Sagrada AI: 90 Qualified Opportunities Generated in Under 3 Weeks

Campaign Overview

Sagrada AI, founded by Phoebe Brown, is a New Zealand-based AI automation agency that builds AI-powered social media automation systems for coaches, consultants, speakers, and service-based experts. The platform takes existing content — talks, podcasts, long-form videos, training sessions — and automatically transforms it into blog posts, social clips, newsletters, and scheduled multi-platform content, eliminating 8 to 10 hours per week of manual content production for busy founders and thought leaders.

As a newer business without established case studies or prior social proof, Phoebe partnered with Lead Gen Jay to launch a structured multi-segment cold email program designed to reach the exact thought leaders and service-based founders who already had a library of content but lacked the time or systems to repurpose it consistently. The challenge: break through inboxes saturated with traditional pitches, without leaning on credentials the business hadn't yet earned.

Five distinct sequences were built to test ICP angles across five segments: speakers and authors, coaching company founders, individual coaches, consulting company founders, and individual consultants. Rather than leading with a sales pitch, each sequence led with a uniquely compelling lead magnet — offering to take a piece of each prospect's own public content and return ready-to-post sample assets generated by Sagrada AI's system. This "show, don't tell" approach gave every prospect a clear, low-friction reason to reply.

Key Metrics

• Total Emails Sent: 19,486
• Unique Contacts Reached: 10,699
• Average Touches Per Prospect: 1.82
• Total Replies: 533
• Overall Reply Rate: 4.98%
• Interested Replies: 90
• Interested Rate (of Replies): 16.89%
• Positive Response Rate (of Total Contacts): 0.84%
• Bounce Rate: 2.45%
• Campaign Duration: Under 3 weeks

The 4.98% overall reply rate is well above the 1–3% cold email industry benchmark, demonstrating that the free sample asset lead magnet successfully cut through the noise crowding most coaches' and founders' inboxes. Critically, 16.89% of all respondents expressed genuine interest — meaning more than one in six people who replied were qualified, engaged opportunities rather than objections or unsubscribes. Bounce rate held at 2.45% across nearly 20,000 sends, indicating clean list hygiene and a healthy sender reputation throughout the campaign.

Best-Performing Campaign

Within the broader five-sequence program, the Speakers & Authors sequence stood out as the top performer by absolute volume of qualified opportunities. Targeting professional speakers, keynote presenters, and published authors, this sequence achieved a 4.22% reply rate — nearly 30% above the program average — and generated 42 interested leads, the single largest share of qualified pipeline from any individual segment.

The result validated a core hypothesis: professional speakers already produce content-rich material (keynotes, talks, stage recordings) but rarely have the systems to distribute that content across platforms. Sagrada AI's offer — turning a single talk into weeks of multi-platform content — directly addressed a pain point this segment experiences acutely.

The Coaching Company Founders & CEOs sequence ranked as a close second, posting a 4.23% reply rate and the program's highest interested-of-replies conversion at 20.54%, generating 23 qualified leads from just 1,571 unique contacts. Together, the Speakers & Authors and Coaching Company Founders sequences accounted for approximately 72% of all qualified opportunities while consuming under half of the program's total send volume — a clear and actionable signal for where to concentrate future investment.

By contrast, the individual consultant and consulting company founder segments posted reply rates of 1.36% to 1.77%, suggesting either a different underlying pain point, a need for a different lead magnet angle, or de-prioritization in the next campaign iteration. The five-sequence structure made these performance differences immediately visible and directly actionable.

Success Factors

Targeted ICP Segmentation

The campaign's performance was driven in large part by precise segmentation across five distinct buyer personas, each with its own custom sequence and messaging. Rather than sending a single generic email to a broad list, the team isolated speakers, coaching founders, individual coaches, consulting founders, and individual consultants into separate tracks. This allowed rapid identification of which content-automation angle resonated with which audience and enabled spend reallocation toward the highest-performing segments in real time.

Strategic Lead Magnet: Free Sample Assets

Rather than leading with a sales pitch or a generic offer, the campaign leveraged a uniquely compelling lead magnet: offering to take a piece of each prospect's own public content — a talk, a podcast episode, a webinar recording — and return ready-to-post sample assets generated by Sagrada AI's system. This "show, don't tell" approach lowered the barrier to engagement dramatically because prospects received tangible, personalised value before any commitment was required. The variant lines in the copy — offering to grab a public talk and produce sample assets — gave each recipient a clear, low-friction yes/no decision, which is one of the strongest drivers of above-benchmark reply rates in cold outreach.

Scale and Consistency

With nearly 20,000 emails sent to over 10,000 unique prospects in under three weeks, the program demonstrated the compounding effect of consistent volume in cold email. Five concurrent sequences running simultaneously allowed the team to A/B test messaging approaches at speed, identify winning segments early, and accumulate qualified pipeline at a pace that would be impossible through manual or ad-hoc outreach efforts.

Quality Over Noise

The 16.89% interested rate among all respondents — and 20.54% on the best-performing sequence — indicates that prospect selection and message-to-market fit were tightly aligned throughout the campaign. The program was not optimised purely for reply volume; it was structured to ensure that replies converted to genuine opportunities at a high rate, ensuring Phoebe's follow-up time was spent on the most promising conversations rather than chasing low-intent responses.

Conclusion

Sagrada AI's cold email program demonstrates that early-stage founders without prior case studies can still drive meaningful, qualified pipeline through outbound — provided the lead magnet delivers immediate, tangible value rather than promises. The free sample asset offer cut through the noise that defeats most cold email aimed at coaches, speakers, and consultants, producing a 4.98% reply rate and 90 qualified opportunities in under three weeks.

The campaign also delivered clear market intelligence: Speakers & Authors and Coaching Company Founders are Sagrada AI's two highest-leverage segments — content-rich operators who already produce talks, podcasts, and training sessions but lack the systems to distribute consistently. These segments produced the strongest reply rates, the highest interested-of-reply conversion, and the largest absolute volume of qualified leads, providing a proven template for the next phase of outreach.

As Phoebe layers testimonials and case studies from these initial 90 conversations into future sequences, Sagrada AI is well-positioned to compound credibility, scale qualified pipeline, and convert early interest into recurring revenue across its strongest verticals. The foundation has been built — with data to back every decision going forward.