An executive events company selling thought leadership media placements used informal, question-first messaging and a low-commitment one-pager CTA to engage C-level executives across 93,000+ cold emails.
An executive events and media company helping business leaders gain thought leadership visibility through TV, conference, and publishing placements needed to scale their outreach. Their challenge: reaching the right decision-makers across wildly different industries—from biotech to fashion to financial services—who would benefit from executive visibility.
The service is high-touch and perception-driven, making mass-market cold email risky if the tone doesn’t match. They needed messaging that felt consultative, not transactional.
Conference-specific campaigns targeting attendees of major industry events complemented a broader total-addressable-market approach.
| Seniority | C-Level, Directors, VPs, Managers |
| Department | Executive, Marketing, Sales, Product |
| Company Size | SMBs to mid-market (1–200 employees = 72% of positive replies) |
| Geography | United States (72%), with secondary traction in Canada, UK, Israel |
| Industries | IT/Software, Financial Services, Healthcare, Apparel, Biotech |
5 campaigns total—a broad TAM sweep plus event-specific campaigns targeting conference attendees, exhibitors, and sponsors at major industry conferences.
Led with the media opportunity rather than pricing. Informal tone tested against formal across multiple variants with component-level tracking.
Multiple email variants tested different tones (formal vs. informal), lengths (short to long), and structures (question-first vs. value-prop-first vs. trust-first), with component-level performance tracking across all campaigns.
The audience of executives responded far better to casual, conversational messaging than formal pitches. Informal emails generated more positive replies across all structures and lengths.
This single low-commitment CTA accounted for 44% of all tagged positive responses. It massively outperformed meeting-request CTAs. The runner-up, a referral-seeking “Can you point me to the right team member?” generated 39 replies.
Emails that opened with a question before presenting the value prop generated 37 positive replies. Trust-first structures came close at 41 combined. Leading with curiosity worked better than leading with the pitch.
No long-form emails appeared in the top 15 performing combinations. Short and medium-length emails performed equally well, suggesting conciseness matters for this audience of busy executives.
| Seniority | Department | Company Size | Replies |
|---|---|---|---|
| C-Level | Executive | 1–10 employees | 155 |
| Director | Marketing | 11–50 employees | 28 |
| VP | Marketing | 51–200 employees | 17 |
| Manager | Marketing | 51–200 employees | 12 |
| VP | Executive | 201–500 employees | 11 |
Based on enriched contact data. Some replies had incomplete profile information.
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