Cold Email? Start With This Simple Setup

[00:00:00] If you are doing your cold email out of HubSpot or Zoho or your CRM, you're not actually doing cold email. You're sending a newsletter to people who don't know you. Sending a couple hundred emails at a time is not cold email. Last month, we sent 5,171 emails. We got 103 replies. But shockingly, only about 25 of those were positive responses. And those are the metrics you need to really get results with cold email.

[00:00:29] And that's why today we're going to break down how you can set up to run cold email at scale, how to improve those results, and how to create this infrastructure for the long term. Welcome to Payrollin'. And now, here's your host, Matt Vaadi. Let's go. I'm joined today by Chris Clark, who's the Director of Outreach at Underdog Digital,

[00:00:56] who handles all things cold outreach for underdog and their clients. Chris, why don't you open us up with why your CRM is probably not the right tool for handling cold email? Yeah, it's a great question. And I think it's probably the number one misconception about sending cold email. And a lot of it, Matt, has to do with changes that email service providers have made. Really, this has been a long time coming. It's kind of been a little bit of a domino effect.

[00:01:23] And it's continued even since 2024 when Gmail, Yahoo put in a lot of more robust spam protections, right? So, in a nutshell, a CRM is not optimized for cold email sending. CRMs are very, very powerful. They do a lot of different things. They're great at sending transactional or marketing emails.

[00:01:48] For example, nurture sequences, automating invoices, payments, sending out newsletters to your warm, engaged audience. But they're not optimized for cold sending because cold sending is a totally different mechanism. Obviously, the segmentation is warm audience, past customers, current customers, people who are on your email newsletter, people who have otherwise engaged with you. Cold customers are cold outreaches to people who literally don't know you.

[00:02:18] The first email that they get from you, if you can land in their inbox, is the first touchpoint possibly that they've ever gotten from you. And so, the technical setup of those things is a lot different. Spam protections now are so powerful that your infrastructure has to be the number one thing that you set up. There are a lot of different tools out there that help you accomplish that, which I'm sure we'll dive into a lot of those here as we continue.

[00:02:44] But in a nutshell, in short, CRMs are optimized for, in terms of email, warm engagement, newsletters, things like that. They are not optimized technically to be able to send email to cold audiences. So, let's back into that scale piece that we just talked about. So, to get 5,000 plus emails out in a month, the infrastructure that you need, what does that look like? I mean, how many different domains? How many different mailboxes approximately?

[00:03:13] And why are there different domains, different mailboxes? And talk to us about like the actual setup behind the scenes to get that many emails out in a month. Yeah, that's a great question. And typically, if you're sending out through a CRM, so say a Zoho, a HubSpot, a high level, and if you were trying to run cold email through it, typically what would happen is you would set up your email address, and then you would be sending through the CRMs servers a lot of the time.

[00:03:41] And so, what CRMs are not optimized to do is to actually throttle your sending limits and to be able to rotate tons of inboxes into your cold sending. The more people you're sending to, and you have to scale your sending to be able to have success in cold email, unless you're getting super targeted, the more inboxes you're going to need, and the more domains you're going to need.

[00:04:04] The best practice industry-wide for sending cold emails is 20 to 30 a day per inbox. Okay, so you may say, well, Chris, I have a Google Workspace account, and it's telling me that I can send up to 2,000 emails per day off of that account. Technically, that's true. If you sent 2,000 cold emails a day off of your Gmail account, you're probably going to get banned or you're going to be going to spam a whole lot, right?

[00:04:34] And so, what you want to do is create a variety of inboxes, set the sending limits for them at 20 to 30 a day. That's the best practice. Sequencers out there can help you do that. Create different domains so that you're not relying only on your main domain. Think about this. Your main domain, if you're using a CRM, if you're emailing people transactional items, if you have an email newsletter, you want to protect your main domain as much as possible.

[00:04:59] When you're sending cold email, there is a harsh reality that you are going to get people who say, please take me off your list, or not even as nicely, take me off your list. You're going to get marked as spam sometimes. Every time that happens, your domain sending reputation can actually go down, which then can affect other parts of your business. So, that's why it's very important to diversify your sending across multiple domains and across multiple inboxes.

[00:05:27] So, just to give you an example to actually answer your question, Matt, one of the inbox providers that we use is called Scaled Mail. One of their baseline plans where you can get a couple domains and get 25 to 30 inboxes across those domains costs about $50 a month for that infrastructure. That will get you to a place where you can be running 25 to 30 inboxes at one time and send about 7,000 cold emails per month.

[00:05:56] Again, utilizing safe sending limits across all those inboxes. If you sent that volume of cold email from one email address on one domain, from two email addresses on one domain, you're simply not going to be able to keep up that pace because you're going to get sent to a bad place, which is the spam folder. Even if you get some returns initially, it's going to end up catching up to you. So, very important to diversify your inbox and your domains. Beautiful.

[00:06:25] And just for clarity sake, like, so for example, like Guru, we might have a domain that is, our primary domain is guHRoo.co. Some of the domains we use for cold email might be guHRoo.in, guHRooPayroll.co. Like, we'll just, you buy a bunch of different variations that are close, maybe include your name, maybe don't include any names or anything in your name, but you've got to just create these additional domains and then get a couple of mailboxes set up on each.

[00:06:55] Chris, let's talk a little bit about, we've got a couple more minutes, let's talk a little bit about the messaging. So, what is working right now in terms of messaging? To your point, we all get hundreds of cold emails a day. What are you seeing that's actually cutting through the noise? And how many emails are you sending on average in a campaign? Yeah, so typically we go with a three-touch campaign. You can find some people out there sending email, and we've had success with this, sending a one or two email sequence. You can send a five email sequence. You typically don't see them longer than that.

[00:07:25] Generally, the sweet spot is going to be three emails within the span of anywhere from seven days to 10 days to two weeks, just to spread them out a little bit and stay top of mind. The other thing, and I'm glad you asked this about the copy and what cuts through the noise, is a lot of times...

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