I recently posted on LinkedIn about my takeaways from my cold emailing experiences. In particular, my learnings from sending over 19000 emails in a week (~ circa 2017), and generating over $4m in SMB pipeline.

This resulted in closing around $910K in annual recurring revenue (ARR) for the business.

The LinkedIn post got good engagement, and over 5000 people viewed it. 

I published the same post in other relevant places, one of which was Indiehackers.com.

While it didn't get as much attention as on LinkedIn, I received far more relevant questions about the posts than I did on other channels. Another reason why Indiehackers is such a quality community.

Due to so many questions, I decided to give everyone here a free masterclass on cold emailing, LOL, in all seriousness though I hope this post provides some value to each of you. 

Let's get started, this is going to be one of the most detailed posts about cold emailing you'll ever read.

Six Pillars of Cold Emailing

I always start by introducing the six core pillars of cold emailing. These six pillars are:

1. Deliverability

2. Timing

3. Subject Line

4. Email Copy 

5. Follow-up 

6. Re-engagement

Before we get into each one of them, take a moment to debunk a myth around cold emailing. 

It's not true. The email copy is one of the core pillars of cold emailing, but it's not the only factor that makes you successful. 

You need to figure out all six pillars to knock the ball out of the park with cold emailing.

Things to measure

When it comes to cold emailing, you are optimizing for four key metrics:

1. Send Rate

2. Open Rate

3. Reply Rate

4. Get Back Rate

Deliverability has the greatest impact on Send Rate.

Timing and Subject Line affect open rates.

Email Copy and Follow-Up within an email sequence have an impact on Reply Rates.

A prospect's Get Back Rate is impacted by not burning bridges with the first email sequence you sent them, and by not getting marked as spam.

Let's dig deeper into these pillars.

Deliverability: Must Do Things Before Sending Out Cold Emails

The probability of your emails being delivered to their intended recipients is called deliverability.

Prior to putting together your outreach sequence, you need to complete the technical setup. 

I tweeted this about cold emailing -

Yup. SPF, DMARC, and DKIM checks. Don’t beat yourself up if you haven’t heard about these terms before. 

Before I give you an overview of those weird technical terms. Here is an important hack -

A secondary domain is not your main domain, but a similar looking domain that really redirects the traffic to the main domain. 

For example: my business domain is Revxgen.com, which is my primary domain. I also bought Revxgen.io, which I would use for setting up my cold emailing program. 

The key point is - do not use your main business domain for cold outreach programs.

When you scale cold emailing to thousands of emails, every time your domain is marked spam, it affects your domain's reputation. The main domain of your business should therefore be preserved. 

Doesn't that make sense?

The technical setup

A high delivery rate can also be achieved through proper authentication. Configure the following key domain settings:

• Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

• DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)

• Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, & Conformance (DMARC)

• Pointer (PTR)

• Mail Exchange (MX) and Address (A)

I won't go into these configurations in this post, but in a nutshell, setup procedures differ based on your domain hosting provider. 

You can find a pretty comprehensive breakdown of the most common authentication issues (along with tips for resolving them) in this article by Reply.io, so you can use these instructions when setting things up.

Warm up your email account

It is important to warm up your email account properly. It is a set of activities designed to build a positive reputation for the sender. 

You should send emails to trusted email addresses (such as your friends or colleagues) and have them open them, mark them as important, respond to them, and even take them out of spam if necessary. 

Following the warm-up, you can gradually increase the number of outgoing emails and reduce the delay between them.

In the beginning, I advise setting a delay of at least 200 seconds between two cold emails going out on a newly warmed-up domain. Keep like this for a couple of weeks and send out under 100 cold emails per day. 

After a couple of weeks you could reduce the delay to around 100 seconds, and then again in next couple of weeks to 67 seconds.

This is how you ensure deliverability!

Secret To High Open Rate: Timing + Subject Lines

Emails that are well crafted are of no value if they aren't opened, so it's crucial to nail the open rates. 

The success of email open rates purely depends on two factors:

1. Getting the timing right

2. Having a subject line that makes people open the email

You can only get the timing right if you live through the lens of your target persona. To capture your receiver's attention in their inbox, you must understand their lifestyle and make calculated bets. 

For example, if you are selling to doctors, you should send your emails just before their breaks. If your emails are sent when the doctor is busy with patients, it is probably not realistic. For the best chance of getting opened, stay on top of their inbox. 

Yes, you heard me right, the best way to get your email opened is to not reveal everything in the subject line.

However, if your subject line is irrelevant and does not connect with the email body, people will feel deceived and cheated. You certainly don’t want to leave a bad taste.

Getting Responses: Email Copy + Sequence

Avoiding the spam filters

Consider how a spam filter might interpret your subject line and email when writing good emails. Despite the fact that you may be predicting an extra few inches of snow, the filters might see this as a massive red flag.

In emails, there are a variety of words that are likely to be marked as spam, here's a list of some of them.

Less image, more text

It is also recommended that you avoid sending images in the cold email. There is something called image to text ratio, and strict spam filters won’t let your email pass if text to image ratio is lower than 80:20. 

No links in initial emails

If you are cold emailing prospects in highly regulated industries such as healthcare, financial services, cyber security, government, etc., then you must avoid sending an image and links in your first two emails of the cold email sequence. This will provide you with the maximum deliverability. 

Once a couple of emails are successfully delivered, then the mailbox of the receiver has registered the sender as safe, and it won’t block suspicious links anymore.

Email structure:

Structure your email body in three parts: 

a. Context: 

Your email opener should explain why you are writing to this person in the first 1-2 sentences. This is what makes cold email “warm”. 

b. Pitch/Value: 

The second paragraph should contain two to four sentences. Concisely present your pitch or what you can offer the person.

c. Ask:

Make sure you make it clear to them what you need.

And that’s it. 

No one-off email in cold outreach:

The wrong way to conduct cold outreach is to send one email rather than a sequence of emails.

As a matter of fact, a sequence of emails significantly improves the open rates for your emails, and gives you a chance of getting a response back. 

As an example, you had 100 people in your email list. A three-email sequence is sent every third day. 

Your first email was opened by 25 people.

Your second email was opened by 28 people.

Your third email was opened by 20 people.

But the second email was opened by 15 people who opened your first email, and 13 people who didn’t open your first email. 

Likewise, the third email was opened by 15 people who might have opened either the first or second email, but 5 people who didn't. 

The overall number of people who opened the email sequence = (25 +13 + 5) = 43 people out of 100. That’s basically 43% Open Rate for the sequence. 

In a nutshell, email sequences increase your open rates. Better open rates lead to better reply rates.

Never Break Up, Re-engage 

Let me first start by saying this - it is 2022, and if you are still sending those 3 pointer break up emails that everyone is sending then you are doing it all wrong!

Copy structure, not email copy

Don't forget to keep your message original. People often overcomplicate cold emailing. The first thing they do is search online for top performing sales email templates.

Once something is online, it's already old in the internet world. Thousands of people have used those templates, and yours looks like it was copied and pasted.

Don’t burn the bridges

Use common sense. When it comes to cold emailing, there are many ways to succeed. Optimizing for your key success metric is crucial. 

For instance, you don't want to aggressively contact the person 5 times a week. As a matter of fact, we sent out just 3 cold emails within a two-week period. Self-proclaimed internet gurus will tell you that’s too little checkpoints in 14 days. Don’t buy that crap.

Cold emailing is like building relationship with the receiver through emails. You don’t want to annoy the person and put an end to the relationship.

Do not burn the bridge after one sequence. Instead, give an out to the person who has not responded, and set the expectations that you will follow-up after a few weeks or months. This will help you build the context for your next outreach, making cold email “warm”.

This is where the Get Back Rate for your list comes into picture. Simply put it’s the measure of people getting lost between multiple sequences over time.

That’s all for today folks

This brings me to the end of Part 1 of this masterclass in cold emailing. In Part 2, I will go over the “How” of sending over 19000 emails in a week. 

Let's put a stop to this long-winded email for now. Hopefully it lived up to the hype I created at the beginning.

Anyway, until next time, take care and enjoy!