Let’s face it—most people’s cold email campaigns follow the same predictable pattern:
- One campaign for a massive audience A
- Another campaign for a similarly massive audience B
- Maybe an audience C if they're feeling extra ambitious
And while you can see some success doing outbound this way, there’s a much better approach if you really want to maximize results: campaign stacking.
Campaign stacking is when you layer multiple hyper-targeted campaigns, each reaching out to different niche audiences at different strategic times with tailored messaging.
The overarching goal is to always reach the right people, at the right moments in their buyer journey, with a relevant message that speaks to their specific scenario.
Here’s how it works:
Layered Personalization: Instead of one campaign targeting a broad audience, we create a series of smaller, highly personalized campaigns.
Each campaign is tailored to specific triggers, events, or characteristics of your audience. Every touchpoint is relevant.
Strategic Sequencing: These campaigns are not standalone efforts but are strategically sequenced to build upon each other. This approach allows us to nurture leads through a nuanced, engaging journey that speaks directly to their needs and interests.
Dynamic Adaptation: Our campaigns are not set in stone. We continuously monitor performance, gather insights, and adjust our strategies in real time. This agile methodology ensures our messages are always relevant, engaging, and, most importantly, welcome in our recipients' inboxes.
When we reach out to startup founder, we actually have several messaging variations even within that audience:
- One campaign works best for sub-20-person teams just getting started
- Another campaign for those who recently raised a VC round
- Another for those hiring first salespeople
- A few others tailored to specific tools they have or haven't adopted
So even though we're broadly targeting “startup founders” — We can speak directly to their unique situation with a custom message that demonstrates we really understand what they’re going through at that moment in time. The result? Response rates are upwards of 40%, and this hyper-relevant outreach drives way more qualified sales opportunities.
There are a few key reasons why stacking campaigns delivers such strong results:
With campaign stacking, your messaging is always hyper-tailored to whoever you’re reaching out to. Rather than blasting the same generic message out to everyone, you can speak to people's specific scenarios.
This triggers way higher open and response rates compared to generic outreach.
When you stack niche campaigns, each one starts independently racking up its own data — opens, replies, meetings booked. This makes optimization at a granular level so much easier.
Over time, your best-performing messages for each niche audience bubble up to the surface. Campaign stacking essentially builds a methodology where only the messages that convert get to stay alive.
After running stacked campaigns for a while, you have loads of historical data on what works specifically for each niche audience and when. This makes outbound more predictable — enabling you to confidently invest and scale it.
So, rather than relying on pure guesswork, campaign stacking turns outbound into a repeatable system based on data.
Sometimes people think they’re stacking campaigns effectively, but they’re still just blasting generic untargeted messages.
Here are a few signs you need to consider stacking your campaigns:
- Reaching out without a specific trigger event
- Using the same message copy for multiple audiences
- Failing to tailor messaging to individual recipient scenarios
- No optimization of historical campaign data to inform future outreach
When you see these issues, it signals that your stacking methodology needs some refinement. Go back to the fundamentals of tailoring ultra-specific campaigns reaching very niche audiences.
If you want to step up your outbound results by implementing campaign stacking, here is a simple 4-step process to help you get started:
Step 1: Identify Clear Trigger Events - Get clear on what types of external or internal events warrant a new outreach. Company raised funding? Launched a new product line? Identify your strategic triggers.
Step 2: Map Your Niche Audiences - Who are the key niche audiences relevant to your offering? Identify specific titles, use cases, tools used that indicate fit. Get ultra-targeted.
Step 3: Craft Tailored Messaging - Write crisp, benefit-focused messaging tailored to each audience segment. Stick to a casual, but professional tone. Keep rigorously testing messages and tracking open/reply rates.
Step 4: Continuously Optimize - Use audience-level response data to double down on what converts. Keep refining messaging and stacking additional niche campaigns.
The more niche campaigns you stack using this process, the savvier your overall outreach machine gets. You’ll hit breakthrough response metrics in no time.