How Practical Prospecting cut email infrastructure costs by ~40% with Mission Inbox

Overview

Practical Prospecting is a cold email and LinkedIn outreach agency founded by Jed Mahrle. The agency has been run full-time for over three years and supports more than 20 active clients.

As the agency grew, email infrastructure became one of its biggest costs and one of its biggest operational risks. Practical Prospecting needed a sending setup that was stable, cost-effective at scale and strong enough to support client campaigns where reply rates matter more than vanity metrics like open rates.

The challenge

In the early days, Practical Prospecting used whatever infrastructure allowed campaigns to get moving. That worked while the agency was still proving the model, but as client volume grew, the setup started to create risk.

One provider went under while campaigns were still running on it. That pushed the agency to split client inboxes across multiple tools, including Mailforge, Zapmail and Hypertide.

The diversified setup reduced dependency on one vendor, but created a new problem. Some campaigns would start well, then drop off even when the list, messaging and inboxes stayed the same. After reviewing the data, Practical Prospecting found that reply rates varied heavily between providers and could fall sharply over time.

At the same time, email infrastructure had become the agency’s biggest tech expense. Before scaling further, Practical Prospecting needed a more stable and cost-effective way to run client sending.

The solution

Mission Inbox helped Practical Prospecting de-risk the move before migrating everything.

First, the team ran a head-to-head pilot. New inboxes were created on Mission Inbox and tested against the previous setup using the same list, same message and same campaign structure. The only meaningful change was the infrastructure behind the campaign.

After a couple of weeks, the reply-rate difference was clear enough to make the switch.

Mission Inbox then managed the migration across client infrastructure in a single day. The move was planned on a kickoff call, split clearly between both teams, and completed without lost email threads or broken workflows.

For Practical Prospecting, the value was not just better sending. It was also less operational load. The team responsible for infrastructure had less to manage day to day, while the agency reduced infrastructure cost per client by roughly 40%.

The results

Practical Prospecting now runs client campaigns on Mission Inbox with better economics, stronger infrastructure confidence and better reply-rate performance than the previous setup.

The migration was completed in one day with no lost email threads and no disruption to client campaigns. The agency reduced email infrastructure cost per client by around 40%, while the like-for-like pilot showed higher reply rates compared with the previous vendors.

The result was a cleaner setup for the agency: lower cost, less infrastructure risk and a more reliable platform for client outbound campaigns.

Customer quote

“You guys were awesome, super responsive, and laid it out really clear. Within that day everything was transferred over and nothing went wrong.” Jed Mahrle, Founder, Practical Prospecting

The takeaway

For cold email agencies, infrastructure is not just a backend detail. It affects cost, campaign performance, client trust and the amount of operational work needed to keep campaigns running.

Practical Prospecting chose Mission Inbox because it needed a more stable way to manage client sending at scale. The agency kept its outbound workflow, but moved the infrastructure underneath it to Mission Inbox.