Cold Email Outreach SOP

OVERVIEW

This is a step-by-step guide to:

1. Buying domains & email accounts

2. Setting up your DNS records properly

3. Adding your email accounts to Instantly and beginning the warm up process

4. Ramping up your outreach while keeping your domains healthy

The tools you will need access to are :

• Google Domains & Google Workspace [Slack]

  • This will be your domain host and email provider

• Instantly.ai

  • This will be where you warm up the email accounts, create the email sequences, and filter replies

• Apollo.io

  • This will be where you build a list of your target customers

• Bulk Email Checker

  • This is where you will clean & validate the list to ensure we limit the number of email bounce backs

• Zapier

  • You will use this to automate new lead information to the CRM

• CRM

  • Any CRM will work (even Google Sheets)

    • GoHighLevel

    • HubSpot

    • Close.io

    • Salesforce

    • Pipedrive

    • Zoho

These are the tools we recommend. Your company may use different but similar tools, that is ok. For our purposes, we will be showing the step-by-step process using the tools listed above.

STEP #1: Buying Domains & Email Accounts

Always use Google Domains and Google Workspace to buy your domains and email accounts.

It is possible to find cheaper domains and email hosting services, but you will almost certainly deal with deliverability issues from the very beginning. 

👉 Google runs the show when it comes to email, they make the rules and their servers are the safest ones to use. 

The amount of domains you buy will depend on how many cold emails per day you are trying to send. If you are setting this up for the first time, I recommend buying at least 4 domains as this will allow you to send 300 cold emails per day. 

Buy domains similar to the company's main domain. For example, my main domain is outboundai.co and here are some examples of a few domains that we have bought:

• outboundai.app

• getoutboundai.com

• startoutboundai.com

• outboundaiapp.com

I recommend sticking with '.com' endings because they are the most effective

When thinking about how many domains you need to purchase, here is the domain math:

• 2-3 email accounts per domain

• 25 cold emails per day per account (do not go above this)

• 4 domains ➡️ 12 email accounts ➡️ 300 emails/day

*Google is transferring their Domain hosting service to Squarespace. We're not sure when this will go into effect but an announcement was made here: https://9to5google.com/2023/06/15/google-domains-squarespace/

STEP #2: Configuring The DNS Settings

This is THE MOST IMPORTANT aspect of sending cold emails, please pay attention to detail.

If you’re using a Google Domain and Google Email account, your DNS settings will already be done for you except for the DMARC record and the Custom Tracking record.

DNS records to input: 

• SPF (done by Google) 

• DKIM (done by Google)

• MX record (done by Google)

• DMARC (done by you)

• Custom Tracking (done by you)

STEP #3: Adding Email Accounts To Instantly & Starting Warm Up Process

You will be inside of Instantly on a daily basis so make sure you are comfortable with the platform. This is where you will manage the campaigns, warm up new email accounts, and field responses.

The warm up process takes 34 days total.

🚨 DO NOT send cold messages for the first 14 days.

Once you've past the 14 day mark, start by only sending 5 cold emails per account per day. Do this for the next 5 days, then increase the number of cold emails by 5 (so you are sending a total of 10 now). Continue to increase the sending limit by 5 every 5 days until you've reached 25 total.

This process will take you a total of 34 days, and by the end you will have a completely warmed up email account 🤙

STEP #4: Building A Verified Contact List

To find our target contacts, we will use Apollo.io.

👉 Instantly just released a new feature where you can search for leads within their platform. This may be an even easier method building a list as you will not have to use multiple platforms.

👉 Apollo also has a campaign sequence builder. There is no right answer in terms of which platform you use.

Apollo

Filtering in Apollo is straightforward. Simply apply the filters that best help you triangulate on your Customer Segment.

Once you've built a list, you need to clean the list using Bulk Email Checker or NeverBounce. Despite which database you use to build your lead list, you will need to run it through an email checker.

NeverBounce

BulkEmailChecker

NOTE: It may take a few hours for the verification/cleaning process to be completed.

STEP #5: Prepare Campaign Sequence & Launch

Let's hop back into Instantly and start creating our email sequence.

For quickest results, you should have a messaging sequence prepared to be pasted into the campaign sequence builder.