Karis Health: 56% open rate on a cold broker campaign. In December.
Five emails. 729 brokers. Zero prior cold outreach infrastructure. Multiple first meetings and a lunch and learn booked before January enrollment season.
The situation
Karis Health is a Medicare Advantage startup. They needed to build a broker channel from scratch. No existing relationships. No outbound infrastructure. No campaigns to iterate on. And they needed meetings before January enrollment season, which meant launching in December, when every broker's inbox is already full.
The positioning problem
Brokers hear from Medicare Advantage plans constantly. Every email sounds the same: "We're growing. We care about members. Partner with us." None of it gives a broker a reason to take a meeting. The positioning gap wasn't about Karis being unknown. It was about every plan sounding identical.
What we built
Five emails, each written from the broker's perspective, not the plan's. The sequence was designed around one insight: brokers don't switch plans for the plan. They switch when the current plan makes them look bad to their clients.
- Subject lines built around broker pain, not plan features
- Copy that named the specific friction brokers feel during enrollment season
- A CTA structure that lowered commitment at each step instead of asking for a meeting in email one
- Each email stood alone. No "just following up" filler.
The result
56% open rate across 729 brokers. 16% click rate. Multiple first meetings booked. A lunch and learn scheduled. The Chief Commercial Officer, who told me she hadn't responded to a single cold outreach in 20 years, responded to this campaign. Then she hired me to write her outbound.
"Ben is so good at what he does that he is the first and only cold outreach I have ever responded to over the course of my 20 year career. He absolutely overdelivered on what I was expecting. His campaign drove multiple first meetings, a lunch and learn, and pipeline activity. 10/10 would recommend."
Why it worked
The emails didn't sell Karis Health. They sold a conversation about a problem the broker was already having. Every plan talks about their star ratings and member experience. This campaign talked about what happens to a broker's book of business when their plan drops the ball during enrollment. The positioning made the medium work.
Need cold outreach that actually gets opened?
It starts with the positioning, not the template.
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