Separation: never from your main domain
This rule has no exception. Prospecting from the domain that carries your order confirmations means gambling the deliverability of your transactional email against a handful of sends. So we work on secondary domains, close to yours, entirely dedicated to prospecting: a reputation incident stays contained there and never reaches your order emails.
- Separate sending domains, with full authentication records in place.
- Isolated reputation: what happens on prospecting never touches the transactional side.
- Several inboxes per domain, volume spread to stay under the mailbox providers' thresholds.
Warm-up: an inbox goes live on its metrics, not on a date
A new inbox sending fifty messages on day one is classified as unwanted, and that almost never recovers. So volume rises in stages over at least two weeks, with exchanges that generate real opens and real replies. Going into production is decided on the stability of the metrics — bounce rate, complaints — and not because a date has arrived.
- Starts at a few sends a day, rising progressively to the target volume.
- Bounces and complaints watched continuously.
- An inbox whose metrics degrade leaves the pool until it recovers.
Three optimisations in parallel, never crossed
The message, the sending time and the source of the contact are optimised separately, and that is a structural choice. Crossing them would mean testing 5 messages × 4 slots × 3 sources, that is sixty combinations: at thirty sends a day, not one of them would reach a usable result inside two months. Kept separate, that is twelve tracks fed in parallel and readable within two to three weeks.
- The message — each variant receives its share of sends and is judged on the replies it earns.
- The slot — the sending time is optimised independently of the copy.
- The source — where the contact came from. It is steered one step earlier, at collection time, and its verdict arrives one to three weeks later: the time it takes for contacts to be written to, followed up, and to answer. It is slow by construction, not by neglect.
No variant is eliminated on a run of bad luck
The common method is to cut underperformers fast. On volumes of a few dozen sends, it regularly eliminates perfectly good messages by pure statistical accident — and nobody ever finds out, since they never run again. Every variant therefore keeps a small but non-zero share of the sends: a track that started badly can climb back, and sometimes does.
- Every variant keeps a share of the sends, even after a poor start.
- Sends go to the variant furthest behind its target, not to a random draw: on a hundred contacts and four variants, the split is exactly 25/25/25/25.
- Editing a variant resets its history — an amended text is no longer the text that was measured.
The objective changes the scoring, not just the label
A B2B campaign is after a reply; a B2C campaign is after a sale. These are not two words in a setting: they are two distinct scoring scales. With a single scale, a campaign whose objective is the sale actually optimises the reply rate — replies are a hundred times more numerous than conversions and drown the signal. The winner would be the message that makes the most people write in without buying.
- Reply objective — a positive reply weighs heavily, a conversion slightly more.
- Sale objective — the conversion dominates, the reply barely counts.
- Unsubscribes and bounces penalise in both cases: volume never redeems a bad list.
Building the lists, and consent
The list weighs more than the message. We build lists targeted on criteria you approve — sector, size, area, type of business — and clean them before any send. On the B2C side, addressed to your own customer base, marketing consent is filtered at source: only contacts who are genuinely subscribed are approached. On a typical sample of 250 customers, around half had declined — a customer base is not a pool you can use wholesale.
- B2B — resellers, independent retailers, works councils, public bodies, wholesalers, trade prescribers. Volume of 20 to 40 a day per inbox, to protect sending reputation.
- B2C — your customer base, marketing subscribers only, at far higher volumes.
- Addresses verified before sending, to keep the bounce rate as low as possible.
- Unsubscribed contacts are never reinstated, whatever filter is requested.
- No fabricated contact, ever, not even “to test”: a fake contact receives a real message and permanently distorts the measurement of its source.
The channels: email, SMS, voicemail
On Starter, prospecting runs on email only. From Pro we add SMS and voicemail dropped without ringing — two channels with far higher read rates, precisely because almost nobody uses them in B2B. The sending costs for both run on your own tooling and are not included in the tier.
- Email — the backbone, on dedicated warmed domains. Every tier.
- SMS — reserved for contacts already engaged in a conversation, never for cold first contact.
- Voicemail — effective for reviving a contact who has gone quiet.
What happens when someone replies
Positive replies are passed to you with the context of the exchange. Depending on what you prefer, we hand over for the negotiation, or keep qualifying until a meeting is booked. What we do not do is negotiate your prices or your trading terms in your place.
The legal framework for B2B prospecting
Business-to-business prospecting is permitted in France and across the European Union, on three conditions: the message must relate to the role of the person contacted, the sender must be clearly identifiable, and a simple way to opt out must be offered. We respect all three, action removal requests immediately, and send no prospecting to consumers without prior consent.