Cold Email & Deliverability | Growth | Partner @ Vinna.ai

If you're interested in improving your cold emails, you've come to the right place.

I’ve worked with clients like Discord, HP, Jellysmack, L'Oréal Paris, Fourthwall, Creative Juice, PearPop, and many more — sending over 60 million cold emails across different industries.

I combine cold email and outbound GTM expertise with AI solutions, smart automation, and deliverability optimization to help businesses scale their outreach and consistently book meetings.

My passion is sharing the knowledge I’ve gained from 5+ years in outbound sales, lead generation, and email deliverability with businesses and individuals who want to get the most out of their cold emailing process.

If you think there’s any way we can help each other, feel free to DM me!

Jovan Shojlevski

How most cold emailers clean their lead lists:

1. Export their contact list
2. Upload it to a verification tool
3. Wait
4. Download the results
5. Re-import the clean list
6. Suppress the bounces

That's 2+ hours per week.

8 hours per month.

Almost 100 hours per year.

On something that should take 0 minutes.

And don't get me started if you do crazy sales volume.

I switched to Bouncer AutoClean since it came out.

It: 

1. Connects to your CRM.
2. Verifies new contacts every hour.
3. Reverifies existing ones automatically.
4. Suppresses undeliverable emails on its own.

I haven't touched a verification CSV since.

And my bounce rate has been as low as ever.

Automate the boring stuff.

Spend your time on what actually makes you money.

Landing 1.2M+ cold emails/month in the inbox at Grow Surely

I check 6 things before sending any sales email campaign.

(Skipping even one can destroy your deliverability)

1. DNS setup → MxToolBox

SPF, DKIM, DMARC must be perfect.

If anything is in red, I let the domain warm up for longer.

No exceptions.

2. Domain reputation → Cisco Talos

If a domain's reputation isn't perfect, nothing is sent from it.

3. Email verification → Bouncer

Every email gets verified before it touches a campaign.

It also identifies spam traps, breached addresses, and complainers.

Invalid/untrusted emails = bounces = reputation damage.

4. Copy readability → Hemingway Editor

Grade 7 reading level or below.

If a 14-year-old can't understand it, simplify it.

5. Mailbox warm-up → Instantly.ai

Every mailbox needs at least 14 days of warm up.

I also always leave backup inboxes to warm up for longer.

6. Sequencing → Instantly.ai

Randomized times. Random intervals.

Predictable patterns trigger spam filters.

That's it.

6 checks. <15 minutes. Every campaign.

I track a metric that most cold emailers ignore.

It's not reply rate.

It's not open rate.

It's lead-to-valid-email rate.

Here's what I mean:

You build a list of 1,000 leads.

You run them through an email finder.

Only 400 come back with valid emails.

That's a 40% lead-to-valid-email rate.

Which means 60% of your research was wasted.

I used to deal with this every week.

Hours spent building lists.

Half the leads had no usable contact info.

It was the most frustrating bottleneck in my workflow.

Then I switched how I source leads.

I start with Prospeo.io 

And it's not just for enrichment.

But for the entire list build.

Here's why it changes everything:

→ 280M+ contacts with pre-verified emails
→ I filter by ICP before I ever export
→ Every email is verified at the source
→ My lead-to-valid-email rate went from 40% to 90%+

That means from 1,000 leads, I get 900+ valid emails.

Not 400.

Same effort. More than double the output.

Here's what that looks like in practice:
Old workflow:

→ Scrape leads from 3 different tools
→ Cross-reference in Clay
→ Run emails through a verifier
→ Lose 50-60% of the list
→ 4 hours of work for 400 usable leads

New workflow:

→ Build the list directly in Prospeo
→ Enrich for personalization
→ Push to Instantly.ai
→ few minutes for 900+ usable leads

The best campaigns don't start with better copy.

They start with better data.

If you're losing half your list before you even send, fix the source.

Antonio Gabrić

I help people write cold emails that convert 🚀 | Marketing @ Hunter.io

Hey! I'm Antonio. I help SaaS companies grow their brand's presence and revenue with outbound marketing.

Building backlinks that move the needle is hard. Here's how I can help you:

- Set up hyper-personalized and automated link building outreach campaigns
- Build contextual backlinks from relevant DR70+ domains at scale
- Get your brand featured on Hubspot, Zapier, Wordstream, and more
- List your brand in high-traffic listicles (top X tools)
- Grow your brand's presence, authority, and revenue

Why me?

- Grew Hunter's organic monthly sessions from 100k to 300k
- Built semi-automated processes for effective link building (7,000+ referring domains in 2 years)
- Sent tailored outreach campaigns with 12% conversion rates
- Featured on industry-leading websites such as Hubspot, Zapier, Wordstream, and many more
- Managing a Slack community with over 100 active SaaS link builders (SERanking, Toptal, Hubspot, and others)

Ready to leverage link building to grow your SaaS into a multi-million dollar success?

🔔 I'll be posting SEO and cold email case studies – so hit that "Follow" button! 

Cheers,
Antonio.

Outreach Manager

Some of the current responsibilities and achievements:

- leading the link building at Hunter
- establishing and reworking processes
- hiring freelancers
- managing a team of link builders and writers
- running a Slack community of amazing link builders
- experimenting with different outreach approaches
- managing affiliate program approvals
- working with influencers
- ensuring Hunter is featured on most authority industry-relevant websites consistently
- increasing organic traffic by 78%

I’m looking for 20 people to join an exclusive SEO partnership circle.

The vibe: 
✅ Real SaaS brands only (No PBNs/Farms)
✅ High-authority guest post collabs (Zapier, Moz, G2, and more)
✅ Editor intros & networking 
✅ Bi-monthly "Win/Fail" syncs
✅ Weekly catch-ups to discuss new strategies and tactics

If you’re tired of shouting into the void and want a small community of peers to grow with, this is for you.

The keyword: "Value".

Comment "SaaS" below, and I'll send you the details.

(I'll go through all comments and messages. But, I'll just respond to people who meet the criteria (e.g., not interested in resellers, agencies, etc.))

Marketing @ Hunter.io | Author on Moz, Zapier, G2 & 50+ top industry sites | Writing on SEO, content marketing, B2B sales & lead generation

Only 1 in 20 cold emails gets a reply.

My colleague Ziemek Bućko did a fantastic job analyzing 31 million emails and pulling this report together. I went through the findings and pulled the 14 stats that actually move the needle.

Some of these surprised me:
→ Turning off open tracking increases reply rates by 68% 
→ Emailing 21–50 people outperforms blasting 500+ by 158% 
→ 3 follow-ups double replies. 4+ kills them. 
→ LinkedIn is now the preferred channel for 50.5% of decision makers

Cold email isn't dead. Lazy cold email is.

The full breakdown is in the carousel 👇

Drop your biggest takeaway in the comments. Curious what resonates most.

(Full report link in the comments)

Email outreach stats

If someone told me you could win $1,000 by writing one email, I'd have laughed.

Which means most people reading this won't bother entering.

Less competition for you.

Messaging Madness 2026: entries close tomorrow, March 10. 

Write one outreach email based on a real scenario. It goes into a public bracket, head-to-head voting rounds, until one winner takes $1,000.

I'm judging one of the 4 scenarios myself.

10 minutes to write. $1,000 to win.

Full details + entry form below

Messaging Madness 2026

Can you write an email worth $1,000? Let’s find out.

Messaging Madness 2026 is officially back. 🎉

Last year, we launched an experiment: a bracket-style tournament to find the world’s best outreach. We saw thousands of votes and one undeniable truth: the "spray and pray" era is dead.

This year, the stakes are higher, the scenarios are tougher, and the philosophy has shifted.

From "Cold" to "Outreach"

In 2025, we called it a cold email competition. We were wrong.

Looking at the winning entries, none of them felt "cold." When you research a prospect and understand their pain so deeply that your message lands at the exact right moment, that’s not an intrusion. That’s a solution.

The theme for 2026: 

Turning a cold lead into a warm conversation through human-to-human connection.

How the Messaging Madness works:

Pick your scenario: Choose one of four specific prompts.
Write your email: Craft the perfect initial outreach.
The Selection: Our judges pick the Top 64 entries.
The Bracket: You go head-to-head in 6 rounds of public voting.

What we learned from the 2025 winners (@anne kar:

Relevance > Cleverness: "Smart" copy loses to "helpful" copy every time.

Length is a myth: Value-packed 200-word emails beat generic 50-word ones.

Be Human: If you sound like an AI template, you’ve already lost.

🏆 The Prize:

The "Follow-up 4" (Semi-finalists) all get a year of Hunter’s Starter plan.
The Champion takes home $1,000 cash.

📅 The Key Dates:

Entry Deadline: March 10

Bracket Announcement: March 16

First Round Voting: March 17

Stop sending spam. Start writing outreach that actually gets a reply.

I’m dropping the link to the scenarios and the entry form in the comments below. 👇

taplio

The Battle

Jovan Shojlevski

Antonio Gabrić

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreJovan Shojlevski's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreAntonio Gabrić's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Jovan Shojlevski

Antonio Gabrić

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Jovan Shojlevski's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreAntonio Gabrić's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreJovan Shojlevski's LinkedIn Performance