We are going to breakdown the ultimate tactics for your cold emails that will allow to send hundreds (or even thousands) email per day with >80% open rate.

🎯 What results we will achieve:

💌 500 emails daily

💌 10,000 emails monthly

💌 2,000 unique prospects contacted monthly

💌 1,600 (80%) prospects opened email

💌 80 (5%) prospects replied

Keep in mind, that you might send more or less leads comparaed to what outlined here. It strongly varies on the industry you are in, but what can we surely say - you can increase number of sent emails as much as you want.

💼 What will we need:

Before we dive into the set up, we need to add a disclaimer. Setting up your cold email infrastructure is a hard work, but it will totally pay off if you execute it properly.

Here is the list of things you need to be ready for:

• 2-3 hours of manual work to set up infrastructure

• 10-14 days before you start sending emails. We need to warmup email accounts before we start sending out mass emails

• ~ 120$ in average monthly expenses

💰Cost breakdown (for numbers we’ve outlined above):

• 5 domains - 5 * $10 = $50 yearly

• 10 corporate emails - 10 * $6 = $60 monthly. This cost could be 2 times lower with MicrosoftXGoDaddy offer.

• Email cleanup - $10 monthly

• Coldy, email sending tool - $60 monthly. If you send less emails, you could go on the cheaper plan

Total: $4 + $60 + $10 + $60 = $134 which translates into $134 / 80 = $1.675 cost per lead

⚙️ Part 1: Set up infrastructure

In this part we are going to create email accounts for cold outreach and do all the settings to ensure all of our emails get inside reciepents inbox.

Step 1: Buy domains

We don’t recommend to use your main domain for the outreach. Cold outreach sometimes can damage reputation of the domain, so we will play it safe by buying domains specifically for outreach.

We are going to need multiple domains to increase number of emails we can send per day. You can count number of domains you need by following formula:

1 Domain = 2 Email accounts = 100 Emails/Day

So let’s say if you want to send 1000 Emails/Day, you will need 10 domains.

If you’re just starting out you can try with 2 domains and 4 emails.

What domain name should I select?

As for the name of the domain, try out using different domain zones (.com, .co, .ai, .net, .tech, etc.) or adding additional words to them (get, try, go, etc.)

Let’s say your main website domain is coldy.ai, in that case you can try buying following domains: getcoldy.com , trycoldy.co , coldy.co, coldy.net , gocoldy.com, appcoldy.co, etc. You can also ask ChatGPT for ideas.

Just try to avoid using domain zones from this list, like .biz, .xyz, .online. And don’t choose domains with dash(-) inside, like try-coldy.com

Where to buy domains?

Most of the domain providers are pretty much the same. We would recommend using following domain providers:

1. Porkbun - cheap price, no irritating upsales

2. GoDaddy - domain usually cost more, but you can save up bunch of money on corporate accounts by bying MicrosoftXGoDaddy offer

We usually buy domains that cost around $8-$15/year

Step 2: Get email (workspace) provider for your domain

This is very important step, bcs choice of the email provider will strongly affect deliverability of your emails.

What email provider should I choose?

We recommend following providers:

1. Google Workspace - this email provider has the best deliverability for most of the reciepients, so we usally recommend it for starters, one account costs $6/mo. The only problem with Gmail accounts - they usally have quite bad deliverability for Microsoft365 (Outlook) recipients, so if your target audience usually use this provider, you should go for Microsoft365.

2. Microsoft365 - quite good deliverability for most of the providers, but it’s exceptional for sending to clients who use Microsoft365. Accounts cost $6/mo, but you can pay 2 times less by purchasing email accounts through MicrosoftXGoDaddy offer.

Pro tip: When you send emails to the same email provider as yours (from Gmail to Gmail, from Microsoft to Microsoft) you gonna get a higher deliverability. So if you want to have a highest possible result, we would recommend buying both of them

There is also a “secret” method to get 50 Gmail accounts and 30 Microsoft accounts for free, which works for tech startups. But we share it only with paid subscribers, so if you want to know how - purchase any Coldy subscription and write to our support.

Here are guides on how you can buy those workspaces:

Google workspace

You can follow along with this video

Microsoft365

You can follow official guide from Microsoft. Remember, if you want to get accounts cheaper, use GoDaddy+Microsoft offer while buying a domain from them.

After you’ve created a workspace, you need to connect other domains to this workspace.

Google workspace

You can follow along with official guide from Google. Make sure you add domain as a “Secondary domain”. Alias domains won’t increase our email limits.

After you’ve added those domains make sure to “Activate Gmail” for them.

Microsoft 365

Go to the admin center at https://admin.microsoft.com.

1. Go to the Settings > Domains page.

2. Select Add domain.

3. Enter the name of domain and follow instructions on the page

Step 3: Create email accounts for each domain

We recommend creating 2 email accounts per 1 domain. We also recommend using almost the same name for the second inbox, since it’s easier to make outreach from one person. Let’s say your name is John Doe, so your first email will be john@getcoldy.co, second one can be jdoe@getcoldy.co or john.doe@getcoldy.co.

Pro tip: Don’t forget to add profile photos for email accounts you’re creating - it increases open rates and trust.

How to add additional users in workspace:

Google workspace

You can follow official guide from Google. Make sure you select the right domain while creating the user.

Microsoft365

You can follow official guide from Microsoft. Make sure you select the right domain while creating the user.

Step 4: Set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC & MX

This is most technical, but in the same time one of most important parts of the set up. We need to add MX, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records to DNS of out domains, without them our emails will go to spam.

Keep in mind that you need to set up those records for each unique domain you’ve purchased.

Here is a detailed guide on how to set up those records:

SPF, DKIM, DMARC and MX set up

Step 5: Check if everything is working correctly

You can use mail-tester.com to check if everything is setted up correctly. All you need to do is to send email to the address they’ve generated for you and you will see a report.

Your score should be around 9 or 10 like on the image above:

Make sure you have “You’re properly authenticated” result in the 3rd row.

You can ignore blacklist problems, it’s common thing for Gmail servers and they don’t affect your deliverability.

Step 6: Set up forwarding and domain redirect

Forwarding

It’s easier to see all the replies if they come to one inbox. You can forward all the replies to your main inbox that you use everyday to make sure you won’t miss any replies.

Here are official guides:

Google

Microsoft

Make sure to choose “Forward a copy of incoming…” option and click save changes after you’ve verified the forwarding address.

Domain redirect

You can set up redirect on your outreach domains so they would redirect to your main website. Here are the guides on how to do it:

GoDaddy

Porkbun

Step 7: Connect email accounts to Coldy

We’ve almost finished with the set up. We just need to connect emails to Coldy.

For those who don’t know - Coldy is a tool for email outreach designed to maximse the deliverability and efficiency of your email campaigns. We use more than 10 techincs to make sure your emails get inside primary inboxes of the customers. Did we mention that you can connect unlimited inboxes on every plan for free?

Create account on Coldy

Follow these guides to connect email accounts to Coldy:

How to connect Google accounts to Coldy

How to connect Microsoft accounts to Coldy

Step 8: Warm up emails

Warmup is a key for the successful outreach . Email warming simulates the activity of your mailbox account by sending a certain number of unique emails within our database of email accounts. Those emails will be read and will also receive responses from other warmup participants, and the best thing - this is fully automated.

How to Enable Warming

1. Go to the “Email accounts” page

2. In the Warmup column, click on the gray toggle “Disabled”
   
   

   

3. Then a menu with settings will open. If you have not used warmup before - leave the default settings

4. If you want to enable warmup for all email account at once - click on the checkbox “Apply these settings to other email accounts” and press the “Enable warmup” button

5. In the next step, select accounts you want to warmup, and click “Enable warmup”.

Recommendations:

• Warm up for at least 10-14 days, especially if you have brand new domain. During warming up, you can work on creating a prospect list and working out email sequence

• 20 emails per day is the optimal limit for most users

• Always keep warmup enabled, activity in the mailbox, even when you send email campaigns

How to hide warmup emails in the mailbox?

Because of the warmup emails, you can miss important messages from your leads. In order to make mailboxes easy to read, we advise filtering such emails.

How to filter warmup emails in your inbox

👔 Part 2: Get your leads

In this part we are going to create a database of our potential leads.

Step 9: Decide on target audience

It's important to identify the audience to who we are going target. Your service should be useful to the target audience, and it's also important to identify their geography, revenue, compay size - all of this will help in finding contacts and personalising emails. Depending on the chosen target audience, the way of getting prospects might change.

Step 10: Create lead base

On this step we are going to get corporate emails of your target audience. The result will be CSV with your leads, where we have their email, first name, last name and any other parameters we might want use to personalise the outreach. The end result will be similar to this csv.

There are multiple ways to create your lead list, we are going to focus on 2:

1. Getting leads from specialised lead databases

   This method is good if your Target audience uses LinkedIn and could be identified through that.

   For starters, we would recommend using the biggest player on the market - apollo.ai. It seats on top of LinkedIn and couple of other data sources and provides you huge amount of emails for free. All you need to do is to create the account and set filters that fit your audience. We recommend using following filters:

   • Job titles

   • Location

   • Employees

   • Industry & Keywords

   • Email status = verified

   If you not sure what filter parameters to pick - you can search for companies from target audience that you already know, and get those parameters from their Apollo profiles.

   You can also use other databases, like hunter.io, zoominfo, linkedin sales navigator, etc.

   If your target audience is ecom, you can use those services:

   https://builtwith.com/

   https://storeleads.app/

2. Website parsing
   If your audience is not present on the above services, which sometimes happens, there's no need to despair. The harder it is to get a lead, the fewer emails they receive, so the chances of your email being read are WAY higher.

   You can search for contacts in search engines, or on websites related to the activities of companies. For example, if you are looking for web design studios, you can find their data on Awwwards. Personal emails can also be found inside resumes.

   Ways of data collection:

   • Collect database manually

   The most labor-intensive method - you will have to search for customer websites and manually add data to the excel table, but at the same time the quality of the database will be the highest.

   • Hire a student (or freelancer)

   This method is quite the same as the previous one, but you will not have to spend your precious time on manual labor. Another advantage - the student can potentially grow into a good specialist and unload even more lead generation tasks from you.

   • Automated parsing

   If you have found a website where you can automatically collect data from your potential clients - great. In this case, you can write a parser yourself, or hire freelancers for this job. Most often such databases show very good efficiency.

Step 11: Sort email list

The databases we usually gather often contain non-existent mailboxes. Bounce, or sending emails to a nonexistent mailbox, is a sure way to get a temporary account lock, especially if the share of Bounce emails exceeds 5%.

For such purposes, there is software for cleaning the database. We recommend using 2 products:

1. Bulk email checker - the cheapest software for cleaning emails. Validation of 10,000 emails will cost you 10 dollars. Not the most accurate check, but if you have a large database, feel free to use it.

2. Zero Bounce - quite expensive, but the most effective service for validating mail. If you have a small database or a small potential customer market, each lead might be golden to you, so it makes sense spend more

The validation process takes some time, after cleaning in most services you will receive a CSV with an additional field for your leads. You need to upload this CSV to Google Spreadsheets and filter it by this field. (example of a cleaned database).

How to filter clean database

1. Upload CSV to Google Spreadsheets

2. Select all fields by clicking on the top left corner of the table.

3. Click on the filter icon at the top right

4. Click on icon with three stripes in the "Details" column and leave only "The Adress passed all tests". Example of filtered base.

   

5. The rest of the emails are not suitable for safe outreach. If you have too few recipients left, you can add emails with "Catch all" settings to your campaigns.

Step 12: Create campaign and upload leads

1. Go to the Campaigns page, click on the "+ Create campaign" button and give a name to the campaign.

2. Once we get inside campaign we need to click "Import leads". In the window that opens, we transfer or find our CSV on the computer.

3. Next, you need to select (map) the corresponding values for the columns from our CSV. This will allow us to use personalised variables in emails. If you do not want to import a specific field - choose Do not import. When you finish marking the columns, click "Import Leads" at the bottom of the page.

   

📬 Part 3: Create email sequence and launch

Prospect list - ready, Email infrastructure - ready, now it’s time to tackle the most creative part of our task - create email sequence.

Step 13: Think about what your leads want

When you write copy for emails, it's important to think about who will read them and what they want. You can write as much as you want about how cool your company is, but the recipient is more interested in hearing about how you can be useful to them.

Look at your database, estimate who will be reading the letters. Write out the problems, desires, metrics, KPIs of potential recipients and think about how you can help them.

Step 14: Create sequence

Writing sequences is an art, but it doesn't necessarily have to be complicated. There are no unique email templates that work for everyone, but there are still some principles that you should follow:

• Multiple emails in a sequence, we recommend 4. More emails mean bigger chances to get a reply, perhaps previous emails came at an inconvenient time, or the content of new emails will be more interesting to the recipient.

• Use personalisation. You can start with a simple one, at least using the recipient's last name/first name. If you could also write a unique paragraph of personalised text for each recipient, that's great. Our task is to make the recipient think that you wrote the letter manually, addressed personally to him.

• Write sweet and short copy, use only text. We try to avoid attachments and links, at least in our first email. Try to write without excessive formality and clichéd phrases.

• Do not use "beautiful" email templates with HTML and images, most likely, you will immediately end up in the spam folder. But don't worry, at Coldy we simply do not provide the ability to send such emails :)

• The target action in the letter is the reply. If a person has already once responded to your letter - with a high probability he will answer other emails.

• Do not use spam-words, here is the list.

• Write without mistakes, it is always better to check the text using various services like Grammarly. If English is not your first language - you can ask a native speaker for proof-reading.

All these principles - are not axioms, you are free to experiment and from time to time break them, but if you are a beginner - try to follow them.

Where to write letters?

Since our emails are text-based - you can start in Google docs or any other text editor. If you have already created a campaign in Coldy - you can write letters on the Sequence page. Don't forget to click Save, otherwise, the text will be lost. To add an extra email to the chain - click Add email on the left.

What to write in the subject of the letter?

The subject is the first thing the recipient sees when they open their mailbox. The task of the subject is to make the lead click on the letter. If he immediately understands that the letter is promotional - he is unlikely to open it.

We often use abstract letter subjects to intrigue the recipient, for example:

• Question

• Question for {{firstName}}

• Question about the website

• New client

• {{companyName}} X {{yourCompany}}

• Saw a small problem

• Congratulations

• Hey {{firstName}}

• Can I help?

💌 First email

The first email is the most important one, usually it receives the majority of responses. Here are few examples:

Example 1: CCC - Compliment, case study, call to action

One of the most popular formats in the world, as the name suggests, the letter has 3 parts - a compliment, a case/similar experience, and a call to action.

• Compliment - will break the ice between you and the client, everyone likes to hear good things about themselves, the main thing is that it doesn't sound vulgar. It's cool if we write a personalised compliment, if there is no time - you can come up with something general. As an alternative, you can write why you wrote to them specifically.

• Case - will show your expertise, the main thing is that it is relevant.

• Call to action - ask a simple question, so it will be easier for reciever to reply

Subject:

New project

Email:

Hey {{firstName}},

Saw that {{companyName}} got a red dot award, wow! I can’t imagine what could be better than that for a design agency.

Wanted to know if you’re open for the new clients.

In last month, me and my marketing agency helped landing 5 new clients with an average check of $40,000 for one of your competitors. Would be an honor to work with you too.

Let’s have a 15 minute call, I’ll share our experience in a field and non-obvious ways of landing clients for the design agency. Let me know if you’re up to it.

Cheers,

Dmitriy from AdsPerformance.

Example 2: Small question

Brevity is the soul of wit. Very often such emails produce the best results. If the lead has responded to one email, he will also respond to further messages in your communication.

Think about what question your potential lead is most likely to answer. Only after this, we tell them about our offer.

We recommend testing such approach in the majority of campaigns.

Subject:

Question

Email:

Hey {{firstName}},

Wanted to know if {{companyName}} has open software engineering jobs.

Dmirty.

Example 3: “What is the best way to reach out to ….”

Email:

Hey,

I have a question for your marketing director, wanted to know what is the best way to reach out.

Thanks in advance, Dmirtiy.

💌 Second and third email

In these emails, we can show our achievements or competencies, provide useful material, or simply remind about ourselves.

Here are examples of emails you can use:

Example 1: Have you seen my last email?

Hey {{firstName}},

I’m sure you’re busy, just wanted to make sure my previous email didn’t get burried.

Dmitry.

Example 2: Case stuidy

Hey,

Wrote you earlier about PPC ads in Google. Wanted to brag a littile bit, we’ve got first results from one of our clients. For one of the hotels in Londond we were able to save up $3,000 on booking fees with an ad budget of just $600.

I think you won’t mind if we do same for hotel, right? Just let me know in a reply.

Have a nice one!

Dmirty.

Example 3: Useful information

Hey {{firstName}},

Wrote you a while ago about optimizing your sales processes. Recently I’ve publhised an article, where I cover all possible mistakes I’ve seen in more than 15 years in sales. You can read it here:
{{link}}

Hope you find something interesting for you, if you need my help with optimizing your sales team - let me know.

Dmitriy.

💌 Break up email

Our last attempt to get a client. Here we should make an offer lead can’t refuse (we don’t recommend using horse heads 🐴). Also we can leave our contact details in case lead discovers this email in future

Example 1: Polite breakup

Hey {{firstName}},

I get it. Probably I’m writing in a wrong time or you’re just not interested in my offer. Promise: no more emails from me :)

If something changes, and you will require some help in lead gen - let me know, I’ll be there for you. You can contact me on:

Telegram
Linkedn

Thanks,
Dmirty.

Example 2: Bold offer

Hey {{firstName}}.

Probably you’re gettings lots of messages, and I’m just one of many in your inbox. But… I still think we could be useful for each other.

Here is the deal: Let’s have a 15 min call (just like a small coffee break) and I’ll tell you how exactly we can help your business. If you think your time got wasted - I’ll immideadly send $50 on your PayPal.

What do you think?
Dmitry.

❓What interval I should use between emails in sequence

First email
Wait for 3 days
Second email
Wait for 4 days
Third email
Wait for 7 days
Break up email

Step 15: Campaign launch

After leads are uploaded and sequence is written - you need to select sending accounts and sending schedule.

If you want to try several versions of letters (which we strongly recommend), then divide the base into several parts and create a separate campaign for each chain.

After the campaign is launched, you can track the progress of the campaign on the leads tab:

Contacted - people who received an email from us

Opened - people who opened our email

Bounced - leads with non-existent mail, if there are too many of them (> 4%), urgently stop the campaign and clean the prospect list.

Replied - those who replied to your letters. To read the response - click on the "replied" tab and then "read reply" next to each lead.

You will see the text of the response, as well as, to which mailbox they have responded. To continue the communication - open your mail client and continue the conversation there.

If the lead responds to any email - sequence will stop.

Step 16: Monitoring the performance

In the email campaigns, we usually look at 3 main metrics. You can track them on the campaign page.

📨 Open rate

Shows the percentage of recipients who opened your letter.

Benchmark:

• Excellent: from 80%

• Good: from 60%, if less, there may be problems.

The open rate is influenced by 3 main factors:

1. Email subject - should be quite good clickbait. You can experiment and change it, maybe the open rate will increase

2. Quality of your infrastructure - if your email get into spam, they will hardly be read. Maybe there is a problem with some mailbox (incorrect setup, too many letters, poor warming up, etc.). In this case, it is recommended to remove problematic mailboxes from the mailing list and keep them on bare warming up for a couple of weeks. You can also check the mailbox through mail-tester.com or Glock apps.

3. Quality of the leadbase - maybe you are writing to boxes that are rarely checked

Sometimes the recipient's mail clients may not load the tracking pixel, this often happens when mailing to Microsoft accounts. In this case, we cannot find out whether the recipient has read the letter, and the metric will be low.

📨 Reply rate

The main metric in our mailing list shows what proportion of leads responded to our letters.

Benchmark:

• Excellent: >5%

• Good: 2%

The following factors affect the reply rate:

1. Open rate - if letters are not opened - they will not receive a reply.

2. Quality of the email sequence, quite obvious here, we need a good offer. Always work on improving letters with various experiments/hypotheses.

3. Relevance of the prospect list - possibly your offer is simply not interesting to the recipients, or it is read by the wrong people.

📨 Bounce rate

Shows the quality of the base. If there are too many Bounces - the email provider will most likely temporarily block your mailbox, so, better turn off the campaign as soon as possible.

• Good: <4%

• Excellent: <2%

Only one factor affects the Bounce rate - the quality database cleaning. We do not advise neglecting the validation of your base, more about this is written in step 11.

Conclusion

If you have gone through all 16 steps, you are a superhero. As a reward, you have received a system, more effective than 90% of cold emailers.

In addition to the basic information listed in this article, there are many other ways to optimize your campaigns. I wish you not to stop in gaining knowledge, conduct constant experiments, and most importantly - achieve the desired results.

I hope you didn’t get tired after reading this article, because the author definitely got tired or writing it:) If you have any questions about email outreach, you can write me here:

TG: @squadsgn

Email: vlad@coldy.ai