Props for actually sharing the numbers - most people chicken out and just ask for help without any context. Let's cut through this honestly.
First thing: your open rates are completely fabricated. Not being harsh, that's just how the ecosystem works now. Apple and Google both pre-fetch and open emails for privacy reasons. So that 22-25% you're seeing? Real human open rate is probably 3-6% at best. You've spent 18 days optimising a ghost metric. Forget open rates entirely. Replies are the only number that matters.
Second, you launched way too early. A warmup score of 80 sounds solid on paper, but it's not. You need 90 or above before touching a single cold prospect. Chances are a significant chunk of your emails hit spam folders before anyone even saw them. So your "no reply" problem isn't rejection - it's invisibility.
Now the uncomfortable bit. Your bounce rate is fine, so your list isn't the bottleneck. The real issue is your email copy. Zero replies across 586 sends means the message isn't connecting. A cold email to a stranger has to achieve one specific thing: make them feel like you're speaking directly to their pain, not pitching a product. Most first-timers accidentally write: "Hi, I built a tool that does X, want a 30-min call?" Strangers ignore that. What works? Lead with their problem, keep it to 3-4 sentences max, and end with a yes/no question that requires zero effort.
Also - did you send follow-ups? Roughly 80% of cold email replies come from follow-ups, not the first touch. If you sent one email per person and waited, you left almost everything on the table.
That single "internally forwarded" reply is actually a small green flag. It means someone thought your email was relevant enough to pass along. That tells me your targeting has some logical basis, the execution just needs refining.
Here's what I'd do if I were in your shoes: pause the campaigns immediately so you don't keep burning your domain's reputation. Get warmup above 90. Run a spam test on something like Mail Tester to see where your emails actually land. Then rewrite your email from scratch - one sentence about a specific problem your prospect faces, one sentence about what you do, one simple question. Build a sequence of at least 3-4 follow-ups. Then relaunch.
You're not miles off. You just hit every classic first-campaign mistake in one go, which pretty much everyone does. The data you've got is actually useful - now you know what not to do. That's more than most people have after 18 days.
