Use Cold Email to Grow Your Business – The Complete Guide [2021]

Estimated time to complete: 1 hour

The most common servers used to send cold emails are probably Google Workspace, better known as G Suite. A lot of people also use Office 365, the paid version of Outlook by Microsoft. Both of which claim has the ability to send a high number of emails per day for each sender.

Pro Tip: It is known from our experience and others that Office has better deliverability than Google.

However, we’ve found the sending limit info to be bogus as it relates to cold email outreach. We’ve seen accounts shut down for doing cold outreach even when they’ve been used regularly for years. As an experiment last year we had set up the popular tool GMass on a Gmail account that was used frequently over the past 8 years. We were only sending around 100 emails per day with perfect deliverability and still, the account was shut down after only a couple of weeks.

These email servers have intelligent bots that are always looking at open rates, delivery rates, reply rates and will recognize that you are sending an email to a cold audience. The threshold is quite minimal in regards to the percentage you need to stay under to not be put on their “naughty list”. However, we’ve never had no issues when following our 40/40 rule.

At WOWlutions, we actually just use the free email service that comes standard with most cloud hosting solutions. Our favorite hosting provider is SiteGround because of the incredible support they offer. We will purchase the domains on GoDaddy and then change the nameservers and point them to SiteGround. Once you add the domain to SiteGround, you can create as many email addresses as you want. This beats paying $6/mo per email sender with Google or Microsoft.

Pro Tip: Use NameMesh to quickly find awesome domains based on keywords of your choosing.

Before creating your email accounts, be sure to enable SPF and DKIM for your domain, and also be sure to install Let’s Encrypt, a free SSL that you can attach to your domain.

Here at WOWlutions, we only connect 2 or 3 cold email accounts (senders) per domain name. The higher amount of cold email sent per day, per domain, dramatically increases your chances of “burning” (ruining the reputation) that domain. This then of course kills your deliverability, leads to landing in spam, and destroys any chance of winning that potential customer.

Chapter 1 Action Items:

Estimated time to complete: 45 minutes

For those of you not familiar with WOWlutions, here are some of the key benefits:

All of this is included for $149/month (7-day free trial). One size fits all whether you’re just starting out or you want to send thousands of cold emails each day.

Paying for these features separately would add up to thousands of dollars per month in most cases.

From within WOWlutions, you will want to navigate to the “CRM” tab at the top and then click on the “Senders (SMTP)” tab.

Pro Tip: Use NameMesh to quickly find awesome domains based on keywords of your choosing.

You can find your SMTP and IMAP information HERE.

SiteGround will provide you with your SMPT/IMAP information once you create an email sender.

That should give you your hostname and port number. Then you just need to reference your login credentials for each sender account that you previously saved in your spreadsheet.

You can create an email signature or leave it blank and come back to it later.

Note: There are some additional steps needed if you are using Google or Office. Links to the instructions are found within this screen in WOWlutions. Essentially with Google, you need to go into your Google Workspace admin account and grant access to less secure apps, here is the LINK. The same thing more or less for Office, you have to enable SMTP authentication from your admin account, here is the LINK.

Pro Tip: Avoid using links in your signature, make sure to include a picture if you have one that looks nice. Try to incorporate a snippet of data that gives you credibility as a reliable and trustworthy person, such as social proof.

We recommend setting your daily sending limit to 40 per day. We have battle-tested sending 40 cold emails along with 40 warm emails per day per sender and have consistently achieved really high deliverability and open rates without burning the domain. This is our 40/40 rule we mentioned previously.

After you connect your sender, you will see a button titled “Warm up the deliverability”. We recommend that you set the max daily limit to 40 emails per day and set the increment starting point to 4 emails per day.

Your domain and email sender reputation will now be automatically warmed up each day. We recommend letting this run for a minimum of 14 days before sending any cold email. After that, be sure to leave this running indefinitely. The combination of cold email with warm email lowers your threshold for bad metric percentages. In other words, as long as you’re cleaning your lists and hitting the right buyer persona, you should never have to worry about bots thinking you’re sending spam.

Chapter 2 Action Items:

Estimated time to complete: 20 minutes

The steps in this chapter are based on an assumption that you already have a business strategy put together which addresses the pain point of your buyer persona. If this is something you need help with, please feel free to contact us and we’ll gladly give you some guidance.

Reaching the right person with the right offer is going to dramatically increase your open rate and reply rate. We recommend looking into guides online that can help you craft your unique value proposition. That content can be repurposed into personalized emails to your potential customer.

From the “CRM” tab, you’ll see the “Templates” button at the top and you can click “Create New Template”. You have the ability to save as many templates as you want, send test emails, and generate previews. Templates can be assigned to different users if you want to have someone join in and manage your cold emailing.

From the campaign screen, you’ll see many unique default macros that you can be used in your template. It’s important to remember that our software will also create other macros after you import a list or add prospect data.

Fun Fact: Personalized subject lines increase cold email open rate by 26%.

You’ll notice a gallery of cold email templates and cold email scripts at the top of the screen. If you want to use a custom template that matches your brand you can also import HTML.

Pro Tip: For the initial outreach on a cold email campaign, you should avoid using images and links. A simple text email is best, make sure it’s personalized to your buyer persona. Coming up with a very clear question that leads to the solving of a problem for your target audience is a sure-fire way to get your prospect’s attention and land them as a potential client or customer.

Now, you’ll want to import a list of cold prospect data. Later on, we will be going through how you can use WOWlutions to get as much outreach data as you want.

From the “CRM” tab you’ll see the “Lists” button at the top and you can click “Create a New List”. Make sure you give your list a name that has a clear definition because you’re soon probably going to have hundreds of lists. Again, you can assign the lists to different users if you have someone else on your team managing sales emails or cold outreach for specific digital marketing campaigns.

When you import your list you will have the ability to assign macros to your columns. If there isn’t a default one available you can create custom macros. Be sure to keep a note of all your macros for each list in a spreadsheet or in your internal documentation somewhere, we use Microsoft OneNote for this.

Pro Tip: The richer your data, the more macros you can create, which means more personalized emails.

Note: Be sure to not import lists of more than 5000 contacts, this is the max list size you can assign to a single campaign (you can assign each sender to a different campaign). If you are on Mac OS X, you can easily follow this tutorial by Eikhart and if you’re on Windows you can check out this free tool by ERD Company.

Next, you’re going to select the “Campaigns” tab and “Create a New Campaign”. From here, you can send a one-off email or you can create a sequence that would contain follow up emails.

Most of the fields shown here should be self-explanatory so we won’t go through them all. However, we will share with you our strategy in regards to configuring sending times and delays.

Remember, we’re sending just 40 cold emails per day per sender.

In this example, our target audience is in the United States and we want to reach them in the middle of the day. We’re going to set our sending schedule to the Mountain Standard Time and between 9 AM and 3 PM.

Okay, let’s do some math.

40 emails in 6 hours is roughly 7 emails per hour. 60 minutes divided by 7 emails means our max delay timer should not be HIGHER than 8 minutes, if we want to get all of the cold emails sent.

We will then put in a minimum delay of 4 minutes so that the range feels natural but also doesn’t run the risk of sending emails too quickly.

For your business, you may have a 10 or 12-hour time frame for sending emails to your target audience, in which case your delay could be set as high as 18 minutes with a higher minimum delay such as 8 minutes.

You’ll definitely want to leave “track clicks” and “track opens” checked.

Pro Tip: Designed with the busy person in mind, with WOWlutions you can automatically move a prospect that opens an email or replies to an email to a separate list. For this reason, we never start a campaign out on a sequence but instead wait to create follow up emails till after the initial outreach is complete and action has occurred. If no action occurs, those “dead” prospects are stripped clean from our list to ensure maximum optimization for our cold email sender account. We will circle back down the road and attempt to re-engage with them. When we do this, we will often reposition the value proposition and try using a different subject line. Often times, you may just need to build a relationship with them first by sharing valuable content (like this guide :-).

You’ll notice that there is a checkbox for “Custom reply To / CC / BCC”. If you don’t want to use our “All Replies” master inbox, you can set an email address for where all your replies will be sent to. Oftentimes people might set this as the official non-cold email address they use from their @mainwebsite.com email sender account (which you could always connect to WOWlutions and use also).

The CC feature could be used on a campaign where you are responding to a large number of replies and you want to include someone else from your team to help with responses. The BCC is often used to integrate into a 3rd party tool like a CRM, where you could log the contact data and emails into HubSpot or ActiveCampaign for example.

Chapter 3 Action Items:

Estimated time to complete: 15 minutes

Score attribution will assign a point value to leads based on specific events that occur: open, click, visit your website, replied, and converted.

It’s really up to you to determine the point value you want to assign to each event. Every business has a different model and a lot depends on the product(s) or service(s) you offer. Essentially the goal here is to be able to easily identify which prospects have a higher probability to convert into a potential client or customer.

Qualified leads will have a higher score and this is usually an indication you’re reaching the right person. Over time this will help you see which campaigns gain your prospect’s attention so that you can narrow down your ideal customer profile.

Fun Fact: 17.75% of clicked through emails result in a purchase.

A simple way to determine a point value system is by working your way backward. Let’s assume that a lead score of 50 or higher out of 100 is considered a qualified warm lead for your business.

Now, you just need to ask yourself “which events need to occur in order to make a qualified lead warm enough so that they convert to a potential client or customer?”.

For WOWlutions, we look for a lead score of 70 or higher. Getting to that score might look something like this:

In this example, we would still have one BIG conversion event that didn’t’ happen, upgrading from trial to a paid user. We’ll give that a value of 30 points which now gets us to 100 points total lead score, the BIG WIN!

Now, let’s work backwards. If we give the free trial a value of 30pts and the visited demo a value of 20pts, that leaves 20pts left for open, reply and click. Then we will assign 11pts for the demo, 6pts for the reply and 3pts for the open.

Hopefully, this will give you an idea of how to set up lead scoring in a way that makes sense for your business. This will guide you to success, especially when you’re sending thousands of cold emails each day and dealing with a ton of potential leads. Naturally, you want to make sure you focus your energy on delivering content and value to the prospects that are at least somewhat interested in what you have to offer!

Chapter 4 Action Items:

Estimated time to complete: 10 minutes per integration

At the top, you will see a tab for “API / Webhooks”. If you’re a developer or have devs on your team, the API options here should be clear to understand for you. There’s no shortage of ways in which you can PUSH data from WOWlutions to other apps.

For the rest of us, you’re probably interested in learning how you can use a tool like Zapier to create a webhook and push data somewhere else like a spreadsheet or another CRM. We’re going to continue adding scenarios to this section with things you could do that would help you grow your business through marketing and cold email outreach.

You’ll see that you are able to push any prospect data from WOWlutions to other apps. If you prefer to send your emails using another tool, you could send the data there.

Perhaps, you have people on your team cold calling and you want to send the data to a dialing software or a spreadsheet. You could also take prospect data and upload it to run hyper-targeted ads on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or other networks.

If you have a VA that contacts people via the contact form on a website or contacts them directly through their social media, you could auto-export data to a spreadsheet or another tool for them.

We’ll get into more things you can do with data at a later date.

One section on the integrations page we want to point out here is the “Sales sequence (cadence) / newsletter campaigns with unlimited emails to send” webhooks options. This could be helpful if you’re using a marketing automation tool like ActiveCampaign. When a prospect visits a page or converts on a specific page, you could send them into an automation. There you can nurture them and provide yourself with richer data so that you are able make smarter decisions for growing your business.

Chapter 5 Action Items:

Estimated time to complete: 600 new potential clients per 15 minutes

In this first example, we will show you how to do PR or content marketing by finding media outlet contacts.

In this example, we are going to show you how you could find affiliate marketers for your product or service.

In this example, we are going to show you how you could find investors for your business.

Chapter 6 Action Items:

Estimated time to complete: 1 hour per day

Obviously, every business has different workloads, which depends a lot on how you’ve narrowed down your target audience. If you’re unclear as to your target audience, you may spend a lot of time fumbling around looking for ideas on who you should target and how you should structure your campaign. Especially, if you don’t have a clear value proposition or solution to a problem to provide them with.

However, if you do have these things figured out, finding prospects via social media or with our internal database should be a breeze. It should only take you 10-20 minutes per day to load up your cold email campaigns with enough emails to keep your outreach going for several days. Most of your time will be spent responding to a warm lead and coming up with ways to engage with your ideal customer.

Pro Tip: We use Microsoft OneNote to store all of our templates for responding to leads; this saves time and allows you to continually improve upon your content as you begin to notice what works and what doesn’t.

It’s been helpful for us to keep a simple daily to-do list in OneNote, something like this:

Fun Fact: 58% of consumers check their email first thing in the morning.

Chapter 7 Action Items: