Cold email is a great way to help generate leads and expand marketable contacts, but, there is more to it than just finding prospect lists and sending emails. This SOP will cover all of the necessary steps in setting up a cold email campaign from technical set-up to implementation and A/B testing. 

Cold email sequences, when done correctly, help generate new business and expand your list of marketable contacts. Before starting one of these campaigns, it is extremely important to establish multiple email sending domains. This prevents you from affecting your main domain and potentially getting it banned. Here are the basic steps for setting up new email sending domains 

Figure out where you're currently hosting your website and buy a new domain that is similar to your current domain.  Example: If your current domain is 

. Any variation that keeps your branding.

Once you've set up your new domain you'll need to set up DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance). This is an email security protocol that verifies your email senders are legitimate. 

Setting up DMARC involves a few key steps:

Setting up DMARC can be complex, especially if you're not familiar with email authentication protocols. It's often a good idea to seek assistance from an IT professional or service provider to ensure it's set up correctly for your domain.

Here are instructions on how to do this from both 

If you need more info or want more info on how this relates to emails in Hubspot checkout the Hubspot Guide 

Now that you've established new domains and you've set up DMARC, you need to create your new emails to be used in all of your cold email campaigns. Typically, we recommend that you have 

 set up for each team member. There are two major reasons for this:

Once you've established all of your new email addresses you need to start the email warming process. This involves using a service to simulate email sends and responses to increase your overall domain reputation and increase the percent of emails that land in the inbox. Here are the basic steps for email warming

Having an email signature adds a layer of personalization to your profile that helps build trust with the recipient and overall improves the deliverability score of your email. You can create custom signatures using custom code of follow basic steps for each email service. If you are using Hubspot, we recommend you set up a basic email signature and also one within Hubspot. Here are some basics for setting up email signatures in common mailing systems: 

To get to the email signature go to settings -> general -> email and then navigate to email signature. You can select "simple" to enter plain text and insert images and links or click "html" to insert custom code. 

Here are some images on how to navigate to email signature in Hubspot and what it looks like when  you try and set it up. 

2. Segment Audiences and Write Email Sequences

Your email domains are set-up, you've let your emails warm until their deliverability rates are above 90% and you have all of your email signatures set up. What next? It's time to identify your target audiences and write email sequences for each of them. 

Now that you've identified your target audiences and written emails sequences as well as A/B versions of each email in the sequence, it's time to put them into Hubspot. 

Hubspot has a "Sequences" section built into the sales hub that you can access if you have "Sales Professional" and a Sales Seat (Note: you are usually limited to 5 sales seats with sales pro):

Here are Step-by-Step instructions on how to create a sequence:

Create HubSpot automated email sequences

If you need more context on Hubspot email sequences we recommend checking out Hubspot's Guide on how to create and edit sequences 

Once your sequences have started, you'll need to check them on a regular basis and maintain each sequence. We recommend sending between 50 and 150 emails per day per email account per sequence. For Microsoft you can not exceed 350 emails/day/account, Gmail is 250/day/account. If you exceed this you may get a warning and your email may be frozen for a few days until you log into your admin account to accept the warning, but don't worry this doesn't mean you are shut down. You will get several warnings before you are turned off, this is just a temporary pause to flag you are sending too many daily emails. To maintain your emails sequences daily you will need to:

It's important to keep your eye on the analytics of each sequence in a campaign for the entirety of a campaign or until a sequence is paused. For more on sequence analytics please check Hubspot's Guide 

Email Campaigns

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Cold Email Process- Peddle

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