Lesson 4: Test: Can you reach your niche with your cold email

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In this lesson, you’ll learn how to test whether your niche is actually reachable for cold email outreach.

You’ll discover how to validate if you can find decision makers, uncover company websites, and reliably extract verified email addresses. We’ll walk through a practical step-by-step reachability test using real-world data workflows, so you can estimate your usable audience size before committing to a niche and avoid targeting markets that look good on paper but are impossible to reach in practice.

Welcome to Lesson 4. Today we run a reachability test.

This means, can you actually find decision makers and valid emails for your niche?

If your tool lets you filter at the person level, great, you already see reachability.

But often you start with company filters only, or a directory that has names without websites.

In that case, do a quick test before you commit.

I will show you a real example I ran with Clay.

While I walk through it I will point out techniques that raise your hit rate.

I began with a directory list of about 33k digital agencies in the US.

Then, I niched down to agencies that offer SEO. Which ended up being 19.5k.

Why SEO? The market is in turmoil due to AI, so these firms may be open to new channels.

In our earlier lesson I tagged them as Pressured.

Quick reminder. You are building a hypothesis, not searching for the perfect truth.

Good cold emailers test in a systematic way.

Pick a niche, form a value proposition, run a test, pivot if needed, rinse and repeat..

Do not spray one message to a giant list and hope.

This so-called spray and pray approach is long dead. 

Unless maybe you are a large-scale agency with over 50k mailboxes.

Yes those exist.

Let’s start with step one. Turning company names into websites.

Luckily, Clay has a Clearbit enrichment that does this for free.

From 19.5k company names I got about 14k websites.

Now step step number two. Use AI to find additional websites.

You can pick a cheap model like GPT 4o mini or nano.

Give the model the company name plus any extra context you have, such as city, size, services.

With a simple prompt I found roughly 90% of the remaining sites.

The cost was about zero point zero four cents per lookup.

About forty cents per one thousand.

Using AI here saves you many hours compared to doing it by hand.

Spot check some of the results though and tweak the prompt if needed.

After both approaches I ended up with 17.5k websites.

That is a solid base for the next step.

Step three, finding the right decision maker.

In Clay the find people enrichment allows you to pull several roles.

I included Owner, CEO, VP, Director, Head, Team Lead, and some more.

If you cannot find the top role, you may still find a strong adjacent one.

For this test I sampled about 9200 companies that had a website.

I found at least one person in about 3.5k of them.

Here we have the biggest drop so far. We are left with 38%. 

There are ways to improve the person finding rate, though.

Clay works best when you provide it with a company LinkedIn URL.

So in this case you could add an AI search that finds the LinkedIn page first.

I ran a small test of one hundred companies.

A simple AI prompt with a cheap model was already quite effective.

It found about 80% company LinkedIn URLs from the remaining list. 

Then, running the same people search with the LinkedIn URLs I found 10% additional people.

Again this cost me well under a cent per company LinkedIn URL. Well worth it. 

Another technique you can use is to search for people directly.

Try a Google search plus a small AI pass to read the results.

This especially works well if you have extra context around the company.

Step four, finding emails.

I tried two commonly used providers and excluded catch-all emails..

With this approach I got 2.7k emails from the 3.5K decision makers.  

That is a hit rate of about 77% at the person level.

Now zooming out, the company to email ratio for me was 29%.

You can push this higher. For instance, add more providers in your waterfall.

Or, search for emails for the second and third contact at the same firm.

You can also include catch-all emails.

Woodpecker has built in catch-all validation and runs it automatically.

Now, with all the data let’s assess our total reachable audience. 

First I have about 8.3k companies left to look for decision makers.

Given my hitrate I estimate to get about 2.5k more decision maker emails here.

Now I am at over 5k emails, which is great.

To get this list bigger I could still use some more techniques to find people.

Since we had the biggest drop when trying to find people I would start here.

I would try multiple alternative providers or even fall back on a Google search.

Secondly I would try more email finding providers in my waterfall.

I estimate I could probably push this to 8k.

With 8k I could run 20 campaigns of about four hundred prospects each.

I could split those campaigns over the span of 4 months. Running 5 each month.

Plenty of room to learn, iterate, and find the right message market fit.

And remember you can re-run the list. 

After 3 months you can reach out to the first contacted people with a fresh angle.

Now it is your turn, some homework.

Revisit your niche scoring from Lesson 2.

If your niche comes from a directory or company level filter, run a reachability test.

Pull a batch of at least 100 companies per niche, try to find the right people, then emails.

Note three numbers:

percent of companies with a person, 

percent of those with an email, 

and the combined company to email ratio.

If the batch is promising and the total addressable pool is large enough, move forward.

If both are weak, consider your backup niche.

A small note on scale.

A low email find rate can still be fine if the niche has a very large pool.

Ten percent of a very big market is still big.

For your first campaigns I would try to aim for a niche where you are able to have about 5k prospects.

Okay, that’s all for this lesson.

In the next lesson we will look into Awareness and Sophistication.

You will learn how to judge the state of your buyer and the market itself.

Different levels of maturity of the market require different approaches to messaging.

See you there.