The authors conducted an industry survey targeting risk management specialists in banks and investment funds. Over a two-week period, they sent approximately 2,100 cold emails to financial organizations globally. None of the recipients replied to the cold outreach, while ten responses were received through personal contacts.
The team compiled a database of 13,511 organizations using the GLEIF registry, which tracks Legal Entity Identifiers. They filtered for active entities and removed sub-funds. To identify domains for these entities, they used the Clearbit autocomplete API, matching results using the Jaccard coefficient to filter out generic terms like bank or capital.
Email addresses were extracted directly from company websites, resulting in 438 valid contacts from 1,682 sites. The team implemented filters to exclude irrelevant departments such as HR, compliance, and legal. They verified domain MX records, noting that some domains used proxy services that returned fake A-records, complicating DNS validation.
The initial email campaign failed due to authentication issues. Emails sent via Gmail using a custom domain failed DMARC checks because the DKIM and SPF records did not align with the sender domain. Subsequent attempts used a dedicated mailing service with domain-specific keys and a gradual warmup schedule to build sender reputation.
The final delivery strategy involved scheduling emails based on the recipient's local time zone, avoiding the first and last days of the work week. The team randomized delivery times within a 110-minute window to bypass spam filters. Despite these technical measures, the cold outreach yielded no direct responses from the target audience.
