How Novel Turned Cold Email Into 5 to 8 Signups a Day

Foundation

Novel sells to ecommerce brands, and it sells something they can try in a minute: shoppable video feeds built from the social content they already make. TikToks and Instagram reels become high converting feeds on the homepage and the product pages.

Joe DeWulf, Co-Founder, is clear about why that matters for outbound: a prospect can click through from an email, type in a TikTok or Instagram handle, and see the product working on their own content. No call required.

Which makes the email the whole funnel. And email, Joe argues, has quietly become a specialist job.

The challenge

Novel had tried running cold email in house, and stopped:

• The landscape changed. What used to be doable on the side now demands constant attention to spam trends.
• Deliverability is a daily job, not a setting: monitoring, cleaning contacts, verifying that addresses are real and valid.
• Testing is the actual work. Identifying what works means running A/B tests properly and iterating on the result.
• A previous partner had not delivered. Standing meetings every couple of weeks, a cost Joe found high, and a lead volume that did not justify it.

His conclusion is the sharpest line in the video:

Before signing, Joe did what a good buyer does: he went back to the market, and he asked ColdIQ for a reference. He spoke to another ColdIQ client first, then started.

The process

1. Deliverability as the standing brief

Keeping messages in the inbox is the constraint everything else is built around: spam trends, contact hygiene, valid addresses, sending behaviour.

2. Solving the link problem

Novel’s campaigns have to carry a link, because the landing page is where a prospect collects the value and installs the app. Sending a link without losing deliverability, whether in the first email or the second, is the specific technical problem the campaigns are engineered around.

3. Testing as a habit

Different approaches, different strategies, different messaging, run as tests rather than as opinions.

4. A shared channel and a standing rhythm

A running Slack channel with everyone in it, and meetings often enough that both sides know what is happening and what is next. Joe’s point about that channel is that it makes unhappiness visible early, not just progress.

5. Keeping up with the tooling

Deliverability and personalization tools move constantly. Joe credits ColdIQ with staying on top of which of them actually improve results, rather than which of them are being talked about.

The outcome

• Between 5 and 8 leads a day, counted as email signups on the landing page.
• 1 to 3 customer installations a day from the same motion.
• A full time job given back. The outbound work Joe would have had to do himself, or hire for, is run by the ColdIQ team.
• Campaigns that hold deliverability while carrying a link, which is the hard version of this problem.

Joe’s framing of why it works is worth keeping, because it cuts both ways: “You could send all the emails with the highest deliverability and the perfect message, but it’s up to the business to have a high converting landing page.” The campaigns are doing well, and so is the product they point at.

Lessons learned

1. Cold email is now a full time skill. The question is not whether you could do it, it is what you stop doing while you do.
2. Ask for a reference. Joe called an existing client before signing, and that is the check most buyers skip.
3. The link is the campaign. When the landing page is where the product sells itself, deliverability with a link in the email is the entire technical problem.
4. It takes two. Perfect sending into a weak page produces nothing. The results here belong to both sides.

What’s next

Joe is explicit that the numbers are a floor rather than a ceiling: growing leads and installations is the goal, from a motion that is already consistent.

Final thoughts

The most useful thing about this story is that Novel had already tried both alternatives: doing it themselves, and paying someone else who did not deliver. What changed was not enthusiasm for cold email, it was who was doing the unglamorous parts.

If your outbound is one person’s side project and it is starting to show, the plays behind this story are in ColdIQ’s GTM Playbook.