Maximizing Bookings with Smartlead: Studio Novus's Strategy for 75 Calls

Published On: July 24, 2026
Updated On: This is some text inside of a div block.

According to various studies, the average cold email response rate is 1-5%. Jack, the founder of the lead generation company Novus, started sending targeted and highly relevant outbound email campaigns for clients, only to face difficulty in scalability.

Upon his friend’s recommendation, Jack started using Smartlead to launch outbound email campaigns.

The result?

Novus achieved a staggering 9.20% reply rate.

In this case study, Jack shares his experiences with Smartlead and how it changed his perspective of outbound lead generation forever and accounted for his business's success.

How It All Started: The Story of Jack Hayward and Studio Novus

Jack Hayward is the founder of Studio Novus, which specializes in outbound sales through cold email campaigns for its clients. Novus takes great pride in crafting outbound sales strategies that are not just effective but highly personalized and relevant.

It primarily serves tech and SaaS companies, although they are open to working with clients from any industry. Jack initially started with manual email sending, but soon, upon his friend Rene’s recommendation, he chose Smartlead to send cold emails.

Upon integrating Smartlead into his workflow, Jack experienced improvements in his lead generation efforts. He credits Smartlead with significantly increasing their booking rates, streamlined inbox management, and overall efficiency in client communication and outreach.

Throughout his journey as the founder of a successful outbound lead generation agency, Jack fondly acknowledges the role Smartlead played in his success story.

Challenges Faced Along the Way

Before starting Novus, Jack ran a web design business where he struggled to find reliable methods to generate leads. To solve this issue, he considered cold calling and attending conferences but found them ineffective and time-consuming.

Initially, Jack started sending cold emails manually, which, while effective, was not scalable. He started exploring cold emailing tools and eventually started offering cold email as a service, eventually founding Novus.

Jack faced difficulty managing the inbox and effectively moving leads to new campaigns. Also, the process of refreshing leads and integrating them into new campaigns was not as smooth as he hoped.

Additionally, there were complications in deleting campaigns without deleting the associated leads and deleting leads not attached to any campaigns was tiring as he had to do it manually.

Notable Achievements

Novus uses Clay and APIs to create highly targeted and automated outbound email campaigns at scale using Smartlead. Specializing in SaaS businesses, Novus has been successfully landing high-ticket SQLs for its clients.

Although they don’t track email open rates anymore, they achieved a consistent email open rate of 80% for their personalized outbound email campaigns.

Powered with Smartlead’s Master Inbox 3.0 and robust API support, Novus not only saved crucial time for SDRs but also generated over USD 12 million in the pipeline for their clients in 2023.

Tracking their analytics, Jack revealed that they secured 55 replies out of 598 leads contacted, with their highest reply rate of 9.20%. Moreover, Novus has also generated 124 positive replies from one outbound campaign, with the best positive response rate of 40.32%.

Key Factors Contributing to Success

Talking about Smartlead, Jack added, “Using Smartlead has been a total game-changer and has been one of the primary drivers in our ability to generate over $12M in the pipeline for our clients last year. The flexibility of the API has given us a tonne of options when creating our internal systems.”

Jack and his team at Novus addressed their challenges through data-backed strategies and leveraged Smartlead and Clay for their cold email campaigns.

Jack found Smartlead about a year ago and has been using it for approximately eight months. He decided to switch to Smartlead after his friend René, a tech partner with Smartlead, recommended the sales engagement platform to him.

The uni box and tagging features streamlined inbox management for Studio Novus. These features enabled efficient organization and prioritization of emails, making it easier to manage leads and follow-ups.

By leveraging Smartlead's API and the customizations, Jack and his team built automation for many of their processes. Jack highlighted, _“The Master Inbox alone has saved us a considerable amount of time, the custom tagging system and subsequences save us at least 2 hours a day. Now that everything appears in real-time, it has become our primary source of truth for email inboxes both for us and our clients who have white-labeled access.