How Bloom Media Reached 30%+ Open Rates with Mailshake
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Cold email outreach usually sees reply rates between 1% and 3% in B2B. For agencies, that often means hours spent sending emails that never turn into conversations. Not because the offer is wrong, but because the message never gets seen.
Bloom Media was stuck in that exact pattern. Before Mailshake, their outreach felt like shouting into a void. Emails went out, but only silence came back.
That changed when founder Neill Di Lucia switched to Mailshake. Open rates jumped to 30%+, reply rates climbed, and the team started seeing replies again.
Now, Bloom Media’s sales team books 2–3 new client meetings per representative each week and has turned cold outreach from a leaky funnel into a repeatable growth engine.
In this case study, we’ll break down:
- Why Bloom Media chose Mailshake
- How they built hyper-personalized campaigns without burning hours on manual work
- The specific features that fixed their deliverability and gave them back visibility
- The five rules they follow to keep reply rates high and pipelines full
Introducing Bloom Media
Bloom Media is a pay-per-lead marketing agency. They generate high-intent leads through their own hosted landing pages and paid traffic, then sell those leads directly to contractors, consultants, clinics, and other businesses.
That model creates recurring revenue through long-term partnerships, but only if Bloom Media can consistently bring new client partners into the fold. And for them, that depended on cold outreach.
Before Mailshake, this outreach was broken. They were using another email platform, hitting “send,” and hearing nothing back. No “I’m not interested,” no “not right now,” no “take me off your list.” Just silence.
That silence was a red flag. It meant their emails weren’t just being rejected; they likely weren’t being seen at all.
Even worse, the team had no visibility into what was happening behind the scenes. Their previous tool worked like a black box, with no real-time insight into sends, no confirmation emails were actually going out, and no way to tell if a campaign was actively running.
Why Bloom Media Chose Mailshake
When you’re in the business of generating leads for others, you can’t afford for your own lead generation to be broken.
Bloom Media had reached that breaking point. They had no signal that their outreach was landing, which meant their existing email platform had become a liability.
The team didn’t want another complex platform with layers of features they’d never use. What they needed was something built around a principle other providers seemed to treat as optional: deliverability.
Mailshake stood out for a few clear reasons:
- A strong focus on inbox placement, including a built-in warm-up tool that promised to solve their visibility issue.
- The ability to send directly from their Outlook accounts and see emails populate their sent folders in real-time was great for trust and workflow.
- It provided the power they needed without the overwhelming complexity or cost of enterprise platforms.
How Bloom Media Uses Mailshake for Outreach
Bloom Media rebuilt its entire outreach process around Mailshake. Here’s how they put Mailshake to work:
1. Targeted, Hyper-Personalized Prospecting
Bloom Media avoids generic blasts entirely. Instead, they build micro-campaigns for highly specific audiences, sometimes targeting just five or six decision-makers within a single company.
Using Mailshake’s dynamic fields, the team personalizes emails around each prospect’s business, recent company activity, or insights from past interactions. This makes outreach feel relevant and intentional, not automated.
2. Automated Follow-up Sequences
For a lean team, manual follow-ups used to be a major bottleneck. Even strong initial emails fell flat if no one remembered to circle back.
Mailshake’s sequencing feature changed that. Once a prospect enters a campaign, follow-ups are automatically sent at the right intervals, like a gentle nudge a few days later, or a final check-in weeks down the line.
This ensures every prospect gets consistent touchpoints and no opportunity slips through the cracks.
3. Operational Visibility Through Outlook Integration
One of the biggest changes for Bloom Media was visibility. Unlike their previous “black box” provider, Mailshake sends emails directly from the team’s Outlook accounts.
Campaign emails appear in sent folders in real time, which gives team members immediate confirmation that outreach is actually happening.
Managers can also quickly scan inbox activity to monitor volume, pacing, and consistency, without digging through dashboards or guessing whether a campaign is still running.
4. Deliverability as the Foundation
Bloom Media treats deliverability as the bedrock of outreach. They use Mailshake’s built-in warm-up tool for new sender domains and keep it running continuously to maintain a strong sender reputation.
This focus on inbox placement was what moved their emails out of spam and into primary inboxes. Once emails started landing consistently, engagement only went up.
5. Measuring What Actually Matters
While Bloom Media tracks open rates, which now consistently land between 25% and 30%, they don’t stop there.
The team focuses on reply rates and, ultimately, meetings booked because that’s what gets the business flowing in.
Using Mailshake’s metrics dashboard, they view outreach as a funnel: sends lead to opens, opens lead to replies, and replies lead to meetings. If a campaign sees strong opens but weak replies, the copy needs work.
But if replies don’t convert, the follow-up needs adjustment. This feedback loop makes optimization straightforward instead of guesswork.
What Results Did Bloom Media See After Using Mailshake?
After switching to Mailshake, Bloom Media could finally confirm its emails were being seen and responded to. And once replies started to flood in, so did results. The team started to see:
- Consistent open rates of 25–30%
- Reliable replies across campaigns, including clear signals like rejections and “not now” responses
- 2–3 new client meetings booked per sales rep each week
Plus, with Mailshake handling sequencing and follow-ups automatically, the team no longer needs to track when to send second or third touches. This helps them scale up (add people or send more) without messing up their hard-won deliverability or making the process chaotic.
Mailshake Features That Power Bloom Media’s Outreach
Bloom Media’s strategy works because it’s built on specific Mailshake features designed for deliverability, personalization, and scale. Here are the five that became non-negotiable in their outreach playbook:
1. Warm-up Tool
Before Mailshake, Bloom Media’s biggest problem was invisible emails. The Warm-Up Tool solved that deliverability issue from the ground up.
Once implemented, the change was immediate: emails started landing in primary inboxes consistently.
For Neill, the proof was in the replies. “Even getting negative responses,” he says, “has been a good sign for us.” It meant their messages were finally being seen.
2. Direct Email Integration
Bloom Media’s previous provider was a “black box.” They had no visibility into what was being sent or when. Mailshake’s direct integration with Outlook changed that.
Campaigns are sent directly from their individual inboxes, and every email appears in their Outlook Sent folder in real time. This ended the guesswork and let the team manage pacing just by glancing at their own sent items.
3. Sequencing and Automation
Manual follow-ups were a major bottleneck for Neill’s team. Strong first emails would go unanswered because no one remembered to send the second touch. Mailshake sequences automated that entire process.
Now, once a prospect is in a campaign, the follow-ups, such as a nudge after a few days or a final check-in later, happen automatically.
This ensured no opportunity was lost and freed Neill’s team to focus on personalizing new campaigns and handling replies.
4. Dynamic Fields
Bloom Media’s outreach strategy is built on hyper-personalization. They use Mailshake’s dynamic fields to create micro-campaigns for companies and insert specific details about the recipient’s business or market.
The result is outreach that feels one-to-one and relevant, which helps them stand out in competitive agency niches.
5. Metrics Dashboard
Bloom Media treats needed to track the journey from send to meeting, not just the top-level “sends.” The Mailshake dashboard gives them that funnel view.
This helps them diagnose issues on the fly and makes optimizing campaigns much easier compared to before.
Bloom Media’s Rules for Cold Outreach That Converts in 2026
Here are Bloom Media’s five non-negotiable rules for outreach that converts:
1. Prioritize Deliverability over Everything
If your email doesn’t land, nothing else matters. Bloom Media learned this the hard way. Before Mailshake, their campaigns were met with total silence, a sure sign their messages were invisible.
Now, deliverability comes first. The team runs warming tools continuously, and treats reply volume, including rejections, as the primary health check. Copy, personalization, and offers only matter once the line of communication is open.
2. Personalize, Personalize, Personalize
Anyone can swap in a first name. That doesn’t show that you’ve done your homework. Bloom Media goes deeper and builds campaigns around specific segments, industries, or shared company traits.
“We… try and include dynamic fields in there that are calling stuff out that we noticed about them,” Neill explains. This shows a level of research and relevance that makes an email impossible to dismiss as spam. It’s personalization with purpose.
3. Focus on Outcomes
Bloom Media tracks outreach as a funnel, where sends lead to opens, opens lead to replies, and replies lead to meetings. And meetings booked are the only metric that ultimately matters because it pays the bills.
Viewing outreach this way makes it easier to spot where campaigns break down and fix the right problem, such as deliverability, messaging, or qualification.
4. Use AI for Drafts, Not Everything
Anyone can ask AI to write a cold email. The problem is that it often sounds like it was written by a robot, because it was. Bloom Media uses AI as a starting point, not the finish line.
Neill makes use of AI tools for a first draft or to polish subject lines, but he always “makes it sound as human as possible.”
This can mean the difference between a message that gets a polite “no thanks” and one that starts a real conversation.
5. Plan to Scale Intelligently
Most teams scale until their domain burns, then try to fix it. Bloom Media treats its sender reputation as its most valuable asset and guards it fiercely.
Their approach is to scale intelligently: first by varying email copy to avoid spam filters, then by rotating sender addresses to manage volume. This way, they make sure growth today doesn’t kill results tomorrow.
Want to use these five rules as effectively as possible? Try Mailshake and see how your campaigns can finally get the results they deserve. Book a demo today.
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