The constraint
Novel is software for e-commerce brands. It turns the social content a brand already makes, TikToks and Instagram Reels, into shoppable video feeds on the homepage and product pages, to lift conversion.
A brand can try it without talking to anyone: click a link, type in an Instagram or TikTok handle, and see it working. That makes the email and the landing page the whole funnel. And cold email, co-founder Joe DeWulf found, had changed. Novel had tried it in house, and doing it properly had become a job of its own: keeping up with spam trends, monitoring deliverability, cleaning contacts, making sure every address is real, and A/B testing round after round to find what works.
It's become now really a full-time job for someone to do it effectively. And what I mean effectively is like keeping up with spam trends, monitoring deliverability, cleaning contacts, right?
He had also tried an outside partner, with standing meetings every couple of weeks. It felt overly expensive for what it returned: a very small number of leads, nothing that justified the cost. Before choosing again, Joe asked for a reference and spoke to an existing client first.
What we built
A cold email system built around one hard requirement: a link in the email.
The link problem
Campaigns pointed to a landing page on Novel's site where a prospect could leave their email or install the app directly. Sending that link, in the first email or the second, without losing deliverability was the technical problem the campaigns had to solve.
Lists of the right stores
Lists were built with StoreLeads, Apollo and Clay.
- Clay
- StoreLeads
- Apollo
- Instantly
- LeadMagic
- BounceBan
Clean contacts
Email addresses came from a finding waterfall (Prospeo and LeadMagic) and were verified with LeadMagic and BounceBan: the contact hygiene that, in Joe's experience, takes a full-time person to keep up with.
Sending
Campaigns ran on Instantly.
One channel, a steady rhythm
A shared Slack channel with everyone in it, regular meetings so both sides knew what was happening and what came next, and ideas coming from Frontal as well as from Joe, including which new deliverability and personalization tools were worth using.
I feel super supported. I feel like I'm not the only one bringing ideas to the table.
Results
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Leads (email sign-ups on the landing page) | 5 to 8 a day |
| New customers installing the app | 1 to 3 a week |
| People reached | 8,600 |
| Email replies | 215, of which 21 positive |
| Sales calls needed | None |
What Novel tracked was leads and customer installations, not replies: the conversion happened on the landing page, after the click. Joe put leads at five to eight a day and was optimistic about growing them further.
When the engagement ended in December 2024, the system went to Novel's team: the tools list, a Clay template, and hands-on sessions that covered setting up Instantly and HeyReach.
It's two ways, like you guys could send all the emails with all the highest deliverability and the perfect message, but it's up to the brand or it's up to the business to have a high-converting landing page or a good sales team, right? So it takes two, and working collaboratively too.
What this means for you
If your product sells itself in a free trial, the email has one job: get the click without landing in spam. That is a full-time discipline on its own (lists, verification, deliverability, testing), and it only pays off when the page behind the link converts. Novel's results came from both halves working together.
