Sending Cold Emails

Quick note before we dive into sending strategies: You should send yourself test emails and look at them on desktop and mobile devices before sending to your prospect list.

Where are the line breaks? Should there be more or less? Do you have a stellar first sentence above the fold on a mobile device? Everyone skims—if you write an email that can be skimmed and easily understood, then you’ll get better results.

Now, when it comes to actually sending cold emails, there are a few questions you want to answer.‌

1. How do I make sure that my emails are getting delivered?
2. How many emails should I send?
3. What tool should I use to send them?

Deliverability

Deliverability is the percentage of emails that make it to inboxes (as opposed to spam folders or firewalls).

High deliverability is necessary for a successful cold outreach strategy. Think: you’ve done all the hard work of finding the right targets, getting their email addresses, and crafting emails to them accordingly. It’s inefficient if many of your emails don’t even make it to inboxes.

Here’s the 80/20 on improving your deliverability. Don’t skip these steps:

1. Create a separate subdomain for sending cold emails. For example, if your usual email is jsmith@company.com, set up a separate subdomain and use jsmith@e.company.com to actually send emails from. This way, if anything goes wrong (rare), you haven’t trashed your main domain.
2. Avoid spam filters by avoiding keywords commonly used in spam emails. This is less important than how your recipients engage with your emails, but it’s still worth avoiding these words.
3. Follow all legal advice we mentioned earlier.
4. Most importantly, get your targeting right. You improve deliverability by getting a high rate of replies, and low rate of unsubscribes and spam reports. So only send emails to people you truly think will benefit from your product.

A few additional strategies that will help improve your deliverability over time:

1. Don’t batch-send all your appointment reminders and follow ups at once. Stretch them out over a few hours or over the day.
2. Avoid including too many images or too much HTML in your emails. One of the spam flags that you can avoid is the ratio of text to other content.
3. Limit your links—especially to social networking sites. And try to avoid bit.ly and other link shorteners as they’ll get picked up by spam flags.

You can also use a tool like Mailwarm to get positive engagements on your emails before you start sending at scale. What you’re looking for is "regular email traffic" and a responsible slope to higher volumes that won’t negatively impact your sender reputation.

Here are two useful tools to help you keep tabs on deliverability:

Glock: This helps you check how your emails are inboxing (how many inboxes you’re reaching). Ideally, cold emails make it to the primary tab and not the promotions tab.

Postmaster Tools: Gmail's feedback loop tool. This helps you understand how Gmail recipients are interacting with your emails.

Email Cadence

Let’s revisit our cold email strategy from earlier:

You’ve already created your 2-3 emails. Let’s assume that you have a list of about 1,000 prospect’s email addresses to send to.

Here’s the most effective way to run your first campaign:

1. Start with an initial test run: an A/B of the 2-3 email archetypes you’ve created (~100 emails for each archetype is enough).
2. Analyze data to see which email had the best reply rate and booked meetings rate. Then send the winning email to the rest of your list.
3. Continuously iterate on your emails.

First test run: 100-300 emails‌ (~100 per archetype)

You need to send enough emails to reliably know what percentage of your emails get opened, and what percentage of your prospects take action—whether it’s scheduling a call with you, emailing you back, or just clicking through to your website.

Sure. You could conduct a statistical test if you want to get technical. But considering the fact that you’ll want to quickly test your archetypes and start sending your winning email, a good proxy is a test of 100-150 emails total.

We’ve found that’s often all it takes to find your winning email, measured by response rate.

Second run: 800-1,000 emails

Send the winning email to the rest of your list. The goal, first and foremost, is to get prospects to take action on your email. But the secondary goal is to validate the results you got from your first test run.

What you’re looking for here is whether or not the metrics from your first test hold true at scale—and we’ll cover those metrics, but think: open rate, reply rate, action rate, etc.

Future runs: Find the cadence that works best for your business

Once you have a tight grip on your metrics, you’ll know how many emails you need to send to get a reasonable flow of leads. Think: You might find out that, instead of sending emails in bursts, it works better to send out 50-100 emails per day per sales rep which should result in roughly 10 new leads per day. If you need more / fewer leads per sales rep each day, you can simply change the cadence.

As you scale, make sure your emails stay personalized, and continuously iterate on the copy you use to improve your metrics.

We’ll cover metrics shortly, but one important note to keep in mind as you find your ideal sending cadence: Most businesses would benefit by maximizing ROI, not purely revenue. High ROI is usually achieved in smaller batches when you can afford taking the time to personalize.

Follow ups

If someone hasn’t responded to you after your first email, follow up twice:

• Once after 3 days
• And again after 7 days

After that, it’s not usually worth continuing. You might find data suggesting that you follow up 3+ times (some blogs suggest following up over 9 times).

We disagree. After your 3rd unanswered email, you’re no longer simply being persistent—you’re being a pest. The damage you’ll do to your brand by spamming people exceeds the marginal benefit of a few additional sales.

We’re building self-aware businesses. Stick with 2 follow ups and don’t spam.

Another reason for limiting your touches: You can recycle these leads sooner. A lead that doesn't respond to a 3 touch sequence can be emailed again in 5-6 months.

Automate your follow ups through tools like Mixmax, PersistIQ, Mailshake, or Lemlist. These tools automate multi-email campaigns, and personalize each for the recipient. They also detect when a prospect replies so they’re taken out of the sequence and shielded from receiving more emails.

Make sure your follow ups accomplish the following:

• Add value to your original email. Don’t waste your prospects’ time with emails that read, “following up on this.” Instead, make sure each of your follow ups adds a bit of value.
  • “Here’s a video walkthrough of our tool.”
  • “Here’s a case study on how XYZ brand is working with us.”
• End with a question, not a statement. This tends to open up more conversations that would otherwise go to closed-lost.
  • “What’s holding you back from exploring this?”
  • “Are you still facing XYZ problem?”

You want to build credibility until your prospect can’t help but respond.

Tools

We recommend using Gmail and something that sits on top of Gmail and sends through it.

As you scale up, you can level up and afford bigger and more powerful tools.

When you’re sending thousands of emails, you’ll want to automate most of the process. Luckily, there are many tools that allow you to automate your emailing: Simply upload a list, copy and paste your emails (and follow ups) into the tool, add personalization where necessary, and send.

Here’s a list of what we’ve used in the past to send emails for clients:‌

• PersistIQ: Free to start.
  • Free plan: 20 emails/day
  • Growth plan: 300 emails/day/user
  • Enterprise: 600 emails/day/user
• Streak: Free to start.
  • Free plan: 50 emails/day/user
  • Solo plan: 800 emails/day/user
  • Pro plan: 1,500 emails/day/user
• Mixmax: Inexpensive, and it can be directly integrated into Gmail.
  • G Suite customers can send up to 2000 emails per day
  • But Mixmax caps you at 500/day to prevent senders from getting rate-limited by Google
• Mailshake: Easy to use, best for people who are just starting out in cold outreach.
  • Sending via Gmail, Mailshake limits you to 500 emails/day/user
• Reply IO: Another easy to use tool, and, unlike all others on this list, it has basic functionalities that can help you to create onboarding or retention drip campaigns.
  • Reply IO caps you at 400 emails/day/user
• Lemlist: Similar to Mailshake with better personalization and email deliverability.
  • Lemlist recommends sending no more than 200 emails/day/user

Your sending tools should integrate with a CRM to make tracking easy. We recommend Pipedrive and Copper for their ease of use and integrations with the tools above.