Cold email that finally cut through to logistics buyers — Cargorunner.co review

I founded Cargorunner because the logistics software market has been stuck in pre-internet workflows for too long. Building the product is the easier half. Getting in front of logistics buyers — operations managers, freight directors, supply chain leads — is harder.

These buyers receive hundreds of cold pitches every week, most from generic SaaS sellers who don’t understand their workflow. Email open rates in the category are punishingly low. Reply rates are worse.

What I tried before

Before SmarterOutbound, I had run cold outreach myself for about six months. I bought Apollo, hired a freelance SDR, wrote my own copy. Total meetings booked: 4. Total qualified opportunities from those meetings: 1. The math wasn’t working.

The biggest problem turned out to be deliverability. About 60% of my emails were never seen — they landed in spam or promotions tabs. The remaining 40% were getting opened by recipients who scanned, didn’t recognize the sender, and moved on.

What changed with SmarterOutbound

Two things specifically.

First, the deliverability work. They moved us to new sending domains, set up proper authentication, and ran a long enough warmup that by the time campaigns went live, we were inboxing at 95%+ on a category that punishes everyone else. That alone moved our open rate from around 28% to 62%.

Second, the copy. Their team rewrote our outreach around specific operational pain points — peak season capacity planning, carrier rate volatility, manual freight audit work — rather than the generic “we save you time” pitch I had been using. The new emails sounded like they came from someone who actually understood the industry.

Results

We now have a steady flow of qualified meetings with logistics operations decision-makers booked into the calendar each week. The funnel that took me six months to build internally was matched and exceeded within the first quarter of the engagement.

For a founder selling into a category that mostly ignores cold email, this is the difference between scaling and grinding. Worth every cent of the engagement fee.