Cold Email Outreach Strategies for Success

Overview / How Cold Email Marketing Works

Cold email outreach is an alternative method of connecting with targeted contacts that increases the likelihood of reaching their inbox and opening the message. Cold email marketing does NOT use email marketing servers to deliver emails, it uses individual SMTP connections, which minimizes the likelihood that the emails will get flagged as spam or marketing messages. Since this uses the SMTP server for delivery, there is a limit on the number of emails per day that can be sent from each mailbox. This ranges from 60-500 per day, based on the reputation of the email address. 

• Emails are sent as simple text based messages so they mimic exactly how one person would manually write and send an email to another person, but our platform (Mailshake.com) automates this process to send thousands per day (60 – 500 emails per day x 5 sending accounts – 3,000-25,000 daily emails). 

• This strategy does not allow us to blast an entire database at one time.

• It is also optimized when we have a series of messages that go out over a predefined cadence (every 3-5 days). 

• As users reply or click through a link from the email, they can be removed from further communication in the email sequence.

• This process is ideal for warming and identifying engaged contacts from within purchased or acquired lists where contacts have not explicitly opted in to receive emails from the brand.

• We keep purchased lists quarantined from Hubspot until they open at least one email, then we can automatically push the record from Mailshake into Hubspot for normal marketing outreach. This maintains our reputation in hubspot at a high level since all contacts are scrubbed for deliverability and unsubscribes.

Cold Email Marketing Strategy 

• First we register an alternate domain to create separate email addresses from the brands main corporate emails. This is done to prevent and potential reputation issues from affecting the brand’s corporate emails. We can use a domain such as businessname.org

• Then we setup multiple email addresses (depending on how fast we want to engage with your entire database) on the new domain that should mimic people’s (sales person, VP, CEO, or anyone) corporate email address. This is because we want all cold emails to come “from” a person, not the brand. 

• The more sending accounts we use, the faster we can churn through larger lists of contacts.

• Once all emails are setup and DNS is properly configured for sending, then we put the email addresses through a mandatory 2-4 week warming process. The warming process sends/receives/forwards/replies/opens emails that we send to and from the new addresses we are warming. Over the course of 2-4 weeks, we send about 1000 emails back and forth through each email address. This traffic builds a positive reputation with all of the major email ISPs and connected corporate email security platforms.

• Once the initial warming period is done, we activate the cold email campaigns. We start out with a conservative daily email send rate for each address – usually 60-100 per day, per address. Then based on review of deliverability metrics associated with each address, we increase the daily limit by 50-150 per week. This process will ramp daily send limits to 500 per day per address after 4-6 weeks of active sending.

• Client provides the copy, but we will give you several examples of other successful campaigns to use as a guide in writing the emails.

• Campaigns are setup with multiple email iterations and can be sent as single conversation strings. We also have A/B testing ability with content and subject lines. 

Cold Email Marketing Outcomes/Benefits

• Email open rates for this type of cold email marketing outreach range on average between 25-50%. Sending to the same list via traditional email marketing servers (such as hubspot) would average 5-15% because of how the data was acquired.

• This connects leads directly with the sales team and allows sales to simply continue the conversation that was already started on their behalf. 

• It is technically against Hubspot’s terms of service to import and market to purchased list, this method allows us to only import engaged contacts who have implicitly “subscribed”. 

• We can identify engaged contacts from the large purchased list and flow them into Hubspot, which in turn positively affects reputation and will increase overall engagement since we’ve eliminated the bounces and unsubscribes.

• This process can be used as a long term campaign that can use the same content, but adding new targeted contacts continuously. 
• See screenshots below for a few examples of other current campaign results using the same strategy.