159 Interested Leads in 9 Months.

01 · The situation

Where they started

Circulate is a creative agency in Dublin with an office in London. They came up through music - DJ culture, festivals, record labels - and around 70% of the work was still music and entertainment. The other 30% was consumer brands, and that was the side they wanted to grow.

The brand side ran on one person. He did the outreach, wrote the proposals and went to the events. On our first call he said he was sending maybe 50 emails a week and that it probably wasn't enough. One meeting in three months, then three in one week. That was the pattern.

When we scoped the trial, we asked what a good result would look like. Two or three qualified conversations a month, he said. They would be happy with that.

02 · The concerns

What they were worried about

Two things came up before the first email went out. The first was tone. Circulate had spent years building a reputation, and the fear was that outbound at volume would sound like it. Marcus, the MD, approved every script himself against the four checks on the right, and nothing launched without passing all four.

The second was their existing clients. Before we built the first list, Circulate gave us every domain in their CRM and every current client, and we blocked all of them. Their own domain was never used for sending. Everything went out from infrastructure we built for the purpose.

03 · The build

What we built

Here's what it took.

We built the email sending infrastructure from scratch and ran it for the full nine months, with monitors on every inbox and regular deliverability checks. Anything that started to slip was replaced before it could cost a campaign. It carried about 3,000 prospects a month without touching Circulate's own domain.

Then the data. We pulled beverage, food and consumer brands across the UK, Europe and the Middle East from several databases, then scraped each company's website, LinkedIn description and public information. Every company was scored and qualified on that before anyone inside it was contacted, and sorted by what it sells so it landed in the right campaign. Inside the qualified companies we found the right marketing titles, validated each person and found their working email address. That is how the list reached 6,710 decision-makers, and 9,262 contacts once the best lists were rested and run again. A whiskey distillery, a cider maker and an energy drink never received the same message.

Then the copy: 63 campaigns, each with its own list, its own three-step sequence and several versions of the first email tested against each other. Every email carried variables written for the company and the person receiving it. Marcus signed off on each campaign before launch.

Then the sending: 26,765 emails over nine months and 1,036 replies, every one scored as it came in. The positive ones went to Circulate's business development lead by email, with the full thread and everything we knew about the company. He could pick up the conversation where we left it.

Every three months we rested a list and rebuilt the campaign on top of it. Someone who ignored an email in December will not remember it by March.

04 · The method

The whiskey campaign

The best performer across the nine months, and the reason the sorting mattered.

Most agencies write one email to "beverage companies". We cut the list to companies that sell whiskey, then to the marketing people inside them, and wrote a message that could only go to them.

Circulate had produced a seven-part documentary-style video series for West Cork Whiskey. It pulled over 4 million impressions, grew their following by 10% and won Best New Marketing Campaign at the Spirits Business Awards. The email named that work in the first line and said what it delivered. Then it said the obvious thing: since you guys are similar, a similar strategy could work well for you. It asked whether it could send the case study over, and the PS joked about the Irish 'e' in whiskey.

Nobody reading it had to work out why a Dublin agency was writing to them. When we rested that list for three months and relaunched it in June 2025, the second run beat the first.

05 · The results

What it generated

159 interested replies across nine active months, 22 of them in the first month. They came from Diageo, PepsiCo, Brown-Forman, Celsius, Haribo, Thatchers Cider, Lucky Saint, Bettys & Taylors of Harrogate, Kilchoman and Ian Macleod Distillers. The Middle East campaigns opened conversations with Qatar National Convention Centre, Oman Convention & Exhibition Centre and Mezzan Holding.

These are the brands one person had been trying to reach with 50 hand-written emails a week. Against a bar of two or three conversations a month, the system averaged about eighteen.

06 · The scope

Where our part ended

We ran everything up to the interested reply. Circulate's team ran everything after it: the calls, the proposals and the closing.