48% positive replies turned into 118 sales conversations in 3 months.
This client's platform can put a message in front of a million voters before lunch. Finding its own next customer was the harder problem. An in-house outbound push had stalled, and election season was closing in. Cold outbound closed the gap: 26,232 emails, 266 replies, and nearly half of those replies positive.
48%
Positive Reply Rate
128 of 266 replies were positive
92%
Qualified & Sent to Sales
118 leads handed to the sales team
0.2%
Bounce Rate
50 of 26,232 sends
Client
A political SaaS company, name withheld
Industry
Political campaign tech: voter outreach at scale
Delivered
Cold email outbound: list build, deliverability, sequencing, reply qualification
Timeline
September – November 2025
01·The Problem
Brutally hard buyers, on a clock.
The client sells to people who are brutally hard to reach. Campaign managers, consultants, PAC operators. They live in two-year cycles, they're drowning in vendor noise, and they buy in short, intense windows. Miss the window and you wait out the cycle.
They tried building outbound in-house first. It didn't take. Cold email at scale is its own discipline: sending infrastructure, deliverability, list hygiene, copy that survives the inbox. The learning curve eats months, and it usually takes a dedicated operator to climb it. The team's time was already spoken for.
Then the calendar forced the issue. Election season was approaching, and paid channels alone weren't going to fill the pipeline. They needed a working outbound program fast, aimed at political organizations and candidate campaign managers, while the buying window was still open.
02·Why They Chose Us
Picked for the operating model, not the pitch.
The client didn't pick us for the pitch. They picked us for the operating model. A track record of delivering past the numbers we commit to. Integration straight into their internal systems, no extra silo. A direct line to the people actually running the campaigns, not an account layer. Reporting granular enough to track every send, reply, and handoff. And the capacity to launch several campaigns at once, which mattered with election season bearing down.
03·The Solution
The numbers tell most of the story.
01/The List
Verified before a single send
11,720 contacts, 50 bounces. That's a 0.2% bounce rate, which doesn't happen by accident. Every address was verified before a single send went out, because in this niche one burned domain costs you the whole cycle. The targets: political organizations and the campaign managers running candidate races.
02/The Cadence
Two touches, not twelve
26,232 sends across 11,720 leads is just over two touches per contact. No twelve-step drip. Short sequences, tight copy, and a kill switch on anyone who said no. The 0.6% not-interested rate suggests the targeting held up.
03/Qualification
Replies worked, not dumped
Replies weren't dumped on the sales team raw. Each one was worked: 266 replies came in, 128 were genuinely positive, and 118 of those were qualified and handed to sales as real conversations.
04·The Results
11,720 contacted. 118 sent to sales.
Contacted
11,720
↓ 2.3% replied · 2.9% with OOO
Replied
266
↓ 48% positive
Positive
128
↓ 92% qualified
Sent to Sales
118
↓ handed off as real conversations
Reply Rate
2.3%
266 replies across 26,232 sends; 2.9% counting out-of-office
Positive Reply Rate
48%
128 people said some version of "tell me more"
Qualified & Sent to Sales
92%
118 real conversations handed to the sales team
Bounce Rate
0.2%
50 bad addresses out of 26,232 sends
Cost per Qualified Lead
$96.61
Per lead handed to sales (118 total)
No baselines exist for the before-state, so no lift is claimed. These stand as flat results.
One result the table can't show
Speed to lead. Interested replies were qualified and handed to the client's sales team immediately, regardless of time of day, often within minutes.
05·In Their Words
Straight from the client.
"What stood out most was the speed to lead. An interested reply reached our sales team within minutes, no matter the time of day."
Methodology & Notes
Client identity. The client is a political campaign technology company whose platform puts messages in front of voters at scale. Their name is withheld from this case study; engagement details are available on request.
Reporting basis. All figures reflect SetWize campaign analytics for this engagement, September through November 2025: 26,232 sends across 11,720 verified contacts.
No lift is claimed. No baselines exist for the before-state, so these stand as flat results rather than improvements over a prior program.
SetWize · Business Development
Case Study · A Political SaaS Company · Campaign analytics, Sep – Nov 2025