Thursday 9 July to Monday 13 July 2026. The email campaign launched on 9 July off the fresh inboxes, one day behind the 8 July estimate in the last report, and 1,750 emails went out in the first two send days. Six replies came back, one of them a clear yes from Lennox. Five interested prospects are now in play across both channels, three of them have opened their personalised reports, and zero calls are booked yet. That last number is the one this report is built around.
The Week 1 report promised the fresh inboxes would be send-ready around 8 July. They cleared warm-up and the campaign launched on Thursday 9 July, with 750 emails on day one and 1,000 on day two across the verified importer and customs-broker lists. The first weekend then passed with the sequence in market. This report covers those first five days of live email plus the LinkedIn work running alongside it.
What came back: six replies, one clear yes, one referral pointer, one unclear, and three opt-outs. The yes is worth naming early because of who it is: Jeff Spengler at Lennox, a major US HVAC manufacturer, asked for the scan and offered to carve out time, four days into a brand-new campaign. That is the exact shape of response the engine is built to produce.
The honest number is at the other end of the funnel: five people have said yes to the scan and none of them is on a calendar yet. Three have opened their reports, one has asked for the methodology, and the conversion of that warmth into booked fit-check calls is the constraint this fortnight. The plan section below is built around exactly that step, not around more volume.
First live sends went out Thursday 9 and Friday 10 July. Open tracking is deliberately switched off on all your campaigns, because open-tracking pixels hurt deliverability, so there is no open rate to report and there will not be while we send this way. Replies below are to the first touch only; the follow-up steps of the sequence have not landed yet, and most cold-email replies arrive on the follow-ups.
| Metric | Result | Read |
|---|---|---|
| Emails sent | 1,750 | First two send days of the launch, 9 and 10 July |
| Replies received | 5 | To first touches that have been in market four days |
| Clear yes | 1 | Jeff Spengler, Lennox, full card below |
| Bounces | 58 | 2.7% of cumulative sends, inside tolerance, monitored daily |
| Campaigns live | 3 | Verified importers, verified brokers, and a recycle pass |
Cumulative since the campaign began: 2,170 emails and 6 replies. The volume steps up through this week as the follow-up sequence starts landing on everyone contacted so far.
The first-pass sequence to 325 brokers and importers finished its run. Both accounts moved onto a hand-picked, highest-fit shortlist of 34 prospects each, and the warm follow-up campaign that connects with email responders and hands them their report on LinkedIn went live alongside it.
| Metric | Result | Read |
|---|---|---|
| Connection requests this week | 50 | The cream shortlist on both accounts |
| Connections accepted this week | 7 | Recent sends, still maturing |
| Requests sent to date | 363 | Across both accounts since 23 June |
| Accepted to date | 70 | A 19% acceptance rate, healthy for cold outreach |
| Replies to date | 13 | Including the yeses in the pipeline section below |
Since outreach began: 2,170 emails and 363 connection requests have produced 19 replies, which have produced 5 active yeses, of which 3 have opened their personalised report and 0 have booked a call. Every stage of that funnel is now flowing except the last one. That is where the effort goes this fortnight, and it is a far better problem to have than silence at the top.
The scan hook works on both channels: it pulled a warm yes out of Lennox on email within four days, and it produced the LinkedIn yeses that are now reading their reports. What has not happened yet is a single booked fit-check call, and the pattern in the replies says why: every yes so far has been given the report and a soft next step, not a direct ask with concrete times. From this week every interested prospect gets two proposed time slots in the same message as their report follow-up, so saying yes to a call is as easy as saying yes to the scan was.
Zero calls have been held or booked so far, so there is nothing to invoice and nothing to dispute. What exists is the layer just before that: five prospects who said yes to the exposure scan and are still active, and a working tier of open conversations behind them. Every card carries direct links so you can open anything live. For completeness: this week also brought three opt-outs (Airways Freight, Piatek Customs, Lynden Logistics), all removed and added to the do-not-contact list the same day.
Two signals this fortnight pointed at the same idea. Adrienne Braumiller, a customs law firm founder, read your scan with interest, and her real value is not as a buyer but as a door into her importer clients. And your own cold replies keep producing referrals unprompted. So we built the machine that turns that pattern into a channel, and we want your read on it on this call.
The concept: a referral partner, a trade law firm, a freight association, a broker network, an adviser, shares one link with their contacts. Anyone who clicks lands on a Ripple-branded page, requests their own free AI HTS & Tariff Exposure Scan in under a minute, and books a fit-check call the moment their report is ready. Every submission carries the partner's tag, so you always know which relationship produced which lead. We run this exact machine for another client of ours, fully automated end to end: form submission to personalised report to booked call, no manual work in the middle.
A working preview already exists in Ripple's brand. The form is in demo mode, nothing sends, but the page is real and you can click through it right now:
Adrienne's clients are importers with exactly the classification problem this scan surfaces. What we would send her is not a pitch, it is the funnel link: a free, co-branded tool her firm can put in front of its own clients. She gets to look generous to her book, and every client of hers who runs the scan lands in your pipeline. If you like the shape, say so on this call and we will write her follow-up that way.
Within four days of the first email send, before a single follow-up step landed, the campaign produced a warm yes from Lennox and a report request. Week 1 proved the hook on LinkedIn; this week proved it on email at a thousand sends a day. The offer does not need changing, it needs finishing.
Five yeses, three opened reports, zero booked calls. Every yes so far received the report and a soft close. From now the report follow-up carries two concrete proposed times, because the gap between "read the report twice" and "on the calendar" is an ask, not more nurturing.
Two prospects, ACE and Krenz & Hannan, asked where the numbers come from before going further. Customs people are professionally sceptical, and both questions came from engaged readers, not dismissive ones. The answer, public import records plus the live tariff schedule, is a strength, so it now goes into the follow-up proactively instead of waiting to be asked.
Two replies this fortnight ended with a pointer to the right person instead of a no: Carmen Gerace at Mallory Alexander and Axiom's Dallas import team. When wrong-door recipients redirect you voluntarily, the targeting is close and the message is landing. Both chains get worked this week.
The next fortnight is sequenced deliberately: the booked-call gap gets attacked first, because five warm prospects are worth more than five thousand cold sends, then the volume steps up behind it.
Caribtrans first, then Lennox as soon as his scan lands, then ACE, Braumiller and AGOL. Each message pairs the report with two concrete time slots for the 15-minute fit-check call. The first booked calls from this pipeline are the milestone for the next report, and we will name them individually.
The first 1,750 sends proved the fresh infrastructure delivers clean, with bounces inside tolerance. Daily volume steps up through the week across the importer and broker campaigns, and the follow-up steps begin landing on everyone contacted so far, which is where cold email replies typically concentrate.
Carmen Gerace and the Axiom Dallas team get outreach that names their colleague. Qasim gets a personal re-opener from Adrian rather than a sequence step. These three conversations cost nothing in sending volume and carry the highest conversion odds in the pipeline.
Where this leaves us. Two weeks in: both channels live, the hook proven on each, a named pipeline of five yeses with three engaged readers, and referral chains forming on their own. Nothing in the machine needs rebuilding. The one missing number is booked calls, the ask is now built into every follow-up, and that is the number the Week 3 report will be judged on.