Cold Email Checklist You Must Follow

Setting a specific goal

In the field of cold emailing, setting goals is an integral first step. Failing to establish proper objectives leaves you navigating without a compass and a wast of money.

An effective way to set goals is to make them SMART

1. Specific: Be precise about what you want to achieve from cold emailing. Are you expecting to generate calls, seek partnerships, or make direct sales? The more specific your goals, the easier it will be to craft emails that elicit the desired response and action.

2. Measurable: You should be able to evaluate your progress towards your goal quantitatively. This quantification can include metrics such as number of emails sent, conversion rates, responses received, or deals closed. Establishing measurable goals will aid you in aggregating data that you can later leverage to optimize your future efforts.

3. Achievable: It's crucial to set goals that are challenging but not impossible.

4. Relevant: Your goals should align with your brand's broader strategy or vision. If your overarching goal is brand awareness, for instance, a matching email marketing goal could involve initiating conversations or increasing your website referrals. Without relevancy, you risk diluting your efforts and drifting off course.

5. Time-Bound: Apply deadlines to your goals to infuse a sense of urgency in your actions and help you maintain focus. A proper time frame allows you to track progress, make necessary modifications, and understand your exact standing with respect to your goals.

Acquiring a contact list

• Signed up for the newsletter

• Obtained through social networks

• Obtained in an Ads campaign such as Google or Facebook.

• Using scraping tools with artificial intelligence

Before the cold emailing process begins, you need to know who you're targeting. One of the integral stages in creating a successful cold emailing strategy is obtaining a reliable list of contacts. However, this is not just any list; it should be a list of properly targeted potential customers or clients, also known as 'leads.'

The first thing to do is to identify who your potential customers are. Be specific about who you're targeting. If you're running a software as a service (SaaS) business for payment processing, for instance, your target audience might be e-commerce businesses.

Once you have effectively identified your target demographic, the next step involves actual data collection. Garnering email addresses isn't as easy as it sounds. Some options to achieve this include purchasing a list of contacts from credible providers, using lead generation tools that scrape the web for contact information, or utilizing networking platforms like LinkedIn which is a gold mine for contact information, particularly for B2B emailing.

Set up your email account and secondary domains

Once you have your objectives set and the daily amount of emails you are going to send, it is necessary to do the math to understand how many email accounts and secondary domains will be needed for your campaign in question.

We recommend sending a maximum of 100 emails/day per email account and having a maximum of 5 email accounts per secondary domain.

Sending a large volume of cold emails from a single account can potentially trigger spam filters. Email traffic is closely monitored by Internet and Email Service Providers. An account that suddenly increases its outgoing email frequency or maintains a high level of email dispatch may be flagged for spamming, leading to potential restrictions or suspension. Acquiring several auxiliary domains enables you to distribute a large number of emails without jeopardizing your email delivery success.

For example, if your goal is to distribute 3,000 emails daily, you should ideally have 6 auxiliary domains, each associated with 5 different email accounts. This setup allows each account to distribute 100 emails daily without triggering spam filters.

Warm up your email accounts

Before starting your campaigns, if your accounts are new, it is advisable to perform a month of Warm-up.

A common mistake many people make when jumping into cold emails is sending a huge batch of emails at once. This is a rookie error that could harm your sender reputation and lead to a significant portion of your emails being marked as spam. To avoid this, it is crucial to warm up your campaigns.

Warming up essentially involves gradually increasing the volume of your emails over a given period. It is akin to an athlete warming up before a race - it minimizes damage and increases performance considerably. This process will enable internet service providers (ISPs) to recognize and trust your IP address, boosting your sender reputation and email deliverability.

We recommend starting sending as low as 2 emails per day and den increase the number of email by 2 every day for at least one month.

There are some warmup platforms that provide you real answers from your delivered emails. Helping you not only on the first stage but also to increase your open and answer rates improving this way your deliverability.

Know your sending limits

Consistent Frequency & Volume of Your Email Delivery When forming an effective cold email campaign, consistency is key. Maintaining a regular frequency and volume of email delivery can greatly increase the likelihood of your emails making it to the main inbox.

Email Service Providers (ESPs), the likes of Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook, employ an array of mechanisms to ensure user's mailbox safety. One of their arsenal is a spam-filtering system that keeps tabs on all outgoing emails from an IP address. The frequency and quantity of these emails are minutely monitored. If the system identifies abrupt and unexplained spikes in the volume of emails or an uncharacteristic sending pattern, it's quite possible your emails will be flagged as spam.

A powerful tool in this regard might be a feature-rich software platform designed to send your emails with a frequency and volume controller.

Consider this, suppose you plan on sending 45,000 emails in a month. It's highly recommended to spread them out evenly over the course of the month. This means delivering about 1,500 emails per day with different email accounts and secondary domains rather than flooding inboxes in one go. This strategy helps maintain a balanced flow, thereby refraining the ESPs from red-flagging your messages.

Create your personalized emails campaign

When it comes to cold emailing, sending generic, mass-produced messages will most likely bring disappointing results. In the era of digital personalization, the key to increasing your response rate lies in constructing personalized email campaigns. So what does personalization entail, and how can you implement it effectively? Before you write a single line, it's crucial that you understand the person, or the company, you're writing to. This includes general background information, their business needs, services they offer, recent news, etc. Leverage social media platforms like LinkedIn, and the company's official website for this. The purpose here is to find elements that you can creatively weave into your email to make it sound more personalized. Personalization starts with your subject line. Including the recipient's name or the company’s name in the subject line can grab attention. However, ensure it sounds natural and not overly familiar or intrusive.

If you're going to use software tools for your cold emails, make sure to use those that send personalized emails. It's no longer enough to have a few variables like {{first_name}} in the same template. Make sure to use artificial intelligence tools that help you personalize your cold emails to the fullest.

Personalizing emails not only helps achieve a better response rate from potential clients but also prevents them from falling into spam filters. Here's an article discussing the best On-Email tips to avoid SPAM.

Measure your campaigns

Having sent out your carefully-crafted cold emails, you're now onto the final and crucial step of the process - measuring your campaigns. Without insight into how well (or poorly) your emails are performing; you cannot define progress, identify trends, or modify your strategy. This step is all about tracking, analyzing, and interpreting the data from your previous steps, allowing you to understand the performance of your cold emails. Your measurements should provide insightful knowledge about what is working, what isn’t, and where there might be room for improvement.

There are numerous key performance indicators (KPIs) you might look at when you measure the success of your cold email campaigns such as:

• Open Rate

• Click-through rate (CTR)

• Response rate

• Conversion rate

• Bounce rate

Measuring your campaigns is an ongoing process and not a one-off activity. It is a significant step as it provides you with objective feedback, helping you to continually evolve and perfect your cold email strategies. Remember, the goal isn't to be perfect from the start, but to continuously learn and adapt.