How To Turn an Underperforming Campaign Into 10 Good Ones

Sometimes, my email campaigns underperform. It happens more often than I’d like to admit, and when it does, one of my first instincts is to review the copy. 

I go into the Campaigns editor and look at what I wrote when creating the sequence, certain that I must have messed up.

But I usually find that my copy is solid, and while I could always make tweaks, there’s nothing that stands out as really bad.

In fact, it’s usually the targeting, not the copy itself, that’s at fault. 

When my campaigns underperform, it’s usually because I aim to target a big segment with the same message. Because I’m lazy.

The fix? Segmentation:

• I take my list, 
• I review what I know about the recipients, 
• I find smaller groups of people within the list,
• I break it down into smaller segments,
• I create separate campaigns for these smaller segments, making slight tweaks to my copy.

You might think that this level of effort only pays off if your ticket size is high enough. This may have been true a couple of years ago, but I don’t think it’s true now. 

In 2025, mediocre outreach doesn’t get you mediocre results. It gets you no results.

Let me show you how I segment my audience and create more targeted messaging in a time-effective way.

Enrich your lead list

Segmentation is unlocked by data, and the more datapoints you have, the more likely you are to find ones that help you create smaller lists. If all you know about your recipients is their names and job titles, that doesn’t get you far.

Wherever you store your lead data, and however you acquire it, look for ways to get as many data variables as possible.

If you’re using Hunter, storing your prospect data in Leads makes it easy to enrich them with every data point we have with them and their company. Even if you upload nothing but an email address to Leads, we’ll automatically enrich it (as long as we have the information in our database).

But even if you prefer to use your CRM, you can use our Enrichment API endpoints to get a bigger picture of who your leads are. 

The Combined Enrichment endpoint offers over 100 datapoints on the prospect and the associated company. While we won’t ever have every detail on every lead you have, you’re bound to deepen your dataset by enriching it with Hunter.

Review your lead list and create subsegments

Having the data is one thing, but knowing how to act on it is another. To efficiently segment, you need the ability to quickly understand the smaller segments hiding in your large list.

Lead data is typically characterized by high cardinality, which means that there are many different values for every variable. 

For example, our linkbuilding campaigns target people that have control over a company website. Their job titles include:

• Editor
• Content Editor
• Marketing Manager
• Content Writer
• Head of Marketing

In practice, these people often share some responsibilities—including the ones that make them our target audience—but there are also significant differences.

It’s difficult to manually sort such data, which is why we added data visualizations to Leads.

These charts can quickly show you where your recipients are and, more importantly, help you view subsegments with a single click.

The key when doing this is to keep your broad messaging in mind and think “Is there anything more specific that I can say to this subsegment?”

After you find an interesting combination of characteristics, save the results to a new list.

Improve your cold email copy

The last part is easy. You take your initial template, and you scope it down based on job titles, geography, company size, or anything else you used in your analysis.

If you’re stuck, AI can be of great help here. For a quick start, try this prompt in your AI chat tool of choice:

“This is my cold email template: {insert initial email}. Initially, I targeted {broad persona}, but I want to contextualize the copy to specifically target {narrowed segment}. Based on what you know about what makes this narrower segment different from the initial segment, suggest changes to the copy and provide an explanation for why they would make the message more relevant to the narrower segment.”

Our upcoming AI writing feature makes iterating on this even easier. You can rapidly test how different framing of who you’re targeting, the pain you’re solving, and the details of your solution, affect the copy. 

It’s critical to note that AI can help by using its understanding of the market, but it doesn’t take your hands off the steering wheel. Your insight into the value your product or service provides is not replaced here.

If you want to give it a try, join the waitlist here.

What’s next?

Our State of Cold Email report shows that relevance is the key to getting anywhere with cold email. And even though relevance is achieved by writing excellent email copy, it’s not possible to be relevant to everyone at once. 

That’s why segmentation is so important. However, if we look at the current landscape of outreach tools—including Hunter—segmenting your lists isn’t easy. We’ve made it one of our main priorities to help Hunter’s users segment without having to spend hours on creating smaller lists and targeting them with campaigns.

As a first step, we completely revamped Leads, making it easier to analyze and filter your lead data. What’s coming next is the AI-assisted messaging to speed up generating email copy that’s partially automated but maximally relevant. 

But we’re not stopping there. Later this year, we’ll introduce tighter CRM integrations so you can use your own data in Hunter, and even more AI-assisted features.