Wassma is a manufacturer of pipeline components for heavy industries like pulp & paper, oil refining, and chemical processing. Their goal: get in touch with decision-makers at mid-size and large industrial plants to offer engineering-grade, localized alternatives to European equipment.
Their buyers weren’t active on LinkedIn. Cold calling didn’t scale. Paid ads didn’t reach the right people.
So they turned to email outreach — but with one caveat: no salesy messages, no long brochures, no tech spec dumps.
- Directors (C-levels) — hard to reach, flooded with vendor emails
- Mid-level engineers and procurement — rarely reply to strangers
- Generic company inboxes — usually ignored or filtered
This wasn’t your typical SaaS outreach. The audience was split:
We needed to test which segment would respond — and which message would break through.
Each message was followed up once, with a reminder that felt personal, not automated.
- For directors, we included technical use cases, cost optimization stats, and a soft ask.
- For line-level engineers, we kept it brief and practical — just looking for the right contact.
- For general inboxes, we sent the simplest version: “Who’s in charge of pipeline systems?”
We ran three tailored sequences:
📩 933 emails sent across all segments
👀 111 emails opened (12% open rate)
💬 41 replies received (4.4% reply rate)
That was it. No links. No attachments. No pitch. Just a genuine, human-sounding question from a real person — not a sales rep, but a commercial engineer at Wassma.
Literally. The email said:
“Hi! Could you tell me who’s responsible for pipeline equipment at your company?”
Instead of pushing a product, we asked a question.
If you’re targeting technical B2B audiences, skip the pitch. Ask a real question. Write like a human. Test your assumptions. And don’t ignore the “info@” inbox — it might just be your best-performing channel.
It wasn’t about the product — it was about relevance.
We didn’t try to sell — we asked for guidance.
We didn’t push — we opened a conversation.
And that small shift — from outreach to inquiry — made all the difference.
The most effective segment was company inboxes — often overlooked, but surprisingly responsive when the message was short, polite, and asked the right question.
But here’s where it gets interesting: