Case study
Making personalized outreach easy enough to actually do at scale
Defdigital already knew how to write a good personalized email. They just could not write a hundred of them a week.
- What they do
- Digital services for B2B clients
- Channel
- Cold email
- Stack
By the numbers
- 820
- Leads researched and pages generated
- <1 min
- Research time per lead
- 340+
- Hours of research saved
- 100%
- Of the list researched
- Overnight
- Time to research the whole list
down from about 25 minutes by hand
roughly eight weeks of full-time work
instead of the top ten accounts
About Defdigital
Marit and Casper built Defdigital into a team that ships client work fast, and they were already running their own outbound before NeuroPage entered the picture. That is worth saying plainly: this is not a story about a team discovering outreach. It is a story about a team that already knew how to do it and wanted the personalized version to stop being so expensive in hours.
Personalization you cannot sustain is not a strategy
Every outbound team hits the same wall. The genuinely personal emails work, and they take twenty to forty minutes a prospect. So personalization gets rationed to a handful of top accounts, and everyone else gets the template.
They knew what a good personalized email looks like. They just could not do it a hundred times a week and still run the business. So you compromise, and the compromise is what everybody else is sending.
How they ran it
- 1
The target list, built together
Defdigital built their list in collaboration with NeuroPage’s founder, narrowing down to the companies where their offer genuinely lands rather than a broad scrape. Getting the list right is where most of the leverage lives, and it is the part teams most often rush.
- 2
Research per lead, without the research hours
Rather than opening fifteen tabs per prospect, the platform surfaced the context they needed on each lead. Enough to make the outreach specific instead of generic.
- 3
Personalization carried through the click
Each prospect got their own page, so the level of relevance in the email did not collapse the moment someone clicked.
- 4
Sent through the stack they already had
Everything ran through Instantly. No new sending infrastructure, no migration, no retraining.
What usually stops teams here
The team already believed in personalized outbound. What stopped them was everything around it, which is the most common blocker of all.
Personalization gets rationed to the accounts that can pay for it
Nobody argues that personalized outreach works. The argument is about cost per lead. When a good email costs half an hour of someone senior, it gets reserved for a shortlist and the rest of the list gets whatever is left, which is the same template everyone else is sending.
Nobody wants to migrate a working outbound stack
The sequences work, the inboxes are warmed, the reporting is set up. Any tool that asks you to move all of that is priced far above its licence fee, because the real cost is the month you spend rebuilding. Defdigital kept Instantly and everything in it.
Reps will not adopt another tool, and you cannot make them
Sales tools die in the gap between buying and using. If a rep has to open a second app to get the benefit, most weeks they will not. What made this stick is that nothing changed in the rep workflow: the personalized link is simply already in the sequence they were opening anyway.
Your sending domain is not something to gamble with
Deliverability is the one thing you cannot buy back quickly. Any tool that sends on your behalf, or puts a shortener in your links, is a risk against a reputation that took months to build. Nothing here sends for you, and the links point at your own domain.
What happened
What stood out was how little friction there was between deciding to personalize and having it live. Setup was quick, the research was already there, and the personalized layer sat on top of the outbound motion they had been running rather than replacing it.
They are still early in the programme, so there is no number on this one yet. We would rather come back and publish real figures than dress up a first month.
Doing it properly, actually personal per lead, stopped being something we had to budget hours for.
Marit & Casper
Founders, Defdigital
What to take from it
The barrier to personalized outbound has never been belief. Everyone believes it works. The barrier is the cost per lead. Take that cost close to zero and personalization stops being a luxury for the top ten and becomes the default for the whole list.
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See what this looks like on your own leads
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Jimmy de Groot
Founder of NeuroPage
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