A quick guide to help you avoid common campaign mistakes and boost results.
Campaign Setup Guidelines
💡 LinkedIn Use
Don't include LinkedIn on all campaigns.
LinkedIn smart limits can create a bottleneck (especially for connection requests). The amount of new daily prospects on these campaigns will be low
Best practice: combine email-only campaigns with some that use LinkedIn.
💡 Prospect Criteria
Keywords: Usually job titles. Go broad (e.g., "Head of Marketing" won’t capture "Marketing Director" so make sure to keep that in mind.
Location: Applies to the individual. On the right side of each row, you’ll see the location type (city/state/country). Click to exclude (turns red).
Industry: Based on LinkedIn’s predefined list. Super-industries contain sub-industries. Niche choices = smaller prospect pool. When typing out an industry, look on the right side of the row to know whether you’re choose the sub-industry or the super-industry. Clients are often confused with this.
Company size: Even though all fields are optional, this one is often used less frequently. When using it, keep in mind that it can sometimes be easier to exclude extreme values (e.g., very large enterprises) rather than manually selecting all other sizes.
💡 Advanced Criteria (usually not needed)
These filters are available but should only be used if truly needed, as the more you use, the smaller the prospect pool becomes.
Management level: A bit of a black box, inferred by third-party data providers and not always fully accurate.
Functional area: Same as above, so be cautious when using it.
Job title: More restrictive than using keywords; use this only when you’re targeting very specific roles.
Target specific companies: You can paste a list of companies, and Overloop will only search for matching prospects within those companies.
💡 Pitch & Highlight Field
Tailor your pitch if you have a specific campaign objective.
Use the Highlight field to change the CTA (e.g., highlight an upcoming event or link to a webinar signup).
💡 Sequence Structure
Follow-ups are crucial, as few people reply after just one message.
First touches: shorter delays.
Later messages: longer delays.
Final message: should be a break-up email. It comes after a longer delay. Psych trick: "Loss aversion" makes people more likely to react when told you’re stopping contact.
💡 Messaging Style
There’s no single winning formula / magic bullet.
Test and adjust:
Writing styles
Subject lines
Email structures
Follow up styles
What works varies greatly by sector, audience, and timing.
💡 Stats & What They Mean
Metric | Average | What It Tells You | How to Improve |
Open Rate | ~35% | Subject line effectiveness | Test new subject lines (A/B test) by duplicating a campaign |
Click Rate | >20% | / | / |
Reply Rate | 2–3% | Overall resonance (messaging + targeting) | Rework pitch or improve targeting |
Note: Even 4 clicks out of 10 opens is considered excellent in cold outreach. Think about your own habits (you don’t usually click on the links in emails that often)
💡 Volume & Scaling
Outreach is a numbers game: low conversion means high volume is necessary.
Encourage clients to:
Connect multiple email addresses (on same or different domains).
Consider connecting colleague accounts (⚠️ Be mindful that the replies will go into their inboxes + multichannel campaigns might not be as coherent if email comes from person A and LinkedIn from person B)
Twice as many emails, means twice as many replies.
💡 Autopilot Readiness
Check if the campaign can go into autopilot.
If not:
Try and understand with the client why not and how it could be fixed
Is the client rejecting lots of prospects? Adjust the prospect criteria with them to render more relevant prospects
Aim: Let the system run with minimal manual input while keeping quality high.