[Technical Guide] Send 1,000,000 Cold Emails per month that land in the Primary Inbox!

Sending cold emails is way more different than a newsletter and transactional notifications. You can’t use the same email marketing tools and strategy for sending cold emails. If you’re sending just 100-200 emails/month, then it’s not the best article for you.

But, if you’re willing to do massive cold email outreach (e.g. 1,000,000 cold emails per month), it becomes way more complicated to keep your email reputation high and keep landing in the primary inbox.

I’ve seen a lot of people usually discuss the subject line and email copies. And I agree it’s very important to have this right. But before getting your subject line & email copies right, it’s important to set up the technical things in the first place. At least when you’re sending a massive amount of cold emails every month.

I used to get a lot of cold emails, while a few of them with the worst copy landed in my primary inbox and a few with the best email copies landed in my promotional/spam inbox. And I’ve closely monitored the difference between both of them. 

I’ll try to break down the technical side of cold email best practices for an extremely non-technical person:

Purchase a new domain for cold email

It’s very important to purchase a new domain for cold email outreach to prevent your primary business domain from getting blacklisted in the worst-case scenario. You can buy a new domain that is similar to your primary domain. Buying a new domain costs you only 15$/Year and it’s very easy to replace if it gets blacklisted. 

You can check if your domain is blacklisted or not: from MXToolBox Domain Blacklist Check .

Choosing the right SMTP server

Most non-technical business owners are aware of email marketing tools like Google Workspace if they want to send emails with their business domains. Though email marketing tools like Google Workspace give you a good interface to write email copies and organize them, internally it is using an SMTP server to send emails. 

Here’s my experience, I’ve also started with Google Workspace to send cold emails in the first place. But popular tools like these are extremely expensive. Also, not every email marketing service might allow you to send cold emails (e.g- MailChimp, SendInBlue & Klaviyo). I’ve tried sending cold emails using these tools and they’ve suspended my account for sending cold emails. 

Instead, you can just get an SMTP server subscription and connect with any app or CRM to send emails. You’ll find thousands of free or paid email marketing CRM (e.g. GrowMeOrganic Email Drip Campaign) to which you can connect your SMTP server (by putting SMTP credentials) and start sending emails. 

There are thousands of SMTP services like SMTP.com (easy to set up, but expensive) and Amazon SES (difficult to set up but affordable).

Or instead, you can set up your private and dedicated SMTP server, where you don’t have to pay the credit limit. You can send as many emails as you want (depending on your server’s sending capacity). This setup is extremely complex and you need to take care of every small technical configuration.

 It is 5x – 10x times more affordable than any email-sending service in this world. The advantage of using a private server is that nobody in this world can use the same server to send emails and ruin your email reputation. 

We can set up a dedicated SMTP server for you with a one time minimal cost. Book a call with me to discuss if it’s a good fit for you or not.

Book a call: https://tidycal.com/anant/smtp-server

Setting up the DNS Records 

It’s really important to set up your DKIM, DMARC, SPF & MX records. I won’t talk about these terms in detail as I don’t want to turn off a non-technical guy here. But setting up these records gives validation to the recipient that it has been sent with your permission. 

Avoiding the proper setup of these records may lead to

• Your IP getting blacklisted
• Email landing on spam
• Your recipient getting a warning that it’s a spoof email

Using a non-blacklisted IP

A lot of people think that the solution to avoid landing in spam is changing the email address. 

E.g. :

1. Changing their current email abc@domain.com to xyz@domain.com 
2. Changing the current domain from domain1.com to domain2.com
3. Changing the subdomain from mail1.domain.com to mail2.domain.com

But, what they don’t realize is that email recipients can still trace the IP through which they’ve sent those emails. This IP address is the internet address of your SMTP server.

No matter if you change the domain or email address, your IP is still going to be the same. And any popular email provider can easily recognize if your IP is blacklisted or not.

Use Mail-Tester to find your email’s SMTP IP (Send a test email to the given email ID on this website)

And then, you may use MXToolBox (https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx)  to check if your IP is blacklisted or not.

Avoid using shared IPs

When you get an SMTP/Email Marketing service from extremely popular companies (like MailChimp, SMTP.com, or SendGrid), they usually offer a shared IP that is being used by a few other companies as well. 

If someone else sharing the same address, ruins the IP reputation by sending spam emails or not following the standard email marketing practice, then it’s a high chance your emails are going to land on someone’s spam or promotional inbox. 

As you can see above, a few websites will tell you whether they’re going to offer you a shared IP or a dedicated IP.

P.S. – Amazon SES costs 24.9$/Month for each dedicated IP whereas we can set it up for 5$/Month when you hire us to set up the dedicated SMTP server for your company.

Book a call: https://tidycal.com/anant/smtp-server

Using additional IPs for rotation

In very simple terms, you can rotate your address for each email that you’re sending. It is very important to do it when you’re sending emails in bulk. 

IP Rotation [Email Marketing]: In simple terms, IP rotation is a process of changing your SMTP IP address for each email you’re sending out. It makes the recipient email provider (like Gmail, Yahoo, etc) feel that they’re receiving those emails from different identities. 

If you send 1000 emails per hour with 1 IP, then the chances of blacklisting your IP are broad, which leads your email to spam or a promotional inbox.

But, If you send 1000 emails with 10 IPs per hour, then your 1000 emails are divided into 10, Which means 1 IP is used for 100 emails only, So the risk of blacklisting will reduce by 10x 🙂

Also, if one of your IPs gets blacklisted, 9 of them can still send emails safely and we’ll only have to warm up that 1 new IP. Otherwise, we’ll have to warm up a new IP address.

You can check whether your current email IP is blacklisted or not using https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx

Additional Benefits of Having More IPs: 

* You can use 1 IP for all your transactional emails and keep the rest of them for other cold email outreach.

* Usually companies like MailChimp or SES would give you a shared IP or just one dedicated IP, having more IPs can help you scale your email marketing outreach by ensuring your email reputation is not hurting.

P.S. – Amazon SES costs 24.9$/Month for each dedicated IP whereas we can set it up for 5$/Month when you hire us to set up the dedicated SMTP server for your company.

Book a call: https://tidycal.com/anant/smtp-server

Warming up your email server

Email warmup is a process required to build a reputation and have a higher delivery rate. It is essential when you are planning a large volume cold email campaign with a new account to make sure emails land in inboxes.

In a cold email campaign, the first thing you need is to reach the recipient’s inbox. Once you are there, having a good engagement will build a more significant relationship. If the email is very well warmed before sending cold emails, it will avoid the spam filter, deliver in the inbox, and have a higher open rate.

A few of the best ways to warm up your email servers are:

1. Send emails from your fresh IP to your friends and employees and ask them to reply to your email. (Also, put it back in the primary inbox if it has landed in spam.)
2. Subscribe to multiple newsletters so that you start receiving emails on your new email.
3. Use an automated tool like GrowMeOrganic Email Warmup that will automatically exchange emails with a pool of its customers.

Conclusion

While it’s very easy to use services like MailChimp, you can’t send cold emails using these platforms as they’ll only allow you to do permission-based marketing. In cold email marketing, open rates are extremely low, so it’s important to send massive emails to see the results. Even popular SMTPs like SMTP.com are damn expensive when you’re scaling your cold email outreach. Hence, getting a dedicated SMTP server with multiple dedicated IPs is the best and most affordable solution. 

You can hire us to set up an SMTP server for your company. But, before you take any decision, I want you to know:

• We’ve been working in this industry for 5 years now and I can assure you won’t find this pricing anywhere on the Internet. 
• We’ll configure the email server for the best deliverability and reputation. 
• And you’ll get dedicated support + I’m just one call away to help you if you get stuck anywhere.

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