Over 11 months we sent 1,160,300 cold emails for SaasRise and hit a 17% peak click rate (industry average is 3.5%). This helped them add 110 new members and scale from $1.5M to $4.2M in ARR. Here’s the full SaasRise story.
Key Results
• 1,160,300 emails sent
• 17% peak click rate (4.86x industry average)
• 7.52% average click rate overall
• 22,950 unique leads clicked
• 80 new members attributed to cold email
• $1.5M → $4.2M ARR growth
He started building this in fall 2024. Started with weekly newsletter and sales funnel with all the usual stuff like calendar scheduler and call recordings. Then he layered in warm outreach and matched audience ads on Google, Meta, and LinkedIn. Then retargeting Ads and LinkedIn posting from his account and his team's accounts. Then SEO and blog content. Cold email was one of the engine funneling leads to these other channels but there was a problem. It wasn’t scaling.
Ryan Allis built and sold iContact for $169M. Now he runs SaasRise, which is a membership community for B2B SaaS founders. Members pay $2K-20K annually to get access to peer networking, workshops, and resources to help them scale.
It's a trust business. You can't mass-blast generic pitches at founders and expect them to join. Every touchpoint needs to feel real. So Ryan built what he calls brand omnipresence strategy where SaasRise shows up everywhere his ideal prospects spend time. Email inbox, LinkedIn feed, Google search results, retargeting ads. Everywhere. At the same time.
You see, Ryan was running cold email using Instantly and sending 10K emails monthly. But the thing is that he was doing it himself. Finding leads, enriching data, writing campaigns, checking replies, exporting engaged contacts to upload to matched audience ads. All of it. He didn’t need someone to teach him cold email because he already knew the fundamentals. The problem was that 10K emails per month wasn’t enough volume to feed his omnipresence machine and doing it himself was eating time he should’ve been spending on partnerships and strategy. He needed someone who could scale volume without breaking what already worked. That’s where we came in
In July 2024, he got a email from Ken AI with a PS line about him going to see Burning Man eight times (we pulled this from his LinkedIn bio using AI). According to Ryan “It was pretty novel and I was surprised that you could do that in an email at scale.” He booked a call. We spoke. He liked what he saw and chose to work with Ken.
We got to work September 2024 but didn’t start sending immediately as we spent two months on prep.
First we built the database because we needed to reach every SaaS founder doing at least $1M in ARR. So we pulled data from LinkedIn, Apollo, Lusha, Instantly, Seamless, and many other sources, then combined them until we had about 300,000 SaaS companies worldwide. Then we found the CEOs and founders for all of them.
However, names and emails weren’t enough because Ryan needed deeper level personalization that felt real. So our AI searched everywhere including social media, company websites, Google, Wikipedia, press releases, and speaking gigs to find publicly available data about each prospect. We pulled career history, company milestones, personal interests, and geographic details because we needed everything we could use to write emails that didn’t feel like cold email. It was expensive to run and AI wasn’t as good back then as it is now, but we made it work.
After building the database, we set up the deliverability infrastructure with hundreds of email inboxes that we warmed up properly so emails wouldn’t land in spam. After that, we built sequences with deep AI personalization where every email was unique to that prospect. By November we were finally ready to launch.
We launched in November and hit 12% click rates right away (industry average is 3.5%).
Here’s what the emails look like:
The personalization was deep because subject lines referenced specific career details, first lines told their story back to them, we matched them to relevant community members in their industry, and PS lines included personal details most people wouldn’t notice.
Then I started A/B testing with different copy and the click rate dropped. We were hovering around 7-9%. Still above industry standards but not what we usually aim for at Ken.
For example, in this campaign, I was testing to see if more professional and less personalized would outperform deep personalization but it didn‘t. This particular test ended up performing at 9% click rate.
So we eventually decided to scale the initial campaign (the 12% campaign), since it was clearly working. We cranked up volume and hit a peak 17% click rate. Then the number started dropping around summer which was normal due to B2B seasonality so we stopped sending.
Even though the 17% campaign was crushing it, we still felt we needed to run more creative tests because we’re always trying to beat our numbers.
So around April we tried industry-specific matching, which was technically harder than what we’d been doing. Here’s what that looked like:
Our AI had to identify each prospect's specific industry, search through 500+ members in the SaasRise community, find 3-4 relevant matches in that same industry, pull their company details, and write personalized recommendations. This was technically challenging at scale because the AI had to process way more data per email, but as usual, we made it work.
After summer, we tried to ramp back up and everything broke. We were getting 0-1% click rates even though we didn’t change anything. It turned out there was an issue with domains that affected deliverability. And that's just the reality of cold email infrastructure. Sometimes things break that aren't your fault.
As of today, we’re still working with Ryan but we paused sending in October because we're building a new sequencer that'll handle even more volume and better personalization at scale. Ryan's waiting for us to finish it so we can continue where we left off.
Volume: We scaled from 10K to 200K emails per month and sent 1,160,300 total emails over 11 months.
Performance: The campaign performed overall at 7.52% click rates with individual campaigns getting as high as 17%.
Business Impact: Ryan attributes 80 new members to cold email. SaasRise grew from 260 to 370 members (42% growth) and scaled from $1.5M to $4.2M in ARR over those 11 months.
When I asked Ryan about exact revenue attribution he said, "There's too many variables changing all the time and I have no idea what the exact attribution is." Which makes sense. SaasRise has different programs where some members pay $197/month while others pay for the $5K monthly growth program. Some even hop on both plans, so there's no clean way to calculate revenue per channel even though we know roughly how many members came from cold email.
Testing simpler copy dropped performance from 12% to 9%. The more professional and less personalized approach still beat industry average but couldn't touch the results we got with deep personalization. I wish I'd just scaled the 12% campaigns instead of testing.
Summer seasonality is real. Results peaked in winter and spring and then died in summer. You can see it clearly in the charts. That's just the B2B industry for you.
Domain issues also crashed us to 1% in August. We tried to ramp back up after summer and deliverability tanked. It wasn't our fault but it still sucked. We didn't change anything on our end but performance crashed anyway because of infrastructure issues on the domain side.
Cold email isn't a magic button that solves everything. It's one of the engine that feeds everything else in your marketing system.
According to Ryan "B2B firms where the ACV is north of a few thousand dollars should be doing outbound email to a very targeted ICP. This really works when the ACV is $5K to $500K because there's enough revenue and profit to blanket the airwaves with ads and email within an ICP." If your ACV is under $2K the economics probably don’t work for you.
You should expect month 4 to be when performance peaks because cold email needs time to test and optimize. You should also expect winter and spring to crush it while summer dies because that's just B2B seasonality.
The key is you need omnipresence where cold email, matched ads, retargeting, LinkedIn, and newsletter all work together. You can start with matched audience ads from an existing list or use cold email to generate that list. Either way, the channels need to support each other instead of running standalone.
Again, this fails if you're running cold email alone without other channels supporting it, your ACV is too low to support the CAC, you don't have a clear ICP yet, or you need results in 60 days instead of waiting for it to compound.
The power of cold email is in personalization that feels real and in feeding engaged contacts into matched ads and retargeting. Building this right means sourcing data from multiple places, having AI that finds actual interesting details about each prospect, setting up deliverability that won't flag you as spam, and integrating with your marketing stack so contacts flow where they need to go. That's what we built for Ryan over two months before launching, and that's how we hit the numbers we hit.
If you're a B2B company with ACV above $2K and want to start building your omnipresence machine today, we'll build the cold email piece for you. We handle data, personalization, deliverability, and scale while you focus on running the business.
