A marketing agency books calls with founders of Shopify brands

You run a marketing agency that does email and SMS retention for online brands, and your best clients sell their own products on Shopify. The buyer is small and close to the numbers: the founder in a 20-person brand, or the head of ecommerce or growth once the team passes 50. This use case finds those people at Shopify brands in the US, opens every email with something real from their store, and turns a yes into a 20 minute call.

Step 1. Write the sentence first

Ours is this. "Founders and ecommerce or growth leads at US brands on Shopify that sell their own products and have 11 to 200 employees." Note what is not in it. No revenue band and no "fast growing". You cannot check either one from outside, and a filter you cannot check gives you a list you cannot trust.

Step 2. Set the filters

Open Search, then People. Set these and read the count after each one.

The link below sets everything except Technology, which you add by hand in the rail. It also leaves out assistants and interns. If Technology finds fewer brands than you expect, add shopify under Keywords as a second door. Keywords look at what a company says about itself, and many brands mention their store platform there.

Open this search in Argorant

Step 3. Read the count, then twenty rows

US Shopify brands of this size are a large market, so expect several thousand people. Here is how to read it.

• Above 20,000 usually means Technology did not stick. Check for the Shopify chip above the results.
• 3,000 to 15,000 is the working range. Start with 3,000 and keep the rest for later waves.
• Under 1,000 means the titles are too narrow or Technology is too strict. Add shopify as a keyword and try again.

Then scroll twenty rows. Look at the company names more than the titles. If you see software tools, Shopify apps or agencies, they slipped in through Consumer Goods or Retail. Remove that industry and see what is left. If you see two people from the same brand, that is fine. The campaign writes to both, and the one who answers decides who talks to you.

Step 4. Save the list, keep only valid emails

Click Select matching, choose how many people you want, then Save list. A name that still makes sense in three months is US - Shopify brands 11-200 - founders and ecom. A saved list keeps the filters, so next quarter it shows the brands that moved onto Shopify since.

When you attach the list to the campaign, include only Valid emails. Small brands often run catch-all domains, and those are where bounces come from. Each person from search costs 1 credit, unless you already unlocked them.

Step 5. Add a line from their store

Every agency writes "I love your brand". The line that gets read names something you can only know from their store, a product line or a recent launch. It goes into its own variable, {{custom_store_detail}}, and every brand without one gets a fallback that still reads well.

• From a file. Export the list, add a column called custom_store_detail and upload it to the campaign with Upload CSV.
• From Claude or ChatGPT. Your assistant opens each store, picks one real product line or launch, shows you five examples first and saves the rest when you agree. It never makes up a product, a review or a revenue number.

For my campaign "Demo: Shopify brands retention", set up a personal line called custom_store_detail.
It names one real product line or recent launch from the brand's own store,
as a phrase that fits after "Had a look at", 4 to 10 words, lowercase,
e.g. "the new cold brew concentrate launch".
Fallback: "your store and your best sellers".
Show me five examples with the page you took them from. Never invent a product.

Step 6. Write the three emails

Press New campaign, name it, attach the list and go to Emails. The sequence below sells retention flows. If you sell paid social or creative, keep the shape and swap the middle paragraph.

One real detail, one sentence of point of view, one small ask. Ownership of the account answers the first worry founders have about agencies.

A smaller ask than a call. A teardown is work you do once and reuse, and it is a reason to reply even for someone who is not buying this month.

The exit that asks for the right person and gives an easy no. A no is useful too, it takes the brand out of your next wave.

Press View preview and read the fallback version. "Had a look at your store and your best sellers" is fine for a brand where you found nothing specific.

Step 7. Mailboxes for 3,000 people in 5 weeks

Cold email never goes out from your main domain. It goes out from separate mailboxes on domains that look like yours, for example a short variation of your brand name. If one of them gets tired, you retire it and your real domain never notices.

Here is the math for this campaign. 3,000 people over 5 weeks is about 120 new people per weekday. Each gets three emails, so once the follow-ups overlap you send roughly 360 emails a day. At 5 cold emails per mailbox per day, that is about 72 mailboxes.

There are two ways to get there. Under Outreach, Inboxes you connect mailboxes you already have, from Google, Microsoft or any other provider. Or you have new Microsoft 365 mailboxes set up on new domains. Those come in bundles from 100 mailboxes, you do not need a plan to buy them, and they connect to your campaigns on their own. 100 mailboxes carry 500 cold emails a day, which leaves room for a second campaign.

New mailboxes wait at least 24 hours before they send anything. Warm-up is included and starts switched off. Switch it on for new mailboxes and give them one to two weeks before full volume. Never raise the limit per mailbox to go faster. More mailboxes is the right lever.

Step 8. Schedule and launch

In the Senders step of the wizard, every connected mailbox is ticked. Untick the ones that belong to other campaigns or brands. Sends rotate across the ones you keep, and each one still respects its own daily limit.

In the Schedule step, set the timezone of the people you write to, here US Eastern (ET), not your own. Keep the sending window at 09:00 to 17:00, keep Skip weekends on and keep the gap between sends per mailbox at 60 to 120 minutes. Plain text stays on, so the email looks like it came from a person and carries no tracking pixel.

The last step is the review. Read it as if somebody else built the campaign. The audience with the grades you picked, the sequence with its waits, the senders, the start and the pace. Then press Launch campaign. Launch is not possible without senders and leads, and mailboxes still in their first day hold the launch until they are ready. Afterwards, open the Settings tab and check that Stop on reply and Bounce protection are on. Bounce protection pauses the campaign when more than 10% bounce once 100 people have been contacted.

Step 9. Replies and booked calls

Every reply lands in the Unibox, from every mailbox and campaign, and gets a label on its own. The standard labels are Interested, Meeting request, Out of office, Unsubscribe and Other. Switch on Referral and Wrong person in the settings as well. On our own largest campaign, one in four human replies pointed us to a colleague, more often than a straight yes.

A yes gets answered by the campaign itself, with a subsequence. It starts when a reply contains one of your keywords, takes the person out of the main sequence and answers in the same thread in the next sending window. A reply that says "not interested" or asks you to stop never triggers one.

On the campaign's Subsequences tab, press Add subsequence and use these keywords. interested, teardown, send it, sure, tell me more, pricing. Then write the first email. It keeps the promise from follow-up one and offers two times.

Deliver what you offered, then ask for 20 minutes to walk through it. A founder who reads your teardown already knows what the call is about.

Every morning, filter the Unibox by Meeting request and Interested. Those are the conversations one answer away from a call. Propose a specific time instead of just a link, and add your booking link as the second option. When the call is set, change the label to Meeting booked so your numbers count it. Answer referrals the same day. Thank them, write to the person they named, and mention who sent you.

If you would rather work from Claude or ChatGPT, your assistant can read the Unibox, sort replies by label and draft answers. Nothing is sent until you confirm. The use case Run it all from Claude or ChatGPT shows how.

What to expect

The ranges below come from our own sending, scaled to 3,000 people. Our healthy campaign, two emails to a valid-only list from mailboxes at 5 cold emails a day, got human replies from 1.3% of the people contacted. Campaigns from overworked mailboxes sat at 0.3%. About one in five human replies says yes, and about one in four points you to a colleague. These are reference points, not promises. Your offer, your segment and your copy move them a lot. The reply rate in Argorant also counts out-of-office notes, so it reads higher. Compare these numbers with the reply rate excl. OOO.

Founders of small brands get a lot of agency email, so the bar is high and the free teardown does much of the work. Expect more replies to follow-up one than in other markets, and expect a share of them to want only the teardown. Send it anyway. Some of those brands come back in the next quarter when they plan their holiday season.

On the calendar it looks like this. The first replies arrive in week one, 65% of all replies come within an hour of the email landing and 84% answer the first email. After 5 weeks everyone has had the full sequence, and a week later nearly everything that will come is in. If human replies stay near zero after a few hundred people, check delivery first and copy second.

Do the same from Claude or ChatGPT

Every step above also works as a conversation once Argorant is connected. This request builds the list. Your assistant counts, shows sample rows and asks before it spends a credit.

The full setup, from connecting the assistant to launching and handling replies, is in Run it all from Claude or ChatGPT.