For contacts you have an email for but no LinkedIn connection, email is your channel. Done right, a well-written cold email costs fractions of a cent and reaches the decision-maker's inbox.
Email outreach means sending personalized cold emails to verified contacts at target companies. Not mass spam — targeted, personalized messages that reference the recipient's specific company and situation. A good cold email has a 30–60% open rate and a 3–8% reply rate.
Hi Sarah,
I was browsing agency sites in Austin and landed on PixelCraft. The brand identity work for the Rosemont Hotel stood out — that's a smart constraint-driven approach to photography direction.
We build websites for creative studios that have outgrown their current site. If that's on the radar, I'd love to show you a few examples.
Worth a quick look?
Eric
Short. Specific. One ask. No attachments. No pitch deck. No "I hope this email finds you well."
Amazon SES charges $0.10 per 1,000 emails. Sending 10,000 emails costs $1.00. The bigger cost is your sending reputation — which is why you send slowly, to verified addresses, with low bounce rates.
Sign up for Amazon SES. Verify your sending domain (this adds DNS records that prove you own the domain). Set up DKIM, SPF, and DMARC — these are email authentication records that tell receiving servers your emails are legitimate. Claude can write the exact DNS records you need.
Write 2–3 versions of your opening email. Each should be under 150 words, reference something specific about the recipient's company, and end with one soft question. Use merge tags for personalization: {first_name}, {company_name}, {city}. A/B test the subject lines — that's what determines whether the email gets opened at all.
The script reads your database for contacts marked "queued for email," merges their data into your template, and sends via the Amazon SES API. It tracks what was sent and when, so you don't send duplicates. It runs every day on a schedule — 50 emails in the morning, automatically.
Most replies come after the second or third email. A follow-up sequence sends 2–3 emails over 2–3 weeks: the opener, a follow-up that adds a case study or social proof, and a final "closing the loop" email. Each is shorter than the last. The script checks for replies before sending follow-ups — if someone replied, skip the rest of the sequence.
After the first 200 emails, check your stats: open rate, reply rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate. If open rate is under 25%, rewrite your subject lines. If reply rate is under 2%, rewrite the body. If bounce rate is over 3%, your email list quality needs work — filter out unverified addresses.
| Service | What it does | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon SES | Transactional email sending at scale | $0.10 per 1,000 emails |
| AWS (general) | Required to access SES | Free tier available |