The proven cold email marketing & sales outreach system used by over 5,000+ B2B Companies, Founders and agencies to predictably drive qualified leads, close deals, and generate revenue.
Discover the secrets to crafting irresistible cold emails used by 1,000s of our clients
that win hearts and boost your business bottom line month after month
So how do you properly send out cold emails?
While each use case and scenario may be slightly different, here are 10 guidelines to ensure you are running and optimizing your cold email campaigns as efficiently as possible:
1. Define your target audiences
2. Ensure your email list is of highest quality
3. Secure/buy your domains for email sending
4. Set up your email, domain records and master inbox properly
5. Follow a proven email warm-up procedure
6. Use proven (“tested”) email copy and a high quality email list
7. Set up an email sending tool and personalization process
8. Launch your cold email campaign
9. Monitor your results and know what to look for
10. Optimize your strategy based on your results/KPIs
Domain Reputation — your cold emailing domain reputation can be affected by a few factors namely its classification (i.e. what type of website you have — business, education, finance, etc.) and the age of your domain (i.e. whether it was purchased 5 years ago or 5 days ago).
With a new domain, it is critical to “warm-up” your domain prior to sending out a bunch of cold email campaigns/blasts. We’ll go into depth on the precise steps you need to take to warm up your new domain properly later in this guide.
First, we need to understand the types of email bounces and how bounce rate affects your email deliverability.
The Difference Between Soft & Hard Bounces
Soft Bounce — occurs when there are issues from the recipient’s inbox (e.g. out of space or temporarily not working)
Hard Bounce — occurs when the recipient’s email does not exist or is blocked
While these two types of bounces arise from different issues, the end result is the same — too many bounces (specifically over 2% of all your emails sent) will negatively impact your email deliverability rate. A bounce rate beyond 2% will likely get you blacklisted by ESPs.
Here’s how to moderate your email deliverability:
How To Optimize Your Email Deliverability - 3 Aspects (email account configuration, email content, high quality email contact list)
1. Configure your email account(s) properly — as mentioned before, use a separate/secondary emailing domain other than your primary business/company domain for cold emailing purposes. Set up your SPF and DKIM records properly. Use a proper ramp up sequence/cadence when warming up your cold emailing domain (see process below)
2. Use proper/optimized email copy — this includes personalized email copy tailored for each recipient (vs. templated or canned copy), avoiding spam words or spammy copy (check against existing spam words lists), and keeping your email formatting simple (i.e. avoiding too much HTML, having a simple email signature)
3. Utilizing a high-quality email contact list — as mentioned earlier with bounces, building and sending to a high-quality email list (one that’s been tested/verified) will ensure you maintain a high email deliverability rate and your messaging reaches its intended prospect (see our process for building a high-quality email list below)
Properly warming up your cold emailing domain helps ensure that ESPs don’t ban or blacklist you for spamming hundreds of contacts from a relatively or completely new domain. There are two ways to properly warm up your cold emailing domain: manually and automated.
How to manually warm up your new cold emailing domain:
1. Start by sending out a few emails to friends and colleagues you know for the first 2-3 weeks after registering your new domain. Ask them to reply and engage with your email(s).
2. Slowly ramp up your daily volumes of emails. Avoid big increases in email volume. Send to recipients with different ESPs (e.g. @yahoo.com or @outlook.com or @icloud.com).
3. Send your emails at different random times of the day.
4. Make sure your friends and colleagues are responding and engaging back with you.
Best practice tip: increase your daily volumes of emails by no more than 5 each day. So if you send 5 emails on day one, you should not send more than 10 emails on day two.
How to automate warming up your new cold emailing domain:
1. Use a tool like Inboxy.io to automate and simulate the above manual process.
2. Connect your email account to Inboxy, set your parameters, and let Inboxy properly warm up your cold emailing domain.
Building/sourcing a high-quality cold email list is critical for ensuring your email and domain reputation stays high and your cold emails are met with a healthy level of engagement and interest. As such, it’s of paramount importance to verify/test your cold emails (to ensure they exist) and strip out unverified emails and emails that do not exist.
Here are three major tips on how to ensure a high-quality cold email contact list:
Now that we’ve discussed the importance of building a high-quality cold email list, let’s get into the details on how to do it efficiently. First, you’ll need to build an ICP “Ideal Customer Profile” based on the following five (5) criteria:
1. Vertical/Niche
2. Geography (of Niche)
3. Company Size
4. Job Title
5. Function
Once this is done, you can either automate or manually perform the following processes:
1. Automate — enter the above criteria into a tool such as Apollo.io, Sales Navigator, etc. and have it generate your list
2. Manual — manually go through LinkedIn and pull matching contacts
If you’re deciding between email tools, here’s a bit more info on Apollo vs. other similar ones:
1. There’s no reason to use ZoomInfo, Outreach, Seamless or Salesloft, unless you run a big sales org.
2. Apollo.io is an email provider plus sending tool in one. It’s $99/mo, and similar in quality and features.
3. One of our guys booked three mid-market meetings in his first week learning Apollo.
What makes email work is your copy and targeting strategy, and iteration off open/reply rates. Which is the same for all tools.
Here’s the exact process we use with Apollo.io to sources our high-quality cold email lists:
Now that we’ve covered almost all of the technical aspects of cold emailing, it’s time to learn about the content that will go into these cold emails and ultimately convert your ideal customer into a paying client.
At Cleverly, we’ve sent hundreds of thousands of cold emails and messages for ourselves and our clients. Without fail, there are four (4) components that make up every single great cold emailing message:
1. Product market fit — the service or product you are pitching needs to solve a serious and specific pain point for your ideal customer’s niche/industry. This needs to be obvious.
2. Personalization — in general, the more personalized the message, the higher your engagement rate will be. Manually, it can be an extremely tedious process, but fortunately with Quicklines (an AI tool for cold outreach personalization), you can truly automate the process — see more below.
3. Short direct message — no fluff, get right to the point. Count on your prospect to have a really short attention span when it comes to cold emails.
4. Questions (in place of meetings) — asking for a meeting so you can then further pitch your product/service can kill the entire sale. Instead, ask specific questions that drive back to your pitch or offer.
Using Quicklines.ai For Cold Emailing Personalization
Quicklines takes your cold email leads and creates custom email personalization lines. Here are five (5) ways Quicklines can help you personalize your cold email outreach:
1. Compliments — Quicklines can help you open your email with a personalized compliment (e.g. their latest blog post/newsletter, how slick their website looks, etc.)
2. Common Ground — Quicklines will help you identify common grounds between you and your prospect (e.g. college, same city, business philosophy, etc.)
3. LinkedIn Abouts — Quicklines will identify standout or notables in your prospect’s LinkedIn About section and craft custom lines about those achievements.
4. Companies Worked With — Quicklines will mention companies and clients you’ve worked with to help establish credibility. This is especially effective if your prospect is familiar with the company or companies mentioned.
5. P.S. Line — Many times, prospects will quickly scan through your cold email and scroll straight to the bottom. A P.S. Line can be a powerful way to engage them at this point. Quicklines automates writing these highly personalized P.S. lines.
In general, we recommend crafting at least a four (4) touch sequence (i.e. one initial cold outreach email followed by three follow-ups).
Here are our top two most effective cold emailing templates:
Cold Email Template 1: The Value Add
Subject line: Suggestions for {Company}
FIRST NAME,
I saw {something relevant about your company}. I have a suggestion for improving {metric A} and {metric B}.
We helped {client name} {do this thing better}, that led to {result}.
{Frictionless, value-driven call to action}?
Touch 2 (same thread):
Mind if I email over those suggestions? Worst case, you can ignore them.
Touch 3 (new thread): Hey FIRST NAME,
To {improve this metric}, we {value proposition}.
Is that relevant at all to you right now?
Touch 4 (same thread): Here’s a case study on how we helped {similar company to you} do {x thing better}.
I’m certain we can replicate those results for you. Worth a 15-min chat?
Example of formula 1:
Cold Email Template 2: The Problem/Solution
See the LinkedIn post below from Mike Gallardo for an amazing cold email framework. Mike directs a very successful sales development team for a massive company called Deel, steal his formulas:
As mentioned before, if you’re starting out with brand new secondary domains for your cold email outreach, you’ll need to precisely warm up your domain(s) following the manual protocol we’ve outlined or use a tool like Inboxy to automate the process.
Here are four (4) critical cold emailing considerations if you are doing the entire process manually or automating with some tools:
1. Leverage sending from multiple email domains — this is a cold emailing best practice as it will help spread the volume of your emails across multiple domains (helping to preserve and maximize deliverability).
2. Prioritize deliverability — by using the above tactic, the total volume per inbox per day will be drastically reduced. Additionally, if there are soft or hard bounces, they’ll be spread over several inboxes (vs. tanking just one inbox).
3. Keeping data costs low — you’ll quickly find that building/scraping a high quality cold email list will be time and resource intensive. This is where a lot of your bulk costs and time will be spent. Leverage tools like Apollo.io or Sales Navigator to help minimize these costs and time spent.
4. “Spintax” — as a best cold emailing practice, you’ll want to vary and switch up your copy in all your cold emails to avoid spam detection. This can be a tedious (but necessary) process to coordinate if done manually, but can also be automated with the right tools.
Once you start sending and receiving emails, you’ll want to keep track of certain KPIs and continue to test and iterate subject lines, copy, personalization, offer, etc. to optimize your cold email campaigns.
The biggest KPIs to look out and optimize for include: Open Rate, Reply Rate and Booked Meeting Volume (or similar success metric e.g. booked demo, trial offer, etc.).
When it comes to cold emailing engagement, we prioritize: fast responses, leveraging a CRM, following-up with everyone who becomes a warm lead at least 5-7 times and treating outbound leads differently than inbound — they’re inherently harder to close.
If you'd like us to run your cold email efforts for you, learn more here.