The Ultimate Cold Email Checklist

Published in

LeadCandy

7 min readApr 26, 2018

Everything you need to know before you send your next cold email.

#1: The Basics

a) Never use your primary domain: When you send cold emails, there’s always a chance of recipients marking it as spam — and this can affect your email deliverability. If you use your primary domain then it might get marked as spam — and, not only will your cold emails bounce as spam, but even your non-cold emails might also bounce. So, buy a few domains related to your primary domain for your cold email outreach campaigns — example, if your primary domain is abc.com, buy few domains like abc.io, abc.co, getabc.co, getabc.io. Avoid .com domains for sending cold emails as they are more likely to be checked for spam.

b) Use G Suite to send emails: Most of the email marketing platforms like Mailchimp are good for opt-in emails. For cold emails, G Suite is a great option. Avoid free email accounts for sending cold mails — like, gmail.com.

You can create couple of email addresses using the domains you purchased for your cold outreach campaign. Like, if you have domain ‘abc.co’ — you can create email accounts using your team members’ names like, jane.doe@abc.co, john.doe@abc.co

G Suite has a daily email sending limit — it’s best not to exceed 200 emails per day per email account. G Suite wants to make sure you use emails ‘like a human’, and if you send too many emails it thinks you are mass mailing/spamming and it can block/suspend your account. Stick to the sending limit of 200 per account.

You can use tools like MixMax, Yesware, Mailshake to automate sending emails using your G Suite account.

c) DNS settings: SPF, DKIM, _dmarc

Create SPF record

Type: TXT

Value: v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all

Create DMARC record

Type: TXT

Name: _dmarc

Value: v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:postmaster@<yourdomain.com>; adkim=r; aspf=r; sp=none

Follow these steps for DKIM

This is how these look like in your DNS settings -

d) Warm up your domain: It takes ~4 weeks for your domain to warm up. So, till then send 25 emails/day (best to start with 10 emails/day), 3 times a week — you can gradually increase it every week. For the first few weeks, make sure you keep testing your email deliverability and spamminess — you can use EmailAnalyzer, or Mail-tester.

e) Make sure your emails have a reply-to header.

f) It always helps to associate the new emails you created in step #1.b with public social / network profiles— so that Google/Bing see them associated with these profiles. Example, add it as a secondary email in LinkedIn / Twitter / Facebook profile where the profiles can be searched publicly.

g) Respect Unsubscribes: If someone doesn’t want your emails, do not bother them. It’s not only a legal requirement (per CAN-SPAM), but also uncool to keep emailing someone who clearly told you not to.

h) Avoid sending to alias (like, hello@abc.com) or personal email addresses (like, janedoe@gmail.com). Send to individuals, at their work email addresses.

#2: Target smartly

You don’t want to waste your time on any Tom, Dick or Harry… so make sure you reach out to the right prospects.

Target smartly. Build a lead list that can potentially close faster.

Get a list of the people who follow your competitors on Twitter. These people are actively engaging with your competitors, so they’re likely to be high quality leads. Using either Followerwonk or Smart Lead List, type in your competitors’ Twitter handles, and download their followers’ details into a .csv file. Here’s a step-by-step guide that explains how to do this.

Next, use LeadCandy to flesh out your prospects’ profiles. Just upload your .csv file, and LeadCandy will cobble together a full profile, including their company, title, work email, personal email, and more. That’s all there is to it!

You can find few more unconventional and clever ideas for building targeted lead lists here and here.

#3: It’s all about segmenting

As compared to non-segmented campaigns, segmented campaigns have a 100.95% higher click-through rate (CTR). No, that’s not a typo. Yes, segmenting is THAT powerful.

Here’s the idea: you want to put your prospects into different buckets based on their industry, title, location, company size, what product they’re interested in, etc. Once you’ve segmented them, you’ll be able to tailor your pitch more specifically to each “type” of prospect. You absolutely should customize your pitch for each segment — it’s totally worth it.

#4: Craft a compelling subject line

Subject lines are super important, because they influence whether your prospect is going to take that extra time to actually open and read your email.

DON’T go with something generic such as:

Supercharge your marketing campaigns with our new automation software
CompanyName’s newly-launched campaign monitoring tool
Next-generation cyber defense software for your company

So, what makes a good email subject line? As a general rule of thumb, your subject line should either convey an amazing benefit or induce curiosity (ideally, it’ll be able to do both). And it should be short and crisp — preferably under 5 words.

Here are a few examples:

2x your inbound leads like Acme
A savings of $75K for Acme 🙌
3 ideas to double employee referrals

If you need more inspiration, check out subject lines that get prospects to open, read and respond.

#5: Don’t include too many pictures

When it comes to incorporating pictures into those emails, less is more. More specifically, you’ll want to aim for a 80:20 text to pictures ratio.

Here’s why: spammers tend to send image-heavy emails, because they can hide links in the images. Bearing this in mind, most email providers will automatically send image-heavy emails straight to the spam folder.

#6: Use the right sender name

Does it even matter what sender name you use? The answer is a resounding yes.

Here’s the thing: emails sent from an actual person’s name are more likely to be clicked than those sent from a company name. Doesn’t “Michelle from TypeBot” sound much more personable than “Typebot”?

#7: Don’t rush to close your prospect

Remember: you’re going in cold, and this guy doesn’t even know you. If you try and close the sale immediately, you’ll come off as just another one of those annoying salespeople, which is a huge turnoff.

So here’s what you do — build a relationship in the first few emails, provide some value in the form of an interesting case study or white paper, and dig deep to find out what your prospect really needs. Once you’ve established rapport, then it’s time to go in for the kill.

#8: Verify your email list

One last thing before you send that email… make sure you screen your list!

If you’re using LeadCandy, all emails are verified and come with a 95% accuracy guarantee, so you’re pretty much good to go. But if you’re buying lists or getting emails from some other source, you can expect 35% of those emails to be inaccurate.

Here’s where things get tricky: when 6–8% of the emails you send out start bouncing, it will affect your email deliverability in a big way. Email providers will assume that you’re a spammer. You might get blacklisted, and your emails will not reach recipients.

Scary, huh? The good news is that it’s easy, cheap and takes just a few minutes to verify emails in your list and weed out all the inaccurate emails. Just use a tool such as NeverBounce, BriteVerify or Kickbox.

#9: Best time to send

We analyzed 40,000+ emails, and here are few great time-slots for best open / click / reply rates -

For North America -

6am — 6:30am PST on weekdays
weekends, especially Sunday, 5pm — 7pm PST

Asia -

10:30am — 11:30am IST
2:30pm — 3:30pm IST was a close second
8pm — 9pm IST worked well too

#10: Pace the actual sending

The more emails you send at once, the higher your chances of getting flagged by spam.

To get around this, tweak the settings on your email platform (or any email outreach tool you use), and pace your sending. 20-30 seconds between every email should do the trick! Yesware automatically paces your emails (we’ve seen they send 3–4 emails per minute), Mailshake allows you to choose your pace.

#11: Nail the art of follow-up

According to stats, 80% of sales require five follow-ups after the initial contact.

Here’s what’s mind-blowing: a whopping 92% of sales reps give up before that 5th follow-up, leaving 8% of the reps who do pull through to close 80% of sales.

Bear in mind, though, that not all follow-up emails are made equal.

When crafting a follow-up email, again, don’t go with something generic. Try and inject a bit of humor into it, if possible! Check out how Gusto used Finnley.

Also, if you’re using one of the email outreach tools for your drip email campaign — avoid tracking clicks/links, or at least A/B test it, as emails that track clicks are more likely to hit spam filters. Another idea — instead of tracking clicks for every email you send, you can test for a few to get an idea of your click rate, and for the rest of the emails in the campaign send mails without tracking clicks.

#12: A/B test everything

We mean it. EVERYTHING.

This includes:

The length of your email
Your Call-To-Action
The color of your buttons (if any)
Day/time the email is sent
Subject line
How your links are formatted, and link text length
Tone of voice
Tracking clicks/links

Make sure your sample size is large enough before you start testing — we’d say 200 people for each variant you want to test should be pretty decent. Otherwise, your tests might not be statistically significant!

Now start crafting the most awesome cold email you’ve ever written, and get ready to close your prospects! :)