40x Reply Rate for an EdTech Video Platform, Without Risking the Main Domain

The Challenge

ScreenPal makes video creation software used by teachers, instructional designers, and corporate training teams. Their buyers are spread across three very different markets: K-12 school districts, colleges and universities, and businesses.

When they came to us, outbound had stopped working and nobody could say exactly why. The team was fairly sure their emails were going to spam, but they couldn’t prove it. Nothing bounced back, nothing errored out, and the dashboards still showed emails as sent. Tens of thousands of emails were going out with only a very small trickle of replies coming back. Everything was failing silently.

There was a bigger risk underneath. Cold email was going out from the main company domain. Every spam complaint and bounce was chipping away at the reputation of the same domain the whole company relies on for customer, billing, and support email. One bad run could have put day-to-day business email at risk.

The Approach

Fix the foundation first. We moved all cold outreach off the main domain. Using Zapmail, we provisioned 14 secondary sending domains and 28 Google Workspace mailboxes, connected them to Apollo.io, configured authentication, warmed every inbox, and ramped sending volume slowly based on deliverability scores. The main domain was taken out of cold outreach entirely. (More on how we set up email infrastructure for cold outreach.)

Replace mass sends with targeted campaigns. The old program ran a few large general campaigns at everyone. We split the market into specific audiences and built a campaign for each: district technology leaders, college accessibility and instructional technology teams, corporate L&D, customer success, and teams switching from competing tools. Each one spoke to a single problem that audience was dealing with. The program grew to 25+ campaigns running across email and LinkedIn.

Add LinkedIn as a second channel. We ran LinkedIn outreach through HeyReach alongside email, reaching the same decision-makers where they were more likely to respond. Accepted connections and replies synced back into Apollo.io, so the sales team saw both channels in one place. (Here is how we connect Apollo.io and HeyReach.) That added 367 new connections with target buyers and dozens more conversations on top of email.

Build it to be handed over. Every campaign, audience, and sending rule was documented inside the client’s own Apollo.io account. After ten months, the team understood the system well enough to run it themselves, and took it in-house.

The result: a reply rate 40x higher than before, a steady flow of conversations from all three markets, and a main domain that was never put at risk again.