How to touch 20k+ decision makers monthly via email and get 600–1,000 warm leads. Infrastructure and knowledge.

Suppose you (or your SDR) send out emails for 1,000 companies every month. It's about 45 per day, 5–6 per hour. Most likely, this results in 30–50 leads, of which 5–10 companies end up with the deal (or demo). What are your options for further growth?

• Improve the email text to increase the conversion? You can't bite off more than you can chew. Any tool has its benchmarks, and if you have a conversion into a lead (by company) of 2–3–5% in Cold Email Outreach, you are cool. Reaching 10% or 15% is next to impossible because you can't know what exactly is happening with the person on the other end of the wire.
• Rebuild the SDR motivation system to make them work faster? It is physically impossible to find and send emails for more than 6–7 companies per hour, even if you use various automation tools like Apollo.io .
• Analyze your addressees even more thoroughly? In this case, you will have 500 contacts per month instead of 1,000 and 1.5–2 times less leads, because people on the other end of the wire have vacations, sick leaves, backlog, overflowing mailboxes, and you can never know for sure whether your offer is relevant for them.
• Hire more SDRs? This may work out, but it’s a difficult option. Recruiting, training, and managing a large number of SDRs is a long and difficult process, which also makes you inflexible. The number of leads will grow, but the cost of a lead and the costs of your company will grow along. Once your sales managers won’t be able to cope with the number of leads, and you won’t be able to reduce your costs in a couple of clicks (you will have to fire people for this). I know what I'm talking about, I've had 25 full-time SDRs under me.

In short words, all options suck.

My first newsletter turned out to be too long, so I will keep shorter this time to save your time. If you reach 1,000 companies a month and get 50 leads, all you need to do to get 500 leads and grow your revenue 10x is reach 10,000 companies without losing quality. But an email marketer and MailChimp will not be any help with this.

You need a business process to achieve the following result: 10,000 people potentially interested in cooperation with a company like yours will see your offer every month. They will see your offer in their emails (and push notifications), and 2–5% of them will say it is relevant and offer to arrange a call.

Key point: don't land into the junk mail folder and do it without hiring 10 more SDRs.

How can you do this?

Modern email providers are very smart, they compare the encrypted texts of all your emails (for similarity), combine your domain and your IP, monitor the technical headers of mailouts (whether it is sent by a robot), and, most importantly, analyze how the behavior of your mailbox is similar to the behavior of a real person. This is why replacing letters with numbers in words, hidden characters and 2–3 variables (name, position, company) will NOT help you get into the inbox with such a volume. Everything must look like it's 10 real SDRs working to write real emails.

Besides, 10k people is just the beginning – if you want a big company, you will need to send more. Therefore, you need a scalable system with infinite potential (i.e. the size of your market and your share in it).

How to build such a system?

So, let’s look at the system where you contact 10k people a month without a crowd of SDRs, but to email providers it looks like 10 real people are writing unique emails to their current customers.

Several domains. The first thing you need to understand is that it is not your email address and not even your domain that get into spam filters – it’s a bundle of “your domain plus IP”. This is the key point. You might have noticed that your emails start landing into junk mail folders after you have sent a certain number of emails per day (exceeding the limit). If you thought that it was the fault of your email address – it wasn’t. It was the fault of your domain (bundled with your IP). This is why you can’t create 10 addresses and send 10 times more cold letters. You will need to buy several domains (not to be confused with second-level domains), as if some different companies are going to send out the emails. But you will not need to create multiple websites – they will all lead to your main website. Even large companies choose this way.

Permanent warmup of domains. When you send a lot of cold emails per day from one domain, you need to hide them among other emails. You need to show the email provider that your domain not only sends a lot of emails, but also receives a lot of replies, maintains long correspondences, and its emails are marked as “Important”. Warmup of domains will help us with this. The robot connects to your address and communicates with itself from different addresses: sends emails, replies, marks messages as “Important” and puts them in a special folder (read) so that they do not bother you.

Spam tests. You need to run spam tests every day: send 10–15 emails from each of your domains to specific addresses, which will automatically tell you where your message landed (junk mail folder or inbox). If 10 out of 10 land into the inbox, then the domain can work today. If not, continue to warm up the domain, but do not use it in mailings.

Split the addresses into two SMTP providers. Outlook addresses for Outlook recipients, GSuite addresses for everyone else. They build your domain ranking differently.

Compliance with daily limits per domain. It is the most important. No company in the world sends 1,000 emails a day to new addresses with only 50 replies – any email provider can understand this. You must comply with human limits.

ICP. A clear understanding of your customer segments, Ideal Customer Profile, an understanding of what the person who pays you money looks like, why and when they do this.

A strong email that makes it clear how you can save or generate lots of money in a few seconds (in the first paragraph) – regardless of your product. For example, a high-quality tailor-made suit which makes you look like a million dollars also helps earn a lot of money Michael Frackowiak . Separate sequence (first email and 2–3 follow ups) for each segment.

Targeted Facebook ads correspond with the previous two points best. FB offers you a choice of different audiences (yoga lovers, people who relocated, etc.), and you show each of these segments an ad creative (photo, video) that will engage them. It is the same in Cold Outreach, only you have a prospect's database with emails instead of Facebook Audience and the subject and body of your email instead of an ad creative and a landing page.

Reliable source of prospects, where you take relevant companies and decision makers suitable for your customer segments. If haven’t met the term “prospect” before, it’s the name + company + position + phone number of a person.

A reliable service for validating prospect's emails from the previous point, because even the best prospect's database contains only 70% of real addresses. The remaining 30% burn your domain's reputation in a few days and make you land into spam.

Reliable mailing service. You need a service that will send your emails as a real person: during business hours only, with dynamic intervals, using different IPs (as if they were different employees), connecting to your mailbox via SMTP (not via API!), and using Custom Tracking Domain.

Compliance with all the requirements for the email content. For example, you can’t use links in the email (even in your signature), words like “money, cash, insurance, earnings”, HTML layout, and more. All this can be checked for free on special websites.

Compliance with other requirements. For example, you definitely need to use Custom Tracking Domain, you can track Open Rate, but you can't track clicks, because they feature different tracking mechanisms and they have different effects on you landing into inbox or junk mail.

Consistent implementation of all this. Detailed instructions and one responsible person who follows them.

Sounds difficult? Only on the first gaze. When you have implemented everything and it's just the daily routine of your company (with checklists, guides, etc.), it's not difficult, but very profitable. This is one of the few ways to boost profits in an era of dramatically expensive advertising.

Brief summary: if you want to contact 10k companies per month and get 500 leads, you divide them, say, into 5 sub-segments (by specific criteria: revenue, size, etc.), create custom texts for each segment, find these segments in services like Apollo.io , validate their addresses, send out emails using software with dynamic intervals between emails from a large number of domains so as not to exceed the daily limit. You also have to comply with all the technical requirements (links, tracking, etc.). With proper implementation, this framework allows sending emails to 10k or 100k companies and always land into the inbox and get leads.

This topic is quite wide to grasp it after one article. I tried to show how it works from a bird's eye view in this article and will cover details about each stage in further articles (warmup, spam tests, customer segments, prospects), so you will be able to implement it step by step.

If now you are already implementing Cold Outreach in your company and face difficulties with a specific stage (say, warmup of domains), then PM me – I will help.

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