Zoho Campaigns vs. Furnace
Why the infrastructure matters more than the message
Most teams treat email as a single category. Send a message, hit a list, hope for replies. But the infrastructure behind your sending determines whether your message lands in the inbox or quietly disappears into spam. Traditional CRM platforms like Zoho Campaigns or HubSpot are built for something very different than cold outreach, and the differences matter.
CRM Campaigns
Zoho, HubSpot, and similar platforms
Cold Email Best Practices
Furnace infrastructure
Sends from one inbox on shared CRM servers
Sends from 20+ inboxes on private, dedicated infrastructure
Uses your main domain, risking reputation
Uses dedicated sending domains to protect the brand
Sends thousands at once (bulk blast)
Sends 20-30 emails/inbox/day with natural sending patterns
Uses HTML templates that look like marketing
Uses plain-text messages that feel 1:1 and personal
CRMs are fantastic for nurturing relationships.
Furnace is engineered to start them safely, predictably, and at scale.
When "good enough" infrastructure kills your deliverability
We've seen this happen, and chances are you know a couple companies that have made the same mistake. Here's a hypothetical scenario that illustrates what can go wrong:
Imagine a fictional B2B SaaS company called "AcmeWorkflow" (completely made up). Their sales director decides to use Zoho Campaigns for cold outreach because the team already uses it for marketing emails. Seems logical, right?
They upload 5,000 cold prospects and hit send. The first week looks promising — emails are going out, a few replies trickle in. They think they've cracked the code.
But by week three, deliverability starts dropping. Emails that used to land in inboxes are now going straight to spam. Their reply rate, which started at 2%, plummets to 0.3%. They don't know why.
What went wrong (in this hypothetical scenario):
- •They sent from their main domain — acmeworkflow.com — the same domain used for customer support, marketing newsletters, and internal communications.
- •Their domain reputation tanked because they were blasting thousands of cold emails from a shared server alongside thousands of other senders.
- •Email providers flagged their sending patterns as suspicious — bulk blasts don't look like human behavior.
- •Their legitimate marketing emails started landing in spam too, damaging relationships with existing customers.
In this fictional scenario, AcmeWorkflow would have to rebuild their entire email infrastructure from scratch. They'd lose months of outreach momentum, damage their brand reputation, and spend thousands on domain remediation. All because they used the wrong tool for the job.
The infrastructure you use for cold outreach doesn't just affect deliverability — it can permanently damage your domain reputation and hurt your entire email program.
Ready to build the right infrastructure?
Schedule a quick call — we'll show you how Furnace systems turn cold outreach into predictable opportunity flow.