The Automated Cold Email Formula
A behind-the-scenes look at our workflow that scrapes, summarises, and writes personalised email openers in seconds—no human research required.
Published: June 2025
Author: Jack Gardner, Founder of Dynamis
Scale Personalisation
Introduction
In today’s competitive B2B landscape, sending generic outreach emails simply won’t cut it. Prospects expect personalisation, relevance and speed—yet manually researching each lead and crafting a custom opener takes hours, if not days. At Dynamis, we faced exactly this challenge: how to scale highly personalised cold-email outreach without hiring an army of research assistants.
So we asked ourselves: what if all that legwork could happen automatically? What if we could instantly surface the single most compelling detail on a prospect’s site and turn it into a human-sounding, personalised opener—every time?
That question inspired our fully automated pipeline. In under 30 minutes, we now research 100 leads, extract meaningful context, generate an AI-crafted icebreaker for each, and push the enriched records directly into Smartlead campaigns (or Airtable) for immediate outreach. The result? A 22 % boost in reply rate and exhaustive time savings.
If you’re ready to leave manual research behind, read on. Or better yet—book a free strategy call today and see how you could implement a similar system in your business.
The Solution: A Fully Automated Pipeline
Instead of laboring over each lead, our system does the heavy lifting in six simple steps. Here’s a bird’s-eye view:
Pull Leads
We store a list of Apollo search links in Google Sheets. Each search returns a batch of target contacts (name, role, company).
Retrieve Contact Data (Apify Scraper)
An Apify actor automatically extracts every contact’s email and company website—no CSV exports, no manual clicks.
Deep Website Scan
For each company site, the pipeline quickly scrapes internal pages (e.g., About, Blog, Product) and gathers text snippets that reveal what makes them unique right now.
Summarise Key Insights (OpenAI)
The scraped text is sent to OpenAI, which distills it into a short, “spartan-tone” summary (e.g., two bullet-points or a crisp paragraph).
Generate a Custom Icebreaker (OpenAI)
A second OpenAI pass transforms those summaries into a one- or two-sentence icebreaker that references a concrete detail: “Hey [Name], I noticed your team just launched the X24 feature…”
Campaign Integration (Smartlead / Airtable)
The final enriched record—complete with
first_name,last_name,email,website, and the AI-writtenicebreaker—is pushed directly into Smartlead (or Airtable). The moment the workflow ends, your first batch of personalised emails begins sending.
Key Benefits & Outcomes
Massive Time Savings
Before Automation: 8–12 hours spent manually researching 100 leads.
After Automation: Under 30 minutes for the same workload.
Why It Matters: Your team regains nearly an entire workday to focus on selling, not scraping.
Higher Reply Rates
Data Point: AI-generated icebreakers drove a 22 % increase in response rates compared to generic templates.
Why It Works: Each opener references a non-obvious detail (e.g., “I saw your new case study on automating workflows…”), immediately proving you did your homework.
Scalable Consistency
Volume: Process 500+ leads per day with zero human intervention.
Quality: Every icebreaker maintains a crisp, “spartan tone” that sounds authentically human.
Outcome: As you ramp up to hundreds of leads, your messaging stays on-brand and error-free.
Seamless Campaign Integration
Smartlead/Instantly: Enriched contacts (name, email, website, AI-written icebreaker) can be piped directly into a Smartlead campaign for automated sending.
Airtable Option: If you prefer, records flow into Airtable so you can review and tweak before launching your sequence.
Advantage: No copy/paste. No data mismatches. One click and your campaign is live.
Our Story