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CENTILIO PULSE / SELL · EMBER
Six things about email, whichever tool you end up using.
Pulse is not out yet, so this is not a manual for it. It is what we would tell any growing business about sending email: how to write one people answer, how to get into the inbox, why open rate stopped meaning anything, how to build a list worth sending to, how to do cold email legally and without being hated, and how to move tools without wrecking a domain. None of it is written to sell you Pulse.
6 guidesuseful before Pulse shipsno sign-up needed
Product design preview · Pulse has not shipped. All features, screens and prices are proposals.
Pulse has not shipped yet.
Pulse has not shipped. These screens, features and prices are proposals, not an app or beta. Email Outreach is described in the source as its precursor—not the full Pulse product. See the product directory for current stages.
Guides
The six things people ask first.
Educational design notes, not legal advice or a guaranteed migration schedule. Verify provider requirements and applicable law before sending real email.
Already on Centilio?
Email Outreach is live today and is what Pulse grows out of. Sign, Drive and Account are live beside it.
Want to shape it?
Tell us what you actually send and to whom. We are still designing, and the awkward requirements are the useful ones.
How to write an email people answer
Five rules that outperform any template library.
- Name something they actually did. The subject that wins is almost always the one that proves you know who they are: what they bought, when, and from whom. Everything about you goes below the fold.
- One idea, one ask, one way to say no. An email with three asks gets zero. An email that makes saying no easy gets answered, and a no is information you can use.
- Write it to one person. Draft it as if you were writing to your best customer by name, then remove the name. Anything that survives that test reads like a person; anything that does not was written for a list.
- Cut the first paragraph. It is nearly always throat-clearing. Start at the second sentence you wrote and the email gets better, shorter and more likely to be answered.
- Send it from a person. A reply-to that goes to a human being, a name in the from field, and a signature belonging to somebody who exists. "noreply@" is a sentence about how much you want to hear back.
How to get into the inbox
The six things that decide it, in order.
- Verify SPF, DKIM and DMARC with the sending provider. DNS propagation and provider checks vary; no completion-time guarantee is made.
- Proposed approach: authenticate first, preserve suppressions, and increase volume only as relevant delivery and complaint evidence supports it. There is no fixed warmup or migration duration that guarantees inbox placement.
- Send to people who want it. Engagement is the strongest signal there is. Emailing your most recent openers first, and the dormant part of the list last, does more for deliverability than any technical fix.
- Google recommends a Postmaster Tools spam rate below 0.1%, never reaching 0.3%. This is not a universal Microsoft threshold. See the provider sources for the applicable scope; no live measurement is made here.
- Clean hard bounces immediately. Every hard bounce you send to twice is a signal that you are not paying attention, and mailbox providers treat it exactly like that.
- Build the list through appropriate permission and verified addresses. Do not import purchased or scraped addresses. Preserve all opt-outs and complaints.
Why open rate needs context
And what to use instead.
- With Protect Mail Activity enabled, Apple can load remote content in the background regardless of engagement. Opens therefore need context; replies can also include automated responses and need review.
- It made every open rate go up at once. Which is why open rates across the industry rose without anybody's email getting better. If your dashboard shows a healthy number and nobody replies, that is the reason.
- Replies carry useful context, but may include automated responses. Review their content before drawing conclusions or proposing a customer-record update.
- Use clicks as the secondary one. Clicks are also inflated by scanners, but far less, and a click on a specific link still tells you which idea worked.
- Keep opens, but label them. They are still useful for comparing two sends to the same segment in the same week. Report them as an estimate, at the bottom, and never in a board pack.
How to build a list worth sending to
Slowly, and from people who asked.
- One clear reason to join. Not "sign up for updates". A specific, named thing they will get, and how often. The promise you make at signup is the one you are judged against as proposed.
- Build the list through appropriate permission and verified addresses. Do not import purchased or scraped addresses. Preserve all opt-outs and complaints.
- Segment on the day they join. Where they came from and what they wanted, recorded then. Retrofitting a segment onto a year-old list is guesswork, and it is why "Everyone" ends up being the only segment anybody uses.
- Prune the dead. People who have not opened anything in six months are costing you deliverability, not offering you upside. Ask them once, then remove them, and your reply rate rises the same week.
- Never buy, rent or scrape. Every one of those routes ends in the same place: a damaged domain, a suppression list you cannot trust, and a year of rebuilding.
Cold email, legally and without being hated
The rules, and the one that matters more than the rules.
- Legal requirements depend on sender and recipient location, consent, purpose and channel. Have qualified counsel review the applicable rules before contacting real people. Relevance is not a substitute for permission, and this preview establishes no legal basis.
- Unsubscribe must work, in one click. Not a login, not a preference centre with eleven checkboxes, not "allow ten days". One click, honoured immediately, on every message including the cold ones.
- Be relevant enough to justify the interruption. The rule that matters more than the rules: if you cannot say in one sentence why this specific person would want this specific email, you are not doing outreach, you are doing spam with better software.
- Small and specific beats large and generic. Two hundred researched people outperform ten thousand scraped ones on every measure, including the one where you still have a domain in six months.
- Stop after four. And take a no as a no. The follow-up that finally "breaks through" also permanently ends any chance of them coming to you later.
How to move to a new email tool safely
The migration people are frightened of, done in a fortnight.
- Export everything, including the suppression list. Contacts, segments, campaign history and — most importantly — everyone who has ever unsubscribed or complained. Emailing a past unsubscriber is the worst first send you can make.
- Authenticate before you import. SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the new tool first, verified, so your first send is not also your first experiment.
- Start with your best segment. The people who opened something recently. A first send that gets opened and replied to establishes the new setup; a first send to your whole list establishes the opposite.
- Proposed approach: authenticate first, preserve suppressions, and increase volume only as relevant delivery and complaint evidence supports it. There is no fixed warmup or migration duration that guarantees inbox placement.
- Run both for a fortnight, then stop. Long enough to catch what the export missed, short enough that you do not end up with two suppression lists that disagree — which is the way this particular migration usually goes wrong.
Questions
Quick ones.
What is a good reply rate?
There is no universal target. Audience, permission, offer, message and measurement vary. The demo uses fictional percentages to illustrate the interface, not benchmarks or promised results.
Should I email more often or less?
Choose frequency based on the permission and expectations of the audience, then monitor relevant outcomes and opt-outs. The sample does not establish a winning frequency.
Is cold email legal?
Legal requirements depend on sender and recipient location, consent, purpose and channel. Have qualified counsel review the applicable rules before contacting real people. Relevance is not a substitute for permission, and this preview establishes no legal basis.
How many emails should a sequence have?
The design proposes up to four, stopping on any reply or opt-out. This is a proposed product limit, not evidence that four is universally optimal.
Next for you
What people add after Pulse.
The tools Pulse sits between. Check each product’s current stage while Pulse is built.
These proposed connections depend on the participating products launching. No shared-record service is operating in this preview.
Relate next wave
Every reply, on the right customer record
Seek next wave
The article the newsletter links to
Ask next wave
The form that grows the list, filed with its source
Book next wave
A reply that becomes a meeting
Sign live
The quote the sequence was arguing for
Site later
The landing page the form lives on
Be told when Pulse opens.
Wave 2 is the next build after the currently available tools. Leave your name and you will hear before the announcement — and tell us what you actually send, while it is still being designed.