How Relentless Made Over Six Figures with Mailshake

Sujan Patel

March 12, 2024

Contents

Searching for a job is a headache. Applicants spend hours looking for relevant jobs, researching every company, creating a resume that highlights their value, and drafting a cover letter — all for a simple “we decided to move on with other applicants” email.

Plus, data suggests that only 25% of applicants make it through an applicant tracking system. And those that do have to go through at least five months of back-and-forth to get their job. This makes the search even harder.

That was the case for Kareem Abukhadra, the founder of Relentless. But instead of trying the road taken often, he diverged to the untrodden cold email path and lined up 30 interviews with some of the biggest brands in one month.

Relentless was the next logical step.

However, while his new company was able to tap into a huge database of LinkedIn job seekers, it struggled to convert cold leads into clients.

That’s where Mailshake came in. It helped Relentless:

Automate the cold email process
Maximize conversions to 10%
Make multiples $100,000.

Let’s understand the A to Z of how it happened.

What Relentless Do:

Relentless is a New York-based company that automates job searches for candidates. It handles everything from searching for positions to applying and sending personalized emails to coaching clients on the best ways to crack interviews.

The company was founded in 2021 by Kareem Abukhadra. Since then, it has helped hundreds of people around the world:

Get an average compensation increase of $447,169.8 over ten years.
Save three months on job search and 220 hours on average.

But before all that, there was a problem standing in the way of Relentless’ growth. While the company was able to find potential clients, it struggled to turn them into leads — a problem experienced by over 61% of marketers.

What was holding Relentless back? It wasn’t an issue with the copy. Kareem had over five years of experience working with email copy and knew exactly what to say. Instead, the problem was caused by the company not using the right software for their job, which led to low conversions.

But replacing the software didn’t work.

The company consistently ran into three problems:

Lack of functionality
Low deliverability and open rates
Lack of customer support (when stuff went wrong).

And while most of these problems were fixable, Relentless was risking its domain reputation using tools that didn’t deliver on what they promised. That’s where Mailshake came in.

While it wasn’t Kareem’s first choice — he went through 10+ email tools before he took a chance on Mailshake — it became his last and only. Why? Because it helped him get real, measurable results fast.

How Relentless uses Mailshake

Job seeking is much like marketing. If you don’t present yourself the right way, nobody will look twice at you. You have to stand out — through research, skills, education, and experience — to get your boot in the door.

Unfortunately, 54% of people don’t tailor their social media profiles, portfolios, and resumes when submitting applications. This causes them to miss out on opportunities.

As a new tech grad, Kareem had been through the trenches and understood the traditional send-application-get-response way didn’t work very well in recruitment. So, he decided to try cold outreach to fast-track job applications.

Instead of contacting every company, he created a system that helped job seekers target specific companies through personalized emails — all without lifting a finger. He essentially automated the recruitment process from application to onboarding.

Once he had everything planned, he reached out to potential clients who could use Relentless to help them get their next job, mostly through LinkedIn. These were the people who had been recently laid off, those looking to enter another industry, or those who’d just graduated.

Mailshake was an essential part of the process.

Using the software, Kareem set up email campaigns that enabled him to reach out to dissatisfied job seekers across the globe. But to make sure he reached the right people with the right message, he segmented his audience based on their location and role title.

He also personalized every single email by using Mailshake’s mail merge feature to address recipients by their name, location, or role title

Importantly, his email copy was focused on what his readers wanted. This helped him receive massively positive feedback and reach a double-digit response rate.

How Relentless measures success

Instead of chasing high open, response, and conversion rates on a campaign-by-campaign basis like most companies, Relentless analyzes monthly goals and tries to make sure they get the cost of acquisition (CAC) as low as possible. This helps it stick to a budget while providing lots of value.

The current CPM for the company is $20 per booked meeting, and the conversion rate from their website to the meeting is 10%. It’s an interesting way to measure overall marketing success and we encourage you to try it out.

Relentless and Mailshake’s support team

With its high deliverability, ease of use, and simplicity, Mailshake has made sending personalized emails in bulk easy for Relentless. But it wouldn’t be as good as it is without our amazing support team.

According to Kareem, Mailshake has delivered consistent support through every phase of use. Whenever he or his team needed support or wanted to clarify something, our representatives were there to help. What’s more, our team often steps in when it notices clients taking the wrong approach to email marketing and helps them out.

He thinks that our “support chain is great,” which feels great to hear because that’s an area we spent a lot of budget on.

Final thoughts

Relentless’ story highlights that the key to successful cold outreach is understanding your customers and tailoring your message to what they want.

But using the right email outreach tool is also important or you risk losing out on deliverability, which can hurt your domain reputation.

If you’re thinking of tailoring Kareem’s solution to your case, you can. Just remember to keep our support on speed dial so we can help you get the best experience with Mailshake.

Why not book a demo today and see how Mailshake can help your business needs!