By activating AI send-time optimisation and scaling from 2 to 14 active sequences, Gridwise's demand gen team more than doubled their open rates and tripled their sequence-to-meeting conversion, without adding headcount.
Gridwise is a B2B infrastructure analytics platform serving energy and utilities companies across North America. Their 4-person demand gen team is responsible for all outbound and inbound pipeline generation, supporting a 15-person sales team targeting enterprise accounts with 6–18 month sales cycles.
Gridwise's email open rate had plateaued at 22% for two consecutive quarters. Despite investing in better copywriting and list segmentation, performance remained flat. The demand gen manager suspected the problem was timing, their sequences were scheduled to send at fixed times that worked for their US-West Coast team but were poorly timed for contacts in the UK, Germany, and Australia, who made up 40% of their target accounts.
A secondary problem was velocity: creating a new email sequence in Mailshake required 2 days of work, writing copy, configuring steps, setting up tracking, and QA testing. This meant the team could only run 2 sequences at any given time, leaving large segments of their ICP unaddressed.
"We knew our copy was good. The problem was we were sending emails at 9am Pacific when our best prospects in London were already heading home."
- Lena Hoffmann, Demand Gen Manager
Gridwise switched to MarketrixAI Campaigns for two specific capabilities: AI send-time optimisation that schedules each email at the statistically best time for each individual recipient, and a visual sequence builder that reduced sequence creation time from 2 days to under 2 hours. Both were available on the Growth plan, no additional integrations or data providers required.
Gridwise migrated 2 existing email sequences from Mailshake into MarketrixAI Campaigns using the visual sequence builder. The drag-and-drop interface allowed the demand gen manager to rebuild both sequences in under 4 hours, including adding conditional branches for reply detection.
MarketrixAI's send-time optimisation was enabled across all active sequences. The system analysed historical open patterns for each contact's domain and began scheduling sends at the statistically optimal time window for each recipient, rather than blasting the entire list at 9am Tuesday.
The team ran their first A/B test on subject lines for the cold outreach sequence: a direct benefit-led subject vs. a curiosity-gap subject. The curiosity-gap variant won with a 34% higher open rate, and the winner was automatically promoted to 100% of sends.
With the visual builder reducing sequence creation time from 2 days to under 2 hours, the team scaled from 2 to 14 active sequences, covering cold outreach, trial nurture, win-back, event follow-up, and product-specific campaigns, without adding headcount.
Within 6 weeks of activating send-time optimisation, Gridwise's average email open rate climbed from 22% to 51%, a 132% improvement. The gains were most pronounced for contacts in EMEA time zones, where open rates went from 14% to 48%.
The sequence-to-meeting conversion rate tripled, from 1.2% to 3.7%. The team attributes this to a combination of better timing, more relevant sequences (enabled by the faster creation workflow), and the A/B testing capability that continuously optimised subject lines across all active sequences.
By week 6, the team was running 14 active sequences, 7× more than before, covering every major ICP segment and buyer persona. The demand gen manager estimates this would have required hiring two additional SDRs under the old workflow.
"The send-time optimisation is genuinely magical. We went from 22% to 51% open rates in 6 weeks by changing nothing except when emails were sent. The visual builder was the other breakthrough, we went from 2 sequences to 14 without adding headcount."
- Lena Hoffmann, Demand Gen Manager at Gridwise