How Pearl Lemon Uses Mailshake to Save 15+ Hours a Week and 3X Reply Rates
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Cold email outreach sees open rates between 20% and 40% on average, with anything above 50% considered great. For Pearl Lemon, hitting those numbers wasn’t the problem. Instead, keeping them consistent while running multiple businesses was.
Pearl Lemon is a marketing agency with roots in SEO and inbound growth. It has grown into a multi-vertical company that also covers event catering, accounting services, and video game development.
Across all these businesses, it depends on outreach to find suppliers, ensure PR coverage, and source niche partners in markets where it has no physical presence.
The problem was that all this manual outreach was eating up hours each week, usually spread across multiple tools. Reply rates were inconsistent, campaigns were difficult to track, and opportunities slipped through the cracks.
After switching to Mailshake, Pearl Lemon cut its outreach workload by 15 hours and saw three times the reply rate of other platforms they’d tried.
We reached out to Deepak Shukla, the founder of Pearl Lemon, to understand the secret behind this success. Read on to learn:
- How Pearl Lemon uses Mailshake to improve supplier recruitment, PR campaigns, and partner sourcing
- The exact Mailshake features that save them hours every week while keeping reply rates high
- Pearl Lemon’s five non-negotiable rules for cold email success
How Mailshake Helped Pearl Lemon Improve Outreach
Pearl Lemon’s outreach isn’t limited to one business or one goal. They use Mailshake as the backbone of campaigns that help them find catering gigs in Milan, get international press coverage, or look for qualified Dutch accountants.
Here’s how they make it work across different verticals:
1. Supplier Recruitment for Event Catering
When running its catering business, Pearl Lemon needs reliable local suppliers on short notice. To find them, it scrapes Google for leads, imports them directly into Mailshake, and sends 50+ outreach emails per day to venues and vendors.
Mailshake makes the import process easy and frictionless, so what used to take three hours per campaign now takes just 15 minutes. This frees up time to focus on making the best deals and getting deliverables on time instead of manual list building.
2. PR Campaigns for Media Placements
Pearl Lemon runs ongoing PR campaigns to land interviews, features, and backlinks for their agency and clients. However, before Mailshake, much of this work was slow, fragmented, and heavily manual.
Now, the company uses Mailshake to run targeted outreach campaigns for listicles, scholarships, expert quotes, and link-building opportunities. These are targeted at journalists, editors, and content managers at publications like TechCrunch, US newspapers, and UK media in a fraction of the time.
Manual one-off pitches are still used occasionally. But for scale, Mailshake handles the work, turning hours of outreach into automated, trackable sequences. In just three months, it helped Pearl Lemon generate 125 qualified leads that turned into actual coverage and backlinks.
3. Niche Partner Sourcing
Some projects require highly specialized partners, like accountants in specific countries for complex, cross-border tax work.
For example, Pearl Lemon recently needed a Dutch accountant for a niche filing. It scraped the first few pages of Google in Dutch, imported the leads into Mailshake, and sent targeted outreach sequences to find the people it was looking for.
This process now replaces hours of manual searching and emailing. It also helps Pearl Lemon find local expertise without the cost or logistics of opening offices abroad.
4. Business Development
Pearl Lemon has a low-volume, high-quality approach for business development. Using Mailshake, it sends ten personalized emails per day from its primary domain. But the team makes sure to avoid spam and ensures every message feels human to keep deliverability high.
This focus on quality has paid off: reply rates are 3× higher than with other outreach tools like Lemlist or Woodpecker, and relationships start on a warmer, more genuine note.
5. Automated Tracking of “Nice Nos”
Not every “no” is final. Pearl Lemon uses Mailshake’s Lead Catcher to flag and organize polite rejections. These are emails where the recipient might say, “Not right now, but thanks for reaching out” or “This made me smile.”
Instead of letting these leads fade away, the team manually revisits them after 30+ days through a light, personalized follow-up. This simple re-engagement process has turned 30% of so-called “lost” leads into clients.
3 Mailshake Features That Helped Pearl Lemon Improve Outreach
Pearl Lemon saw the highest reply rates with Mailshake compared to any other platform they tried. Here are three Mailshake features that helped the company get people writing back:
1. Lead Catcher
Mailshake’s Lead Catcher automatically organizes every reply, positive, negative, or neutral, into one easy-to-review inbox. This means no lead slips through the cracks for Pearl Lemon.
The company regularly checks “lost” leads because, as founder Deepak Shukla puts it, “A nice rejection today could be a client tomorrow.”
With the help of Lead Catcher tracking these warm-but-not-ready prospects, they’ve turned many polite “no’s” into long-term wins.
2. Mail Accounts Dashboard
The Mail Accounts dashboard gives Pearl Lemon a bird’s-eye view of all sending domains, their activity, and daily limits. This helps the team spot delivery issues and monitor daily sending limits, bounce rates, and reply counts without hopping between platforms.
It also helps them quickly troubleshoot, redistribute sends across accounts, and reduce the risk of spam flags. This has enabled Pearl Lemon to maintain a cold email open rate above 54% across campaigns.
3. Campaigns Overview
Pearl Lemon uses the Campaigns Overview as its “outreach scoreboard” to track every active campaign while it’s ongoing. The team can see how many prospects have been contacted, how many are engaging, and where bounce rates are creeping up.
This live feedback loop helps Pearl Lemon with its fast-paced outreach. As soon as a campaign starts underperforming, the team can pause it, tweak messaging, or reallocate sending capacity to more promising campaigns.
This helps Pearl Lemon double down on strategies that are working (like its PR pushes or niche partner searches) and cut the ones that aren’t.
Pearl Lemon’s 5 Rules for Cold Email Success
Here are Pearl Lemon’s five non-negotiables for cold emails that get replies:
1. Make Them Smile
If the email doesn’t make the sender smile or laugh while writing it, it doesn’t get sent. Neuroscience studies tells us that humor activates the brain’s reward system, which makes the sender more memorable and creates a sense of connection before business is even discussed.
People are more likely to reply to someone who made them chuckle than to yet another “quick follow-up” in their inbox.
2. Avoid Bragging, but Laugh at Yourself
Most cold emails start with a resume, like “We’ve worked with ‘big brands’” and “We’ve won so many awards. Look at us.” The problem is that this may sound like a pitch, and pitches cause people to become skeptical.
Pearl Lemon’s team flips the script: they poke fun at themselves and let results speak later. This works because self-deprecation is disarming. It lowers defenses and makes readers more receptive. You can’t fake credibility, but you can earn curiosity.
3. Use a Human Tone, Not a Sales-y Tone
If it sounds like it came from a marketing template, it’s going straight to the archive. Deepak avoids the “corporate press release” voice, which means no jargon, no stiff intros, nothing too on the nose.
Instead, you should write as though you’re talking to a friend over coffee and mention exactly what you can help them out with, not do for them. This works because people respond to people.
4. Add a Relatable PS
The PS is where Pearl Lemon breaks the ice. A quirky observation, a personal tidbit, or a nod to something in the recipient’s world turns a cold email into something more like a note from someone you only know in passing.
Most emails at Pearl Lemon end with a postscript that adds something personal or unexpected that the reader might relate to. This helps break the ice and takes the sender from “unknown salesperson” to “interesting human being.”
And because the PS is one of the most-read parts of an email, it’s prime real estate for making that personal connection.
5. Always Follow Up on “No’s”
A polite rejection today could be a “yes” in 30 days. Pearl Lemon uses Mailshake’s Lead Catcher to tag these nice no’s and schedule a re-engagement after 30+ days.
Because the original email left a positive impression, re-engaging often feels more like catching up with someone you know than pitching a stranger. This warm re-entry converts as many as 30% of past rejections into paying clients.
Final Thoughts
Cold outreach doesn’t matter if nobody replies. And nobody will reply if your emails don’t land in their inbox. That’s why deliverability, personalization, and timing matter just as much as your offer, and that’s what makes Pearl Lemon’s results so interesting.
Founder Deepak Shukla tried many outreach tools, but his team kept returning to Mailshake. It helps them cut down manual work, protect sending domains, and track every lead (even the “no’s”) across multiple businesses with varying levels of complexity.
If your cold emails aren’t getting replies or you’re burning hours on manual outreach, it might be time to borrow a page from Pearl Lemon’s playbook. With the right setup, your inbox could go from “crickets” to conversations that move the needle. Book a free demo today!
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