Picking Your Tools

Conversions aren’t easy to come by, especially for high-ticket B2B niches and services. From SaaS founders to high-personel sales teams, cold email is a terrific weapon to keep in your arsenal. Below you will find a list of our top recommended tools (and yes, the tools we use in our own outbound stack) to properly set up and manage your cold email infrastructure.

Instantly

Instantly is one of the most comprehensive, easiest to use and lowest cost inbox and send management tools out there. In our opinion, Instantly is the best by a long shot, however we realize some people may have other preferences. Instantly is growing quickly and adding new features at least once a month. It’s rare to find a team so dedicated to innovation and solutions.

WarmUp Inbox

Every cold email inbox needs to be warmed up in order to avoid spam complaints and to train the sending reputation model. Although Instantly has their own WarmUp feature included in their process, we advise using a 3rd party tool like WarmUp Inbox to get the ball rolling. Your inbox should be warmed for 30-45 days before engaging in any campaigns.

Apollo

Data, data, data. Apollo’s low cost, highly enriched B2B data is a lifesaver for those looking to not spend exorbitant amounts of money on data providers. For $99/m you can access 10,000 records and it has a wide range of filtering capacities to zero in on your segments. Apollo does fall short in some areas, as we often see a 50% rate of unverifiable emails and occasional lapses in records while refining into certain niches.

Leadshark

Apollo competitor LeadShark is a well known, reputable brand for B2B leads. Though much higher in cost, the data on here seems to be more , which could make up for the cost as you launch campaigns and close sales.

Zoom Info

Widely known and well respected in the data industry, Zoom info is the most comprehensive and complete database available to sales professionals for lead data. Although Zoom Info is expensive, if your sending practices can sustain volume and your offer is high ticket, this may be the right data provider for you and your team. 

Never Bounce

A tool that is owned by Zoom Info, Never Bounce is crucial to every cold email campaign you run. Never Bounce’s cleaning and validation tools will quite literally save your campaign from killing your send reputation and landing in spam folders. Never Bounce offer per-record pricing and bulk credits which can be purchased at a steep discount.

SalesNavigator 

Yet another tool for sourcing qualified leads, Sales navigator is best for hyper-personalized campaigns that have a social aspect or LinkedIn follow up feature. 

HubSpot CRM

With all this data and campaigning, it needs to be tracked and quantified somehow. Although there are dozens of industry leading CRMs, HubSpots free features are not to be overlooked as a realistic and effective solution for lead/pipeline management. 

Google Domains

Out of all the domain providers/marketplaces, Google Domains reach the highest standards. Although a domain can cost up to 3x as much yearly compared to competitors, these domains are better suited for email campaigning, as they integrate natively into Google Suite and Gmail – saving you time, energy and money in the long run. 

Google Workspace

Google Suite and Gmail are the only way (in our opinion) to effectively scale a cold email infrastructure. As of 2022, most of email is hosted or managed through gmail, therefore it’s better to use their own product. We’ll cover DNS records later, but the bottom line is that Gmail inboxes on Google Domains pair perfectly.

Setting Up your Domain

One rule of thumb with cold email campaigns is that you should never use your primary domain for sending. Why? You don’t want your sending reputation being affected on your primary domain if you have too many bounces or spam complaints. It’s easy to purchase domains from various providers, but we recommend Google Domains as the best option. 

Purchase Your Domain

When purchasing your domain, think of creative ways to “replicate” your primary domain and then check if they are available. For example, if your domain is bricknmortar.com, try looking for bricknmortar.us or getbricknmortar.com. It’s recommended that immediately after purchasing your domain that you set up a permanent redirect to your main url. 

Buy Google Workspace(s) ($6/m)

The recommended practice is to have 3 Google Workspace accounts for each url/domain that you intent to use for cold outreach. Any more than 3 and you may see a decline in deliverability, but less than 3 just means more work to create new inboxes on new domains. 

*Tip: When setting up your workspaces, use the same password for each instance to make signing in and management significantly easier.

Install Proper SPF

Each domain that you purchase needs to be properly configured for use. Under the DNS settings, you will find a space to add the proper SPF records, which can be found by searching online or downloading our DIY Cold Email Set Up guide.

Install DKIM

Think of DKIM and DMARC records as mutual stamps of authenticity between mail servers. To find your domain DKIM settings you will need to log into your workspace admin panel and navigate to Apps > Gmail > Authentication > DKIM & Deliverability. From there you will find the record and host that needs to be added for verification.

Wait 72 Hours, Then Create _dmarc Record

Once your DKIM is active, you need to wait for it to propagate before verifying your _dmarc records. Each _dmarc record is unique to your domain. You can find instructions online, or download our DIY Cold Email Set Up guide.

Setting Up Your Inbox

Once your domain and DNS settings are properly configured, it’s time to take the final steps of setting up, connecting and warming up your inboxes.

Turn on IMAP in Inbox

The first step you’ll need to take is to log into your google workspace / inbox and navigate to your inbox settings. Inside settings, find the Forwarding and IMAP tab, then enable IMAP for your inbox. This will allow your mail to push from and to another source as needed.

Set Up Google Account 2FA

Though not always necessary, you may desire to enable 2FA on your accounts. If so, navigate to your google account settings (not inbox settings), select the Security tab and enable 2FA. Follow their steps and make sure to use a verification method that is easy to access at all times in the future. 

Connect to CRM

Now is a convenient time to connect your inbox(es) to your CRM of choice. Follow the set up guides from your CRM to properly link and configure your inbox. 

WarmUp Inbox

Depending on what tool you’re using to send your cold email campaigns, you may need a 3rd party Warm Up tool. Our recommendation is to use WarmUp Inbox – it only costs $10 a month and has a powerful algorithm that replicates human sending practices to ensure deliverability scores.

Sourcing Your Data

What’s a cold email campaign without people to contact? Your data is just as important as the technical aspects of setting up your campaign. There many high-quality data sources for you to pick from while sourcing leads, but we recommend starting with low cost options and testing various platforms before committing to any large data purchasing.

Persona and Profiling

Before you start collecting your data you’ll want to create customer personas. Whether you’re creating these personas on your data platform or making them by hand, you’ll find it advantageous to put yourself in their shoes while examining your product/service, outreach method, price point and more. 

Segmenting

Once your personas are complete you’re ready to begin segmenting your data. Within each persona you should have multiple “buckets” or segments that correspond to distinctively different personality, business and professional traits. It’s best to segment your data and create campaigns that speak to each group.

Cleaning Your Data

A very important, but often overlooked step is cleaning your data with a tool like NeverBounce or Captain Verify. These tools comb your lists looking for dead emails, inactive inboxes, deleted accounts and domain health scores. 

Adding to Instantly & CRM

Once you’ve gathered, cleaned and segmented your data, you’re ready to upload your contacts to the outbound tools of your choice. We prefer Instantly for our campaigning tool, but you can also upload contacts into your CRM for easy communication management. 

Writing Your Campaign

While writing the copy for your cold email campaign, there are a handful of best practices to keep in mind, such as beeing concise, clear, non-salesy and presenting an “irresistible offer.” 

Goals

The goal of your cold email campaign is not to make a cold sale – it’s to get a conversation with a qualified prospect. So many people forget that a successful cold email campaign should be measured in two ways: calls scheduled and revenue generated. You won’t succeed in cold email without a killer sales team and solid closers.

No Brainer Offers

Creating a no-brainer offer for your prospects will look different for every segment you have, but the main question you should be asking is: “what is an offer so good that they are better off taking my call than saying no?” The answers here are limitless, but the bottom line is that your focus should be on getting calls booked and providing tangible value before starting to sell.

Short and Sweet

Keep you emails short. (Enough said?) 

In reality, no one likes opening any email (cold or not) and seeing a sea of text. You have about 5 seconds to capture your prospect’s attention, so write as if they will only care for 5 seconds. 

7 Sequence Follow Up

If you want to realize the benefits of cold email, you can’t shoot off a 2, or 3 email sequence and expect replies. People are busy and for too distracted to reply on the first or second response. 4-7 sequence campaigns seem to perform the best, but you can experiment with your segments to find the sweet spot. 

Personalize

Lastly, but most importantly, you must remember to personalize your emails. The cool thing with Instantly is that they have an extremely powerful email creation engine, where you can use variables, spintaxes and more to create limitless personalized email variations.

Launching Your Campaign

Congratulations! You’re ready to launch your campaign. The technical work is done, but that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook yet. Taking the time and effort to monitor, optimize and improve your cold email campaign can take your from amatuer results to expert results in no time. 

Schedule Campaign

In Instantly, you have the option to schedule your campaign, by segment and variation based on days of the week and times of day. This is helpful, as you may find it better to email certain segments during the morning, lunch or evening specifically. 

Monitor Performance

Tracking your performance is simple with Instantly’s dashboards. You’ll want to keep whatever inbox Warm Up tool you’re using switched on while your campaigns are running. This helps your sending reputation stay high while campaigns are active. It’s important to analyze your winning and losing campaigns to learn what’s working and what’s not.

Source New Data

While your campaigns are running, you’ll want to source new data to restock your leads/prospects so your campaigns stay active. Just follow the steps you took from above to continue gathering data.

Split Test

Try split testing your campaigns to find winning variations of copy and sending practices. Just because you find a winning variation doesn’t mean you want to stop innovating and testing alternative methods. If you do find a winner though, it may be worth doubling your infrastructure size and pushing hard on that segment to grow sales/revenue. 

Closing

There you go! You’re basically a cold email expert. We hope this guide was immensely helpful and encourage your to download our DIY Cold Email Set Up guide here. 

If you’d rather have a professional team set up your cold email infrastructure, you can learn more and schedule a call here.