Case study
Link2LeadsMeetings in week one, and prospects replying to compliment the research
Link2Leads runs cold outreach for B2B clients. They kept their list, their tools and their team, and changed what a prospect finds after the click.
- What they do
- Outbound lead generation for B2B clients
- Channel
- Cold email and LinkedIn
- Stack
By the numbers
- 1,240
- Leads researched and pages generated
- 34%
- Opened their own page
- 9.1%
- Reply rate
- 27
- Meetings booked
- 3
- New retainer clients
of everyone who received a link
up from 3.2% on the same list
in eight weeks
About Link2Leads
Link2Leads is a Dutch outbound agency that builds and runs cold outreach on behalf of B2B clients, from defining the ideal customer and building the list to writing the sequences and handing over booked meetings. It is a business where the scoreboard is public and unforgiving: reply rate, meetings, retention. Demi has been doing this long enough to know which levers actually move.
Everyone’s email got better, and nothing else did
Clients do not renew because the copy was clever. They renew because meetings show up on the calendar, and every year that gets harder. Inboxes are full of the same AI-written first lines, and prospects have learned to spot them in half a second.
The part that bothered Demi most was the drop-off after the click. His team would spend real time researching an account and write something genuinely specific, then send everyone who clicked to the same page. All that work to earn a click, and the personalization was thrown away at the exact moment someone was deciding whether to reply.
How they ran it
- 1
Fundamentals first
Link2Leads built the lead list themselves, the way they always have. Tight ideal-customer definition, email verification, deliverability discipline. None of the rest works if the list is soft.
- 2
Research with an angle
For each prospect they looked at what the company actually does and, the key move, who its current clients are. That produced a pitch that was not about Link2Leads at all: here is how you get more clients like these.
- 3
One page per lead, generated automatically
That research became a personalized landing page for every single prospect, built on Autopilot rather than by hand. No design queue and no per-lead build time.
- 4
Straight into the sequence
Custom variables, including each prospect’s personal page URL, were pushed into Smartlead. The right link landed in the right email without anyone copy-pasting anything.
- 5
The part most teams skip
Page activity, who opened, who scrolled, who came back, became the follow-up trigger. Demi used it to open a LinkedIn conversation with people who had already shown interest, referencing what they had looked at instead of sending another check-in.
What usually stops teams here
Every agency running outbound hits the same four walls. This is where they sit, and what Link2Leads did about each one.
Real personalization does not survive real volume
A properly researched email takes twenty to forty minutes per prospect. At a hundred a week that stops being a copywriting problem and becomes a capacity problem, so research gets rationed to the top ten accounts and everyone else gets the template. Link2Leads did not solve this by writing faster. They removed the research hours from the equation, so the whole list got the treatment the top ten used to get.
Prospects recognise an AI-written first line instantly
Inboxes are full of the same three openers: a compliment, a reference to a LinkedIn post, something about what you are building. Buyers learned to read past them, and the mailbox providers learned to filter them. What worked here was not a cleverer opener, it was a fact the prospect knew to be true about their own company, which is not something a template can fake.
The personalization gets thrown away at the click
This is the one almost nobody fixes. Teams spend real effort on the email and then send everyone who clicks to the same page, so the relevance stops at the exact moment the prospect starts deciding. Link2Leads changed the destination rather than the volume, and that is the whole change.
Opens and clicks do not tell you who is warm
A campaign average tells you nothing about a person. Without knowing who read what, the follow-up is a guess, which is why most second touches read like "just checking in". Page-level activity gave Demi a reason to open a specific conversation with a specific person on another channel.
What happened
Meetings started landing in the first week. But the signal Demi rates highest was not the calendar, it was the replies. Prospects wrote back specifically to say the outreach felt researched, that it was clearly built for them. In a channel where the default reaction is delete, being told you did your homework is the whole ballgame.
The tracking layer changed the shape of the follow-up too. Instead of nudging a cold list, the team was starting conversations with people who had demonstrably read something written for them.
People replied to tell us how personal it was. That never happens in cold email.
Demi Stekelenburg
Founder, Link2Leads
What to take from it
Personalization is not only what you say. It is what the prospect finds when they act on it. Link2Leads did not change their volume, their tooling or their team size. They changed the destination, then used what happened there to power a second touch on another channel.
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Making personalized outreach easy enough to actually do at scale
340+ hours of research saved, and the whole list covered
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