outreach
Email Is Losing You iGaming Partners. Here's How to Move Outreach to Telegram.
Email open rates for iGaming B2B outreach have dropped below 20%. Here's how to migrate your partner outreach to Telegram — and actually close deals faster.
You sent 400 partner outreach emails last month. Forty got opened. Six replied. Two went anywhere. That's not a funnel — that's a lottery ticket with worse odds.
iGaming moves fast. Affiliate deals, traffic partnerships, platform integrations — the teams running these businesses are on Telegram all day, not refreshing their inboxes. If your outreach is still email-first, you're contacting people in a channel they've already mentally abandoned for business.
Moving your partner outreach from email to Telegram isn't just a channel swap. It's a workflow rebuild. This guide walks you through exactly how to do it without losing your pipeline in the process.
Why Are Email Open Rates for iGaming B2B Outreach So Low?
Cold email open rates across B2B verticals have fallen to an average of 17–21%, and iGaming-specific outreach performs even worse — many operators and affiliate managers report sub-10% open rates on cold partnership emails. The reason is structural: iGaming decision-makers are small teams moving quickly, and email has become their spam folder for vendor pitches. Telegram, by contrast, delivers a push notification directly to someone's phone with no subject line filter in between. CRMChat customers report an average 60% open rate on cold Telegram outreach — roughly three times what email achieves in the same vertical.
What Do You Actually Need Before You Start?
Don't just start blasting Telegram DMs on day one. That's how you get banned before your first deal closes. Here's what needs to be in place:
Warmed-up Telegram accounts. New accounts sending cold volume immediately get flagged. Warm each account over 1–2 weeks before running outreach. See how to warm up Telegram accounts properly before you send a single message.
A prospect list built for Telegram. Export your existing email list and try to match contacts to Telegram handles — many will have their username in their email signature or LinkedIn. For net-new leads, parse the relevant iGaming affiliate Telegram groups directly using a tool like CRMChat's group finder.
A CRM that lives on Telegram. Using a traditional CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot) alongside Telegram means you're manually copying context between two tools. Every minute of that kills your response speed — and in iGaming, first response time is everything.
Message templates built for DM format. Email allows 300-word cold intros. Telegram does not. Your first message should be two sentences maximum: who you are and what's in it for them. Personalization fields like
{First Name}and{Company}do real work here.A follow-up sequence mapped out. Email sequences are easy to automate. Map the same logic for Telegram before you start: Day 1 intro → Day 4 value follow-up → Day 9 re-engagement. Have these written and ready to go.
How Do You Find iGaming Partners on Telegram?
The fastest way is to go where your target partners already congregate. There are hundreds of active Telegram groups for affiliate marketers, traffic operators, casino platform vendors, and iGaming media buyers. CRMChat's Telegram Group Finder lets you search by keyword — "iGaming affiliates," "casino traffic," "betting partners" — and receive a curated list of matching groups directly in your Telegram inbox. From there, you can parse group members and pull their usernames and bios into your outreach pipeline.
This is a fundamentally better starting point than a cold email list. Group membership is a strong signal of intent — someone in an iGaming affiliate Telegram group is, by definition, active in the space right now.
For more on extracting high-quality leads from these communities, read where iGaming FTDs come from and how to mine Telegram communities for high-intent leads.
How Do You Migrate Your Existing Email Pipeline to Telegram?
You don't have to start from scratch. Here's how to move what you already have:
Segment your email list by engagement tier. Contacts who opened your last three emails are warm. Contacts who haven't opened anything in 90 days are cold. Treat these as separate Telegram campaigns — different messaging, different pacing.
Find their Telegram handles. Search by name on Telegram, check their LinkedIn bio, look at their email signature. You'll match maybe 30–50% of a typical iGaming contact list this way. That's fine — start with who you can find.
Send a channel-switch message first. For warm contacts, a short message acknowledging the shift works well: "Hey [Name], I know I've been reaching out via email — most of the convos I care about have moved to Telegram, so wanted to connect here." This isn't cold outreach — it's a warm re-introduction.
Import new Telegram contacts into your CRM immediately. Every reply, every new connection — log it. If you're using a Telegram-native CRM, this happens automatically. If you're not, you're already losing context.
Run email and Telegram in parallel for 30 days. Don't kill email overnight. Run both, and watch where replies actually come from. Most teams find Telegram wins within two to three weeks and can sunset the email sequences from there.
What Does a Telegram Outreach Workflow Actually Look Like for iGaming Partners?
Here's the sequence most successful iGaming affiliate teams use after migration:
Day 1: Personalized intro DM — two sentences, no pitch, just context and a hook.
Day 3–4: Value follow-up — share something useful (a traffic insight, a relevant case study, a specific GEO opportunity). No ask.
Day 7–9: Soft close — "Would it make sense to hop on a quick call this week to see if there's a fit?" Direct, not pushy.
Day 14: Re-engagement ping if no reply — something light like "Circling back in case this got buried."
Day 21+: Move to a low-frequency nurture sequence — monthly check-ins tied to relevant news or offers.
The same logic you used in email sequences maps directly here. The difference is the medium responds 3–4x faster, so your sequence cadence can tighten up significantly. For a detailed walkthrough of building this kind of automated flow, see how to build an automated Telegram outreach funnel from cold list to closed deal.
Which Tool Should You Use to Run This at Scale?
You need something that can handle multiple Telegram accounts, automate sequences, and log conversations as CRM deals — all without forcing you to context-switch between a CRM and a chat window.
CRMChat is built specifically for this: it automates follow-up and re-engagement sequences triggered by lead status or API events, handles multi-account outreach from a single dashboard, and turns every inbound Telegram reply into a CRM lead auto-assigned to an owner. That last part matters a lot in iGaming partner outreach — when a target partner finally replies, you want that flagged to the right person within seconds, not discovered the next morning in a Telegram chat nobody remembered to check.
CRMChat also lets you send bulk personalized messages to multiple Telegram group chats simultaneously — which is useful when you're managing ongoing relationships with existing traffic partners spread across dozens of group conversations.
For a broader look at why Telegram-native tooling outperforms traditional CRM setups in this vertical, the comparison in traditional CRM vs Telegram-native CRM for iGaming affiliates is worth reading before you pick your stack.
What Are the Compliance Rules You Need to Know?
Telegram outreach has its own compliance landscape. The platform flags accounts that send too many unsolicited messages to users who haven't saved their number — typically around 5–7 spam reports within 24 hours can trigger a temporary block on a new account. Keep these rules in mind:
Use warmed accounts only. A fresh account running cold outreach immediately is the fastest path to a ban.
Respect daily limits. Even with multiple accounts, don't push volume too hard early. Build up gradually.
Don't message the same person from multiple accounts. Smart account switching (a feature in CRMChat's outreach tooling) prevents this automatically.
Keep messages relevant and targeted. Spray-and-pray volume in iGaming groups generates reports quickly — tight targeting keeps your accounts clean.
For the full breakdown of what's allowed, read Telegram outreach legal compliance rules before you scale.
If you're also managing multiple Telegram accounts across a team — which most iGaming affiliate operations do — the playbook in managing multiple Telegram accounts for iGaming affiliate teams covers the operational side in detail.
How Long Does a Full Migration Take?
For a team of 3–5 people running 200–400 partner contacts, expect the full migration to take about 4–6 weeks from start to full-Telegram operation. The first two weeks are account setup and warming. Week three is parallel running — email and Telegram both live. Weeks four through six are where you see Telegram clearly winning on reply rate and deal velocity, and you can wind down email sequences for that segment entirely.
The teams that move fastest are the ones who commit to a Telegram-native CRM from day one rather than trying to retrofit a traditional CRM into the workflow. Every manual data-entry step you add between "prospect replies on Telegram" and "CRM deal updated" is a step that will eventually get skipped — and a deal that will eventually fall through the cracks.
CRMChat handles that sync automatically, turning every Telegram interaction into a trackable pipeline event without anyone having to remember to log it. You can explore how the setup works in the CRMChat Help Center or review real iGaming results in the case studies.
