The constraint
Lyl Marketing is an Australian agency that builds long-term lead generation for its clients, through paid ads, B2B cold outreach and lead nurturing. When a client needs pipeline, the delivery lands on a small team: three people, led by Director and Digital Strategist Yee Lin Loke.
Cold outreach was part of the offer, and it was run the way most agencies run it: pull a list, load it into a sending tool, write the copy.
With a lot of cold outreach, it was, you know, like, okay, just let's get this list. ... let's do the messaging. It was all very basic stuff.
For an agency, that ceiling is expensive twice: the client judges the agency by the pipeline, and the list decides how good the pipeline can get.
What we built
The work ran in three stages, in Yee Lin's own description: she learned the approach first, then we taught it to her team together, and then we helped with delivery for her clients.
Clay as the list
The biggest change was enrichment. Instead of a raw export, every record carried the right information, and the list came out as a more qualified set of people.
A niche audience, found precisely
The headline campaign went after prospects in a very niche industry, on behalf of one of Lyl's own clients.
Personalization from the same data
What Clay found on each prospect fed the messaging.
Replies routed as they landed
Interested replies were flagged in the shared Slack channel as they came in.
Fast, clear answers
Questions got a response quickly, with a clear explanation, from a team that stayed on top of everything.
But with using Clay, you're able to actually, you know, really enrich the data and get the right kind of information, get the right kind of, you know, more qualified list of people. So, you know, that really helped in terms of the results of the campaign.
- Clay
Results
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Positive, interested leads | 80+ in about a month |
| People reached | 3,080 |
| Replies | 642 |
| Positive replies | 95, one for every 32 people reached |
| Client follow-up capacity | Exceeded: the client ran out of people to follow up |
Yee Lin called it the most insane campaign she had seen so far. The client was very happy, and then came back with a problem most agencies never get to have.
I even lost track because there were so many. The clients, the problem with that, which is a good problem, the client actually came back and said, Oh, no, we don't have enough people in the team to follow up with all these people.
What this means for you
For an agency, the list is the product. Enrichment turned a basic cold outreach service into one that produced more interested leads than the client could follow up. Two lessons carry over: teach the method so it stays with your team after the campaign, and agree lead volume with the client before you launch, because too many leads is still a problem someone has to handle.
