The situation
Ideascape is an internal-communications agency that works with large Indian employers. Its buyers are CHROs, heads of communications and the C-suite of companies with thousands of staff. A clumsy cold email to that audience costs more than it can win.
What we built
Each email set what the company says publicly (its mission, a live trigger like a new plant) against what its own employees rate it on AmbitionBox. Reading 850 manufacturers turned up one pattern: at 93% of them, the lowest-rated category was Promotions and Appraisal. We held back 43 companies where the email couldn't be excellent.
16 lookalike domains and 32 inboxes at 20 to 25 emails a day. Plain text, no tracking, sent under the agency's own senior team. The ask was "want it?" for a one-page diagnostic, never a calendar link.
In September the argument about the category became three specific ideas for that company, given away whether they reply or not. A research agent read each website and the AI wrote only the opener and the 3 ideas. 10 idea types were rotated in code, and any phrase that repeated across companies was regenerated.
For the October anniversary campaign, the contact database's founding years turned out to be wrong 63% of the time. We checked 8,907 companies against the national company register and web search for $8.91, and caught 361 wrong anniversaries before a single email went out.
The line that opened the door
Your teams rate the company 4.0 overall, with 47% giving five stars, but Promotions and Appraisal sits at 3.3, the lowest score.
One line from the say-do campaign. Every number in it came from that company's own employee reviews.
Results
| Campaign | Sent | Replies | Positive | Per email |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Manufacturing, say-do gap (Jul) | 5,788 | 35 | 18 | 0.311% |
| Promise vs people, category argument (Aug) | 18,116 | 34 | 14 | 0.077% |
| Three ideas for your company (Sep) | 20,175 | 109 | 42 | 0.208% |
| Milestone year, anniversary signal (Oct) | 5,580 | 27 | 12 | 0.215% |
In the first 15 days, 2,077 decision-makers got 4,607 emails. 25 replied and 16 said yes. 12 of the 16 were C-level, owner or MD: a chairman, a president, a CEO, 2 COOs and 3 CHROs.
What changed because of it
Three ideas built for one company produced 2.7x the positive replies per email of the category argument, on similar volume. That's now the default for every senior-buyer campaign we write.
