Case Study: A Cold Email Campaign That Booked 9 Site Visits in 8 Weeks

The setup

A Chinese industrial equipment manufacturer wanted to reach food and beverage plants in Southeast Asia. Previous attempts: a bought list of 10,000 “food companies,” a template blast, a 0.4% reply rate, and a flagged domain.

The problem

Three things were broken: the list (irrelevant contacts), the domain (burned reputation), and the message (product features, not buyer problems).

What we changed

Week 1-2: Rebuilt the list from scratch — 900 plants in Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia, filtered by production type (beverage, dairy, frozen food) and verified for accuracy.

Week 3: Restored domain health with authentication and warmup. Bounce rate went from 9% to 1.6%.

Week 4-8: Launched problem-first sequences. Every email led with the buyer’s issue — compressor downtime, energy costs — not the product. Each follow-up added a mini case study relevant to their segment.

The results

• 26% open rate, 5.2% reply rate
• 9 site visits booked with plant engineers
• 2 pilot installations within 6 months

Why this worked

The list was right, the domain was healthy, and the message spoke the buyer’s language. None of those are hard — they’re just rarely done together.

Want this for your industry? See the cold email service that ran this campaign, or the engine behind it.