496 highly targeted leads, 35 replies, 7 positive, 1 client. Am I doing Something wrong?

I Co-run a small agency doing a specialized B2B service (video editing for coaches/founders posting educational content on YouTube. mentioning the niche only for context, not pitching).

My last cold email campaign had strong top-of-funnel numbers, but I can't get people over the finish line.

The numbers:

\- 496 leads. manually sourced and qualified against our ICP \- 79% open rate (Instantly says this is the number of leads that have opened at least one email in the campaign) \- 7.1% reply rate, excluding auto-replies. \- Of those replies, 20% were positive (7 total) \- 1 conversion

What happened to the other 6 positive replies: \- 1 currently mid-trial \- 2 asked about pricing, one said it was outside their budget, then went quiet \- 2 asked to see our portfolio, then went quiet \- 1 asked general questions, then went quiet

Context that might matter: \- Our CTA is a trial project at 70% off (used to be free, but too many people took the free version and never converted, so we added a paywall to filter for intent) \- Our pricing is at or below the market average for this niche \- I know 500 leads/month is small scale, but this is a narrow niche and generic lead-gen tools don't find people who actually fit, so I'm stuck sourcing manually for now \- The positioning we used in the campaign is saving them time so they can focus on higher leverage tasks. \- No calls, everything happens through emails.

What I'm trying to figure out: \- Are these numbers actually fine and I'm just impatient? \- Where's the real leak? And what can I do to improve the conversion rate? \- Besides the discounted trial, what's a good alternative CTA to get someone from interested to committed without you having to convince them via back-and-forth email?

I'm confused so I'd appreciate any input.