From 0.9 to 4.3 percent reply rate targeting CFOs at fintech companies. The full 90-day campaign breakdown
cfo_fintech_alex · 2026-07-11 · 1,540 views
Four months in, 0.9 percent reply rate. A fintech vendor selling a treasury management product to CFOs and VPs of Finance. The client was ready to quit cold email entirely. Here is what I changed over 90 days to get the campaign to 4.3 percent reply rate.
Month one: Fix the infrastructure.
The campaign was running from two domains, six inboxes, sending 40 cold emails per inbox per day. The volume was too high for the domain reputation they had built. GlockApps showed 54 percent inbox placement. The copy was being blamed for a deliverability problem the whole time.
Moved everything to PuzzleInbox Google Workspace inboxes. Added two more domains. Dropped volume to 18 cold emails per inbox per day. Ran warmup in parallel for 21 days before resuming cold sends. GlockApps placement at end of month one: 89 percent.
Reply rate at end of month one with the exact same copy: 1.8 percent. The copy was never the full problem.
Month two: Fix the copy.
The original email was 160 words and started with a company intro. CFOs are time-pressed, operationally focused buyers. They do not read cold emails that begin with who we are.
Rewrote to 65 words. Started with a specific treasury management pain tied to a regulatory shift relevant to fintech CFOs in early 2026. No company intro. One question CTA: is managing your liquidity positions manually something your team is still dealing with?
Changed the subject line from a product descriptor to a short question. Removed all links from email one.
Reply rate at end of month two: 3.1 percent.
Month three: Fix the list.
The original list was pulled from Apollo with no trigger filtering. Rebuilt using Apollo company-level signals filtered by funding rounds in the last 12 months and headcount growth in the finance department. Companies actively investing in their finance infrastructure are different buyers than a static ICP list with no signal layer.
Layered Clay enrichment for tech stack data to identify companies not already using a competing treasury platform. Cross-referenced against ZeroBounce. Final clean list: about 2,200 contacts from an original 4,000.
Reply rate at end of month three: 4.3 percent.
The order mattered.
Fix infrastructure first. Fix copy second. Fix list third. The temptation is to start with copy because it feels most controllable. But copy improvements mean nothing when 46 percent of your emails are landing in spam. Infrastructure is always the foundation. Copy and list quality are what you optimize on top of it. This campaign is the clearest example of that I have seen in three years of running cold email.