Black Apprentice Network 96 Qualified Opportunities from 41,000+ UK Decision Makers

Campaign Overview

Black Apprentice Network, a Black-led community that coaches underrepresented candidates into UK apprenticeships, graduate schemes, and internships, partnered with Lead Gen Jay to build an outbound engine that reaches the people who own early careers hiring at British employers.

Beginning with a strategy call on 4 May 2026 and a first launch on 3 June 2026, Lead Gen Jay built and operated a segmented programme across two distinct offers. The apprenticeship offer targeted heads of early careers, early talent, and apprenticeships at accounting and consulting firms, law firms, and financial services businesses across England. A second undergraduate offer covering graduate schemes and internships launched on 3 July 2026 on its own sending infrastructure so the two propositions never competed for volume. On 16 July 2026, the strongest apprenticeship segment was rebuilt and relaunched as an optimised iteration, alongside a dedicated sequence against a client-supplied list of priority target employers.

The programme ran on 100 dedicated sending mailboxes across 34 sending domains, warmed and monitored inside Email Bison, with plain-text sending and open/link tracking switched off to protect inbox placement.

Key Metrics

• Total Decision Makers Contacted: 41,000+
• Qualified Opportunities Surfaced: 96
• Genuine Human Replies: 486
• Reply-to-Interest Conversion Rate: ~1 in 5 (approximately 19.8%)
• Programme Bounce Rate: 2.16%
• Total Unsubscribes: 64 (approximately 1 per every 1,670 emails sent)
• Sending Infrastructure: 100 dedicated mailboxes across 34 domains
• Total Sequences Run: 8
• Programme Duration: June 2026 – September 2026 (ongoing)

Best-Performing Campaign

The optimised Apprenticeships (Accounting and Consulting) sequence produced nearly half the programme's pipeline from a single audience. The 16 July 2026 rebuild raised opportunity volume and improved conversion versus the original send.

• Original Sequence Opportunities Generated: 37
• Original Sequence Contacts Reached: 11,932
• Original Sequence Interested Rate: 16.7%
• Optimised Rebuild Opportunities Generated: 43
• Optimised Rebuild Contacts Reached: 12,353
• Optimised Rebuild Interested Rate: 20.2%
• Optimised Rebuild Reply Rate: 5.38%

Success Factors

• Two Offers, Two Infrastructures: Apprenticeships and undergraduate offers ran on separate sending infrastructure so one did not cannibalise the other.
• Question-Led Openers: First emails opened with operational questions rather than sales pitches, improving engagement.
• Real Subject Line Test: A three-way subject line test showed employer-specific subject lines performed best, e.g. '{Company} apprenticeships' and 'Early careers at {Company}'.
• Clustered ICP Definition: Audiences were clustered by industry and filtered to relevant early careers titles, revealing accounting and consulting as the strongest segment.
• Permission-Based CTAs: Initial asks were low-friction permission requests, with meeting asks held until later touches.
• Iterative Optimisation: Rebuilds and reallocations after live data improved overall programme performance.

Conclusion

The programme demonstrates what focused outbound can achieve for a mission-led organisation. Across eight sequences, targeted segmentation, question-first copy, a nine-variant test, and a 100-mailbox sending infrastructure reached over 41,000 early careers decision makers and surfaced 96 qualified partnership opportunities. The optimised accounting and consulting sequence is now a documented template that can be cloned and scaled, while the undergraduate offer has validated infrastructure ready to expand.