Don't Send the Audit — Sell the Seat
Most agency audit campaigns end the same way: the prospect asks for the PDF, gets it, and disappears. The document does the agency's selling in a room the agency isn't in — no chance to handle the "we'll fix it internally" objection, no chance to walk from the wasted keyword to the retainer conversation. The fix isn't a better PDF. It's refusing to make one.
The alternative motion sells a 15-minute live teardown: the prospect books a slot, you share your screen inside their vertical's benchmark data, and the waste gets found while they watch. Nothing is attached to the email, nothing is downloadable, and the audit only exists as a conversation — which is exactly where retainers get sold.
Reply.io is the tool built for that motion, because booking a call is a multichannel job. Its sequences combine email, call tasks, and LinkedIn steps in one flow; a click on your audit link can fire a call task while the interest is hours old, not days; and Jason AI keeps the unified inbox triaged so humans only touch replies that move toward the calendar. ColdRelay is the infrastructure underneath — the secondary domains, mailboxes, and dedicated IPs Reply.io actually sends from. This guide covers wiring the two together.
Why Run Reply.io on ColdRelay Infrastructure
Reply.io is a sales engagement platform — it sequences email, call tasks, and LinkedIn steps, but it sends email from whatever mailboxes you connect to it. It doesn't provision the domains or guarantee the deliverability of the mailboxes themselves; that's the infrastructure layer's job.
That's where ColdRelay fits. Instead of standing up workspace seats and hand-configuring DNS across a handful of domains, you order dedicated mailboxes on isolated Azure tenants with dedicated IPs, fully DNS-configured (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and ready in about an hour. There's no warmup waiting period before you can send — warmup runs continuously as part of each mailbox's send budget — so a teardown-call sequence built this morning can be live this afternoon.
The pairing is additive, not competitive: ColdRelay is the infrastructure, Reply.io is the engagement layer on top. You keep Reply.io's multichannel sequences, triggers, Jason AI, and unified inbox — you just point the email steps at mailboxes built to land. For a call-first motion the infrastructure matters more than usual: the entire funnel starts with an email earning a click, and a sequence that lands in spam never generates the click that fires the call task. Deliverability isn't one metric among many here — it's the ignition.
Visit Reply.io →Connecting ColdRelay Mailboxes to Reply.io
Provision mailboxes on ColdRelay
Order secondary domains adjacent to your agency brand — never the domain your clients see on reports and invoices. ColdRelay supports 100-150 mailboxes per domain; call-first agencies typically start with 50-100 mailboxes on 1-2 domains, sized to how many teardown calls the team can actually hold per week. Everything provisions on isolated Azure tenants with dedicated IPs in about an hour, with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC already configured.
Connect the mailboxes as email accounts in Reply.io
Export your mailbox credentials from the ColdRelay dashboard, then add each account in Reply.io's email accounts settings via SMTP/IMAP. Each ColdRelay mailbox connects as its own sending account, and in each account's settings set the per-mailbox sending limit to 2 outbound emails per day — mirroring ColdRelay's per-mailbox budget of 4 sends/day total, split 2 outbound + 2 warmup. ColdRelay's continuous warmup covers reputation; Reply.io only needs to spend the outbound half.
Import the contact list with vertical and platform fields
Load your prospect list into Reply.io's contact management with custom fields for vertical, ad platform, and the booking link for the rep who'll run the teardown. Those fields drive the personalization in every step — the email names the vertical's typical waste pattern, and the call task that fires later lands on the right rep's task list, not a shared queue.
Build the multichannel sequence: email, LinkedIn, email, call
Create a Reply.io sequence that opens with an email selling the 15-minute live teardown — no attachment, one link to the booking page. Follow it with a LinkedIn profile-visit and connection step before the second email, so the prospect has seen a face between attempts, then a second email with a different reason to take the call. Close the flow with a scheduled call task for contacts who engaged but never booked. Attach the full mailbox pool to the email steps and let Reply.io rotate sends across it.
Set the click trigger and turn on Jason AI
Configure a trigger in Reply.io so that a click on the audit link creates an immediate call task for the assigned rep — the click is the intent signal, and the dial should happen while the prospect still has your email open, not three days later on a fixed schedule. Then enable Jason AI on the inbox: let it handle timing objections and "what's this call about?" replies with the teardown framing, and route anything that smells like a booking to a human the same hour.
The PPC Agency Reply.io Playbook
Make the audit impossible to receive without attending
The whole motion collapses if a prospect can get the findings without the meeting, so design the offer to be structurally live: "15 minutes, my screen, your ad account's category benchmarks, we find the waste together." When a reply asks for the PDF instead — and some will — the answer is that there's nothing to send yet, because the audit happens on the call. That's not a dodge; it's the qualifier. A prospect who won't spend 15 minutes watching their own money leak was never going to sign a retainer, and you just found that out for the price of one email.
Treat the audit-link click as a phone trigger, not a dashboard stat
A click on the teardown link is a prospect with your offer literally on screen — the highest-intent moment the sequence will ever produce, and it decays by the hour. Reply.io's triggers turn that moment into a call task on the assigned rep's list the instant it happens. The dial script is short because the context is shared: "You were just looking at the teardown page — want me to grab you a slot while we're on?" Calling on click-intent instead of on a fixed day-7 schedule is the single biggest connect-rate lever in this motion.
Use the LinkedIn steps to stay visible between attempts, not to pitch again
Two outbound emails per mailbox per day means days pass between a prospect's touches — and in those gaps, competing agencies are also in their inbox. Reply.io's LinkedIn steps fill the silence without spending email budget: a profile visit after the first email puts a name and face behind the teardown offer, a connection note references the call ("offered you a 15-minute spend teardown earlier this week — standing offer"), and that's it. No pitch deck in the DMs. The LinkedIn layer exists so that when email three arrives, it's from someone the prospect has now seen three times.
Let Jason AI guard the calendar so closers only do teardowns
A call-first sequence generates a specific reply mix: "what's on the agenda?", "can you just send it over?", "try me next quarter." None of those need a senior rep. Configure Jason AI to answer the agenda question with the live-teardown framing, hold the no-PDF line politely, and park the next-quarter replies into a re-engagement bucket — while anything with booking intent escalates to a human within the hour. The economics follow from the division of labor: your best closers spend their day sharing screens with prospects watching their own waste, not typing the same three explanations into the unified inbox.
Typical PPC Agency Outbound Benchmarks (Reply.io + ColdRelay)
| Metric | Benchmark | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Inbox placement rate | 95%+ | Dedicated IPs and isolated tenants outperform shared Google/Microsoft pools |
| Audit-link click rate from delivered emails | 6-12% | A live-teardown offer with nothing to download pulls clicks a PDF promise doesn't |
| Connect rate on click-triggered call tasks | 20-35% | Dialing within hours of the click beats fixed-schedule dialing several times over |
| Teardown-call show rate | 60-75% | Short, specific, screen-share format — far above generic discovery-call show rates |
| Outbound capacity per mailbox | 2/day | 4 sends/day total per mailbox — 2 outbound + 2 warmup |
What It Costs: Reply.io + ColdRelay
You pay per mailbox per month for the infrastructure, with volume tiers that drop as you scale (see the table below). DNS, dedicated IPs, and isolated Azure tenants are included.
Reply.io is billed separately on its own subscription for multichannel sequences, triggers, Jason AI, the unified inbox, and contact management — priced per its current plans.
Infrastructure cost scales with mailbox count; Reply.io's cost scales with seats and plan tier. A call-first motion changes the sizing question: capacity is bounded by how many teardown calls your team can hold, not by how many emails the pool can send — so most agencies run a leaner mailbox pool at higher intent than a volume play would, and add mailboxes only when the calendar, not the sequence, has room.
| Mailboxes | ColdRelay price / mailbox / month |
|---|---|
| 1–199 | $1.00 |
| 200–999 | $0.85 |
| 1,000–4,999 | $0.70 |
| 5,000+ | $0.55 |
Each mailbox sends 4 emails per day — 2 outbound to prospects + 2 warmup. ColdRelay provisions mailboxes on isolated Azure tenants with dedicated IPs; Reply.io handles the sending, sequencing, and inbox rotation on top.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does ColdRelay replace Reply.io?
No. They're complementary layers doing different jobs. Reply.io handles the engagement motion — multichannel sequences with email, call tasks, and LinkedIn steps, triggers, Jason AI, and the unified inbox. ColdRelay provides the underlying domains, mailboxes, and dedicated IPs that Reply.io's email steps send from. You use them together: infrastructure below, engagement software on top.
Why deliver the wasted-spend audit live instead of as a PDF?
Because the PDF sells in a room you're not in. A document gets skimmed, forwarded, or used as a free to-do list for the in-house team — and the objections that kill the deal go unanswered. A 15-minute live teardown puts you in the conversation at the exact moment the prospect sees the waste, which is where the jump from "interesting" to "can you manage this for us?" actually happens. It also self-qualifies: prospects who won't attend weren't going to buy.
How do the click-triggered call tasks work?
Reply.io's triggers watch for link clicks on sequence emails. When a prospect clicks your teardown link, the trigger creates a call task for the assigned rep immediately, so the dial happens while the prospect still has the offer in front of them instead of on a fixed sequence day. Routing works off the contact's custom fields, so the task lands with the rep who would actually run that vertical's teardown.
Do I need a warmup period before launching the sequence?
No. ColdRelay mailboxes run continuous warmup as part of each mailbox's send budget — 4 sends/day total, split 2 outbound + 2 warmup — so there's no waiting period before sending. Set each connected account's per-mailbox sending limit in Reply.io to 2 outbound emails per day and leave reputation to the infrastructure layer; a sequence built the same morning the mailboxes provision can be live that afternoon.