How Zaap made cold email work in the creator economy - and hit 22% replies.

The creator outreach problem

Zaap’s customers are creators and entrepreneurs - people who are creative, protective of their time, and quick to ignore anything that feels templated or corporate.

The team faced a unique set of constraints:

• Creators aren’t used to being prospected via cold email.

• Most creator inboxes are already saturated with spam.

• Classic “professional” outreach tone feels unnatural in this market.

• If the message felt automated, it was instantly dismissed.

Zaap’s goal wasn’t just to get opens. It was to make every email feel like a real person wrote it - thoughtfully and intentionally.

A shift away from cold email “templates”

Instead of trying to win with clever subject lines or marginal copy improvements, Zaap changed the entire approach. They embraced hyper-personalization.

The insight was simple: creators respond to intention.
If outreach feels personal and respectful, they’ll engage, even if they’re not interested.

Zaap used GenPage to turn every cold email into a personalized experience, not just a message.

Building a personalization workflow at scale

To make this possible without spending hours per lead, Zaap built a scalable system:

• Phantom Buster to scrape creators from Instagram.

• GenPage to generate a custom landing page for each creator.

• Instantly to send emails at scale while keeping the campaign consistent.

Instead of asking creators to respond to a generic pitch, Zaap sent something that looked and felt tailored, like the outreach was made specifically for them.

The results: replies that didn’t feel like “cold outreach”

The tone of the campaign changed completely. Prospects didn’t react like they were being sold to. They reacted like they were being approached thoughtfully.

Some creators replied even when they weren’t a fit - just to salute the effort.
Others asked questions, engaged with the page, and started conversations naturally.

The campaign achieved:

• 22% Reply Rate

• 28% Meeting Booking Rate

• 67% Open Rate

In a world where typical cold outbound reply rates sit around 1–2%, those numbers were a clear signal: creators don’t hate outreach. They hate spam.

What Zaap learned

Zaap’s founders described the campaign as a turning point. By shifting from “emails at scale” to “personalized experiences at scale,” they landed meaningful conversations, and ultimately signed larger creators to switch to Zaap.

Cold email in the creator economy isn’t about better templates.
It’s about sounding like a person, not a sequence.

And once Zaap got that right, creator outreach stopped feeling impossible.

Want help getting started with personalized outreach?

Book a quick call with our team - we’ll help you launch your first campaign and share best practices.