Hemlane
Hemlane Case Study: 830 Qualified Landlord Contacts and a 5.5% Reply Rate From One Campaign
Reached an audience with no corporate email and no LinkedIn, by targeting active rental listings.
What Hemlane looked like before the system was installed, what was built during the engagement, and the results after.
Visit Hemlane- Industry
- PropTech
- Company size
- 11–50 employees
- Engagement
- Nov 2023 – Apr 2024
- Stack
- Clay, Smartlead
A buyer with no corporate email, and outreach that was not reaching inboxes
Hemlane sells property management software covering tenant placement, leases, maintenance and rent collection. Its buyers are landlords and property managers, who behave more like consumers than companies: few corporate email domains, a thin LinkedIn presence, and no reliable way to reach them at scale.
Hemlane had already tried outreach both in-house and with outside providers. Both took time and returned little: contact lists that never turned into conversations, no visibility into which messages worked, and reply and bounce rates worse than benchmark.
Buyers without corporate email or LinkedIn profiles
Contact lists that did not become conversations
No visibility into which messaging worked
Reply and bounce rates worse than benchmark
“The contacts we were generating internally weren't really becoming very fruitful. We weren't really seeing the results we wanted as far as really getting into people's inboxes.”
Target the buying moment, then protect deliverability
The biggest change was not a tool. It was redefining who the buyer is and when they are ready, then building sourcing, copy and deliverability around that definition.
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1
Redefine the buyer
Not landlords in general, but property owners with an active rental listing right now, on platforms like Zillow. An active listing is the buying moment, and that one change did more for results than any tool.
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2
Source and enrich
Clay sourced and enriched contacts at scale for an audience that standard B2B databases miss.
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3
Personal copy at volume
Smartlead ran the campaigns across channels, with every email written using controlled variation so it read as personal at scale, and follow-ups sequenced to feel natural rather than automated.
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4
Deliverability foundation
Careful list building, validation and technical setup underneath everything, so almost every email actually arrived.
Buying-moment targeting
Prospects pulled from active Zillow listings instead of static landlord lists, so outreach landed while they were filling a vacancy.
Controlled variation
Personalization with deliberate variation between messages, to stay human at volume.
Validation before sending
Every list validated and every sender set up technically before a campaign launched, to protect the domain.
830 qualified contacts, a 5.5% reply rate and a 0.5% bounce rate
A single Zillow campaign produced 830 qualified contacts with a 5.5% reply rate. The bounce rate was 0.5%, against industry averages of 2 to 5%, and the work took roughly 70% less time than manual outbound.
Hemlane came back for a second round of work in August 2024.
“Working with the team was great, they're really true partners, and provided insights into growth.”
If your buyers look more like consumers than companies, most outbound advice stops applying. What still works is precision on the moment of need (an active listing, not a job title) and discipline on deliverability. Hard to reach does not mean unreachable; it means the targeting has to do the work.
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