outlook inboxes, load them up on instantly smart lead and email by sin. And they've literally 13 X since that point in time. And they continue to grow more and more and more, especially as we used to be able to buy domains a year ago and they would just last for six, nine months.
Then they started burning in a couple of weeks. And then now you have tons of cold email people who still use the old method they're literally getting blacklisted the day they buy the domain and so it's getting faster and faster and faster with this burn rate so when you put all that together every email you send costs way more than it ever has and the only thing you count is replies it's the only data point you can optimize around and you're throwing most of what each of those emails can do for you we simply could just no longer afford that so let me walk you through the whole system that we use to fix this for ourselves starting with how we send the emails in the first place because That's what makes everything else possible.
You see, most outbound only go after roughly 3 % of the market that is ready to buy right now. They like to use intent data. They like to use event triggers and hit those people up with, you know, a four part email sequence in just a week.
The issue is that everybody is using the same signals, find the same people. So you're fighting for attention in an inbox that's already full of emails, just like yours. Instead, I like to go after the 100 % of a client's total addressable market.
And what's super funny about this is I've been talking about this type of mindset for about the last 18 months. and now I'm starting to see a bunch of other people in the cold email space talk about hit your TAM every 30 to 60 days, which is rad because when people start copying you, then you know you're really on a good thing is what Alex Ramosi has always said.
So every person that we email, we like to get them every 30 to 60 days with a single email. Then we leave them alone until the next cycle. We don't run follow -up sequences and I've gone deep on why in previous videos.
So I'll keep this part short. The way we'll optimize our emails comes down to a few things, usually in this order. The first is the offer is the biggest lever by.
far we test different versions of the ask before we even touch the copy that means if we can say the ultimate version of that is hey joe we'll give you x and we will never charge you a dime everything above that is a less and less performing offer including if you have a seven day trial a 30 day trial or worst of all someone has to hop on a call before they ever see value so after offer then we like to test the copy wide we used to like only doing about a thousand emails per variant before we'd call anything a winner or loser but now we're starting to do 25 000 in a single variant before we start changing course because we need a lot more data and a lot more signal and we need people to actually like have enough time to move through the funnel because cold email is also very unique when someone watches an ad they action the ad right when they see it where with a cold email they let them stack up we have a client right now where most of their meetings booked came in week three and four after we had sent the email and so we give them enough time we put enough volume to really know what our big strikes are going to be when it comes to our copy then we test our lists against each other one thing at a time and we'll test different industries against each other we'll start doing different splices
different head counts in a company, different seniorities in a company. And we'll even look at like different inbox types for our target audiences. We took this from Hormozia as well.
He calls this more, better, new. 70 % on doing more of what works, 20 % on doing better versions of what works, and 10 % on things that are completely new. And here's why all of this matters before we dive into the rest of the video.
If you're only emailing somebody once every 30 to 60 days, you need a way to stay in front of them in between. And that's exactly what the rest of this system does. So in a recent video, I talked about Halo, which is an enterprise sending infrastructure we got exclusive access to through a confidential partnership that we have.
The short version is that our emails go out on the same types of IP signatures that Fortune 500 companies now send their emails on. And so we are able to do links, track opens, track clicks, because we have the trustworthiness of a Fortune 500 company when we send our emails. That means we can send all of our emails with images, buttons, links, the same way a real marketing email looks.
significantly changes what we can ask people to do. So for a product like RB2B, instead of sending, hey, Joe, would you like the link to sign up? We can just say, hey, Joe, here's the link to sign up.
And then they sign up. And because they're full emails, we get real tracking on every single send. Across Halo on our last million email sends, our average open rate is 72 .8 % and our average click rate is 24 .6%.
For context, when we were visiting with Alex Ramosi's team just a couple months ago, they told us that a 3 % click rate was really good when at the time when we told them we had a nine percent click rate they were absolutely shocked we told them we have a 24 now because we've been getting better and better at the system they would absolutely lose their mind i'm sure every one of those clicks and every other data point you could possibly think of goes into outfound io which is a data platform we built so we can own our own data instead of the sequencer owning it forcing it to delete it to follow their silly credit stuff i can have all my stats in there forever i have a back -end database it is super dope from there our clients get a live feed so when somebody clicks, they get a Slack notification with the name and the company behind that click.
The thing is there's so many clicks. Now, most of our clients have just completely silenced that entire channel. And instead we just give them an API hookup via web hooks and they get every single click in real time.
Additionally, what we've started doing is we're starting to install a script on our client's website. So we can also see the UTM parameters on each link. I can actually insert a UTM parameter now for each individual recipient.
So I can put their email in the UTM parameter and I can get a confirmation of the UTM parameter popping up on their website. website analytics. We can know the exact page that they go to all of that kind of stuff.
And so for us, a lead isn't just a reply is now a click. And of course the clicks aren't ever going to be accurate completely the same way UTM parameters are never accurate completely, but it helps us get an approximate data point, which once again, now I can look at open rates, which can tell me about the subject line and the first line.
I can look at the click rate, which tells us about the offer. I can take a look at the UTM parameters, which tells me if the person stayed long enough to click the yes button on the silly cookie thing with those UTM parameters, I can see how long they stayed on the page. if they navigated to other pages.
And then of course, Outfound also allows our clients to stream their signups, their meetings booked, and their paying customers into our system. So we can see which exact campaigns gave us a signup, gave us a meeting book, gave us a paying customer. And so now when we say a lead is somebody who clicks, that's because that's a real person who fits your ideal customer profile.
Otherwise they wouldn't be on our list. They read your email and they went to your website. And there are way more of those people than there are people who reply.
Now, this is the part we've been starting to develop with more and more of our clients. It's like, cool, we have all this data. Now what else can our clients do to count?
capitalized on that. And so this is the part that changes how a campaign works day to day because because somebody who clicks can be somebody who's retargeted even the same day. The clearest example is ads.
Like I said, one of our B2B SaaS clients took all the people who clicked our emails. They started targeting them on Meta and Google and their cost per lead drive by 50%. That means instead of paying $100 per lead, they could pay $50 per lead.
Massive, massive savings. And it makes sense because the people seeing those ads already read the email. They already looked at the website so they know who the company.
is and then they start getting different angles for everything the company and our clients could help them with but the ads are just one options our clients use that same click feed in a bunch of different ways they use it for their cold calling so their sales teams can call the people who showed interest while they still remember the email they can use it for follow -ups on their own terms through multi -channel linkedin or whatever they can use it to put on their content in front of those same people so the next time that prospect is scrolling they run into a video or a post from the founder and some of them hand it to ai agents that just reach out to those people across multiple channels.
So think about what that does to a cadence I talked about earlier. We only email somebody every 30 to 60 days, but in between people who clicked are seeing more and more of our clients in their feed, hearing from your sales team and running into our clients' content. So the same campaigns end up feeding paid ads, cold calling, follow -ups, and nothing depends on whether someone decided to just hit reply.
Now, at any point in this video, if you're thinking you'd rather have us do this whole system for you instead of you building it yourself, click the first link in the description. and book an intro call with us. Back to the video.
So there's one more thing that clicks do that most people miss, which is how much faster you're able to learn things. Remember how I said Fixter's average campaign took 7 ,317 emails to get one positive reply. At our average click rate of 24 .6%, that same number of emails gives you about 1 ,799.
So instead of one data point, one reply telling you if a campaign is working, you have thousands of data points telling you that. Because everything lives in Outfound, our custom tracking software, we can actually use all of that data. We can have agents analyze the copy on every campaign that we do, every two hours, writing notes on what to do better and what to stop doing as well.
We can compare every variant, every campaign to every client in one single place. I can take all of our campaign data, layer it with our lead database data that is part of OutFound.
And I can see what hierarchies of companies are we booking meetings with. I can see what size companies, how many employee headcounts are we booking meetings with. And whatever we learn goes right into the next cycle of email.
And so the whole loop can work like this. We send one email to the total addressable market. We see everybody who opens.
We see everybody who clicks. Our clients follow up on those people across every channel. And the click data tells us what to send next time.
And of course, if there's one campaign that has crazy good click data, but no meetings, and another campaigns that has okay click data but has way more meetings obviously we'll be able to optimize for that as well and what's crazy is when we moved everything from instantly email bison smart lead which great platforms but we could just never get the infrastructure underlying them the inboxes gmail azure stuff we can never get that stuff to last for more than a few weeks regardless when we moved from that system to this system we did everything exactly the same because i wanted to control to directly compare and the lowest lift we saw for any clients was a 30 uplift on their outcomes we define outcomes as signups meetings booked paying customers the minimum uplift was 30 % for our clients.
The best uplift was a 5 .1X multiplier or a 510 % uplift. Now, if you're running cold email yourself, you're probably sending plain text emails through something like Instantly, so you won't be able to track clicks the way we do. And unfortunately, that's just the position we're in.
We have this exclusive relationship with Halo, which as a side note, Halo is not something like we built. It's not just some crazy server thing going on. This is a legit, very large enterprise company that we have the permission to be able to send these emails with.
All hope is not lost. You see, you can still build a version of this system. And here's how I would do it.
If you're on something as straightforward as instantly. First, I would install a website visitor identification tool on your website. One of our best clients, RB2B, they do exactly that.
They can tell you individuals that are on your website, not just companies. So that's something where you can send somebody an email. They never reply, but you notice them on RB2B.
So you can go, oh, okay, cool. We know we sent them an email. We got a website identification visit on this day.
So we know that that person probably Googled us because of those things. So you can see which companies and which people are landing on your site. your campaigns go out third take everyone who replies to your emails doesn't matter positive negative go f yourself and upload them to the ad platforms as a custom audience and you want this to include everybody the ad platforms are going to take associations based on what you're uploading and they're also going to find more people like that and the issue is that if you just take a regular list most lists you get from like apollo or any of these vendors most of the emails are total bull and they aren't real people so if you optimize it around the signal that you do have it'll get your ad targeting to be a little bit better and a little bit more accurate because you're actually optimizing it for real human beings who live, not bots on social media platforms.
The next thing is get those names to your sales team the same day. We have an awesome resource on our website. If you go to our website, salesautomation .systems, you scroll all the way to the bottom.
There's a thing called the Positive Reply Playbook. It's what we used when we had to send plain text emails. Our clients who followed that to a T would book 80 % of all of our replies in two meetings.
And so use that like crazy with your sales team. The second somebody replies, hit them on seven different channels. Now, be a little bit careful.
You know, if they did say unsubscribe or F you, maybe give it a week or two. But if they did, just reply regularly, maybe calm and see if it's a different angle that you could take.
Now, like I said, you won't be able to see every click. You won't be able to see every open. You won't be able to put a link in your email, but you'll start capturing a lot of people who were interested and never said anything.
And it's better than doing none of these things. If you can only send plain text. So if you want this whole system built and run for you, including the ability to send emails that have opens clicks, and we can insert links inside of it, then click the first link in the description and book an intro call with us.
It's super dope. Just last month, we launched wealth reach. We sent 140 ,000 emails for them, a seven.
70 .8 % open rate, a 49 .2 % click rate, but they got zero positive replies. Sounds horrible, right? Until you realize that because we can put links inside of the emails and their company didn't have to chase down a single lead to book a meeting with the leads that we got them.
They had 51 meetings booked off of that. So when you hop on a call with our sales team, we'll map out your total adjustable market. So you know exactly how many people could buy what you sell.
Then we look at setting up that sending infrastructure and we handle all of the deliverability and the private infrastructure rail that we have. From there, we run the testing fast to find messages. market fit and a segment that actually convert.
And then every person who's clicking our emails is going straight in your team with the strategies I just talked about. You can follow up with ads, calls, content the exact same day. And once we find what works, we scale to 100 % of your total addressable market and keep reaching all of it every 30 to 60 days.
So again, click the first link in the description. And if you want to see how I'm generating over 8 million leads at once using cloud code, then watch this video next.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
For every person who replies to a cold email, Taylor Haren says another hundred read it, visit the site, and vanish. The video is his case for counting those people as leads and building a system around them.
Named ideas worth stealing.
05:40list
Offer, copy, list testing order
- Offer
- Copy
- List
Test the ask first, then the copy at 25,000 sends per variant, then lists one variable at a time.
Steal forany outbound campaign
06:35model
More, better, new
- 70 percent more of what works
- 20 percent better versions
- 10 percent new
A Hormozi split for allocating testing effort.
Steal forcampaign testing roadmaps
13:31list
Four steps to build it yourself
- Install visitor identification on your website
- Cross-check sends against identified visits
- Upload all repliers as a custom ad audience
- Get names to sales the same day
A lower-tech version for plain text senders who cannot track clicks.
Steal forplain text cold email programs
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
15:30link
“Click the first link in the description and book an intro call with us.”
The pitch comes after a full demonstration of the system, with the WealthReach case study (51 meetings from 140,000 emails) as the last proof point.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
Visual structure at a glance.
