Tried and tested method to generate 100s of leads just using cold emailing. Read on to find more
This guide is written with the input of 2 Outbound Champions.
Spencer Farber - Has scaled companies like Pandadoc and Cliently just using outbound.
Matthew Lesiuk - Has been successfully running his agency and recently launched his own AI email personalization tool - Nureply
This process is very much scalable and can easily generate 70+ demos a month just from cold emailing.
If you have never done outbound, this going to be a lot to digest. So hold on to your seatbelt.
Let’s first look at some economics considering you are an entrepreneur/rep doing outbound. And you are targeting US Companies. Note the open rates and replies are much higher outside USA.
Total: $1300 maximum a month
Investment Gain - $6k a month
ROI - 450%
Always buy aliases domains for cold emailing so we don't damage the reputation of main domain. With every domain, we will buy 2-3 emails associated.
Here’s a quick checklist you can use to keep track of all the steps for Domain & Email setup for yourself as well as your VAs.
We will gradually be increasing sending limits of email every week, starting from 6-9 a day and gradually increasing to 50 a day. All this is done to avoid going into spam filters.
Buy domains that are similar to your main domain. Top-level domains work best. We’ve had success with domains like .agency .tech too, but if possible, buy .com domains.
If your business is called Cliently.com then buy domains like:
Clientlyai.com
Clientlytool.com
Thecliently.com
Clientlyweb.com
Clientlyapp.com
Cliently.app
Here’s a list of domains with the worst reputation. Don’t use these.We use Google Domains for buying Domains, because we’ve used it for a long time and it has tons of integrations and tutorials. You do you.
Setting Up Google Workspace (3 mins)
Go to https://workspace.google.com/ and click Get Started. Follow the on-screen instructions until your Google Workspace account is set up. You can safely create 2-3 emails per domain (by adding users in your Google Workspace admin). Every google workspace should have unique email.Create a new Workspace account for each of the domains you bought. If something is not working check the Google Workspace status page.
Now we get to the fun part! You should authenticate all the domains you are sending emails from. Here are the three parameters you have to set up for each domain: SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
The screen preview where you manage these DNS settings -
Most likely SPF and DKIM would be set automatically when you buy the domain from google. Like this -
If not, assuming you are using Google Workspace, you can follow this guide to set up SPF.
Again if not DKIM is set up by default and, assuming you are using Google Workspace, you can follow this guide to set up DKIM.
You can check if your DKIM and SPF is properly set up using this tool.
Important: Configure DKIM and SPF before configuring DMARC. DKIM and SPF should be authenticating messages for at least 48 hours before turning on DMARC.
You would click on “Create new record” and let’s say if your domain is healthtec.dental and email is - vance@healthtec.dental, these are the details you should put -
The line to be copied in these columns is (after you make your own changes according to domain and email) : "v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; rua=mailto:harsh@healthtec.dental;" (it has to be your email)
In the end, should look like this -
If still not able to set up, you can follow this guide to set up DMARC.
You can check if your DMARC is properly set up using this tool.
Go to Warmupinbox ($10 a month, famous and established), Instantly (37 a month) or Gmass (free but only sends emails within gmails, all gmail users), and sign up. You should now connect your emails to the Warmup feature and start the warm-up process.
Keep the default limits and we suggest don't cross more than 30 emails in warmups.
Always keep the warm up inbox on - never turn it off.
Once you sign up for newsletters, you must manually verify them inside your email (email confirmation to confirm if your email, you signed up with). Please sign up on these newsletters -
https://www.helpscout.com/blog/
https://www.thedailybeast.com/newsletters
Before starting your campaigns, you want to ensure the domain and email set up is done correctly.
For domains, use SPF & DKIM check.
For testing email spamminess, use Mail Tester.
If something's wrong, go back and quickly fix it :)
Here are the steps from it. This would have to be done from google admin.
https://support.google.com/a/answer/6371005?hl=en
Finding leads is easy, the harder part is knowing exactly which kinds of leads are the best. We approach it based on case studies. Who are the people who have gotten the most value out of your service? And who in that company is in charge of dealing with your offering (CEO, CMO, etc.)
If you don’t exactly know who to target just try different options until you find a targeting & email combo that works. Then just get as many similar leads as possible.
Tools: Apollo and Snov (Cheaper with 55% valid emails) ; Zoominfo, Rocketreach for premium data
They have a huge database of B2B leads and you can filter them with tens of filters like revenue, employee count, niche, tech stack etc.
+ Great Database
+ Great Filters
Check if the emails will bounce or not here -
https://www.zerobounce.net/ or https://neverbounce.com/
Only choose emails that have 100% deliverability. Some emails will be marked as risky, go for it only if your list is very small and targeted.
Simply connect all your emails with Cliently or an email sending software of your choice. We allow all your inboxes to be managed at one place.
We use a 4 step sequence. The first is creating an email copy.
If you don’t have your own stuff then get ideas from:
Here are a bunch of great cold email sequences from Cliently users. Updated continually.
Here’s another list of cold email templates from Hunter.io
For the personalised AI introduction, we recommend Nureply and for personalised images and videos, we recommend Hyperise (also integrated within our app)
Simply connect all your emails with Cliently or an email sending software of your choice. We allow all your inboxes to be managed at one place.
To determine the best time to send an email for this campaign, begin by considering the work hours in the time zone where your leads are located. We typically follow New York Office Hours, which are from Monday to Friday, 9 am to 5 pm EST. Additionally, it's essential to avoid sending emails on holidays, which is the default option in Cliently.
Stop sending emails on reply - Stops the sequence for the user who has replied. This is recommended. Again default in cliently.
Have an unsubscribe button in the campaign.
Daily Sending Limit - We recommend sending max 50 emails a day for best results. If your domain and email is new, start with 8 emails a day per email and slowly ramp it to 50 a day in 6 weeks or so. Gradually increase limits.
That’s it. Now you can launch your campaign.Congrats! Cliently will start sending out emails every day automatically and you just need to keep an eye on the campaigns.
We want to hit:
50% Open Rate
3-8% reply rate (non-US market is more)
1% Meeting Booked Rate.
If the open rate is lower, try a different subject line and make sure your emails are not getting stuck in spam. If they are in spam, pause the campaign for a couple of days and let the warm-up run until you’re out of spam.
Change your email copy and/or targeting if the meeting booked rate is lower. It can take a couple of different tests until you find a working combo.
Also if your domain is old and you are not hitting 50% open rates, it could very well be that your domain is burnt. Google considers it spam.
1) Avoid email spam trigger words such as Free and Prize
2) Put as few urls as possible and no attachments in emails please until they reply.
Including possible no url in signature.
3) Use proper wording in your email: STAY AWAY FROM ALL CAPITALS, overusing exclamation marks!!!!!! or an excess amount of emoticons 😆😁😜🤪;
4) Don't use the old tricks in the book. Trying to mislead spam filters by using random characters in your subject line (Pr!ze), starting your subject line with Re: to fake communication, hiding texts in images. All of this stuff may have worked 20 years ago, but the algorithms are too smart for that nowadays!
5) Get your send emails to the right lead list. If you're sending emails to dentists telling them how cool it is to see that their start-up is growing, they might flag you as spam. Be careful with that. Make sure to always send relevant mails to relevant people!
6) Spintax has been a hot topic lately. “Spintax” simply means, spinning syntax. It’s really more of a way to generate unique variations into an article, email or contact form message etc. This increases deliverability by as much as 10%.
7) Personalize your emails as much as possible, including adding company names, job titles etc. in the email. You can also use the first few lines of personalization using various AI intro line generators. We recently partnered with hyperise to introduce image and video personalisation in our platform.
Create Recipes or filters to know prospects who are more engaged, clicked certain number of times, read email after long time etc.
More here
Some of our favourite recipes
Scaling up is super easy. Just create more domains/email accounts, and add them to your campaign and increase the daily sending limit.
As you scale up, managing many conversations from various email addresses can get pretty tough. That is why we highly recommend you to check out our conversation feature, where you can reply to anyone and monitor conversations coming to all the emails accounts from just one single place!
For instance, we are running email campaigns from 20 email accounts here. See how easy it is to look at one screen and reply to anyone. So if John got reply from his email address and i am logged in from Harsh email in the app, i can simply reply on behalf of John here or even monitor his conversations (so you able to see how well your SDRs and VAs are managing emails)
Feel free to send this tutorial to VA’s and just have them set up as many domains and emails as you need. As you scale your email campaigns and manage multiple accounts, maintaining organized financial records becomes essential. Utilize services like a pay stub generator to streamline creating pay stubs for your expanding team
That’s it. Thanks for learning and now it’s time to start executing.
Always happy to hear from you what you think we can improve to make this system even better/cheaper/quicker.
For questions, you can also post in our fb group
