Happy Saturday!

Today, we'll talk about the setup to send 5,000 emails each week and consistently gain 5-10 new customers every single week.

Before diving in, let's address why you need to send 500 or 5,000 emails weekly:

Many founders are obsessed with "growth hacks" when it comes to marketing. This is a typical week for them:

• Leaving comments on Reddit on Monday

• Posting on Hacker News on Tuesday

• Writing a new article on Wednesday

• DM'ing a few people on Thursday

• Sharing a meme on Friday

No shame, I was one of them. You might get lucky here and there, and make $200/mo.

But to scale to $10k/mo and beyond, you can't rely on growth hacks.

Instead, you need to build:

A growth system.

A machine that works around the clock.

An engine that brings in customers repeatedly.

A system that scales without burning you out.

I say this from experience. I got really lucky with a Reddit launch (150 interested comments). But at the grand scale…

Did it even matter?

When looking at things from 10,000 ft, to build a growth system using cold email, this is what you need:

We've talked about step 0 and step 1 in previous issues. In this issue we'll focus more on step 2 - creating a scalable cold email infrastructure. I’ll share the exact tech stack I used with you so you can create your own cold email system. (some links below are affiliate links)

So first thing first, why do you need a special infrastructure, instead of just using SendGrid, MailChimp, ConvertKit?

The reason is deliverability.

Everything you need to know about cold email deliverability

Each day, 361.6 billion emails are received worldwide.

To manage this volume, email clients like Gmail use sophisticated rules to determine whether an email lands in the "Primary" inbox, the "Promotional" folder, or "Spam".

This is influenced by many factors:

• Email content

  • Is it personalized

  • Does it have links

  • Does it have HTML

  • Does it have images

  • Does it have attachments

  • Does it have spam keywords

  • Does it have the recipient's name

  • Is the same message sent to others

• Email sender

  • IP Reputation

  • Domain reputation

  • Domain authentications. (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)

  • Number of emails this domain sends

  • Blacklist, greylist status

  • Bounce rates

  • Engagement rates

  • Spam report rates

Essentially, email deliverability means what percentage of your emails will successfully pass through these filters to reach the inbox.

Even if you are not sending cold emails, this is just so critical for any businesses.

Think of what's on the line:

• Announcements to all your users

• Updates to your current clients

• Emails with important business partners

Emails are the lifeline of any business today. And it's so important to maintain your primary domain's sender reputation.

Because of this, never send cold emails from your main domain.

Unlike warm emails to people who already know you, cold emails on the other hand, can attract more spam complaints and lower engagement rates especially when you are just starting out. If you send them through your primary domain, it can hurt your sender reputation, affecting all your communications.

Instead, for cold emails use secondary domains that redirect to your main domain.

Setting up the right Mailboxes

You should actually setup multiple secondary domains to avoid having just one domain’s sender reputation destroyed and losing the entire cold email system you've built.

When setting up, use the following structure:

• Set up secondary domains that redirects to your main domain.

• Set up 3 mailboxes per domain

• Send 30 emails max per mailbox per day. (Some older resources will say 50, but in the second half of 2024 this is 30 or even lower)

Tip: Use .com domains for best deliverability. (You can also easily ask ChatGPT to help you brainstorm 20 domain names)

What mailbox providers should I use?

For email providers, there are basically three options:

• GSuite ($6/mo)

• Outlook ($6/mo)

• Private mail servers ($3/mo or less)

Most businesses use GSuite or Outlook, and both platforms tend to favor emails sent from their own platform. Therefore, cold emails sent from GSuite or Outlook generally have the best deliverability possible.

Since my style of outreach involves hyper-targeted lists and hyper-personalized copies, it’s better to split all mailboxes 50/50 between GSuite and MS equally.

I know each email packs a punch, so I want to maximize its chance to lands in the primary inbox.

How many mailboxes do I need?

Now we know where to get our mailboxes, the next step is to figure out how many mailboxes we need.

If you plan on sending followups (you should), each will count as a separate email in your daily send limit.

Assuming you have a 3-step sequence, then:

1 domain = 3 mailboxes x 30 emails/day = 90 emails/day = 30 leads/day = 150 leads/week.

Using this, you can calculate based on your sales target:

• 1 new client per week

• 5 meetings

• 20 interested replies

• 600 leads per week

• Setup 4 domains

Or you can plan around the campaign's duration:

• 100,000 leads in total

• 6 months to run the campaign

• 4000 leads per week

• Setup 27 domains

Or you can plan according to your available calendar:

• 20 meeting slots

• 80 interested replies

• 2,400 leads per week

• Setup 16 domains

To decide on this, you need to find the limiting factor in your current operation and build a cold email system to fit to that scale. It may be your sales team’s calendar (or just you), your startup’s runway, your team’s delivery capacity, or something else.

This also illustrates why people say cold emailing is a numbers game. (Though many mistakenly use this as an excuse for poor campaign performance)

How to set up your mailbox

Now knowing how many mailboxes we need, we just need to set them up.

When I first started I followed some guide and did it manually myself. You can find many similar guides online, basically this involves:

• Purchase domain

• Setup SPF

• Setup DKIM

• Setup DMARC

• Redirect domain

• Setup GSuite workspace

• Create 3 accounts per domain

• Log in and turn off 2FA for each account

• Connect instantly using OAuth

• Repeat for 12 accounts

• Wait 14 days for warmup

• Run campaign for two weeks

• One account with leads asking for meetings gets disconnected

• Recover locked accounts with your phone number

• 4 more accounts disconnect

• Exceed the 3 accounts per phone number limit

• Ask your wife for her phone to recover locked account

• Explain to your wife what you are doing with so many emails

• Give up, buy a new domain and start over

• Try not to cry

(If you look at the growth chart at the beginning carefully, you'll see there's a few weeks where the growth slowed, and that's because I lost some of my mailboxes. It’s a very costly problem because impacts your entire downstream operation)

A month into the campaign, I discovered a tool called Coldsire to automate this setup. (Kudos to this neat shovel-selling micro-SaaS ideas) The best part is when accounts get disconnected for a phone number verification, they are automatically fixed so you don’t need to worry about it at all. The whole thing takes 5 minutes instead of 5 days.

Email account warmup

Once you have the mailbox, you can't send from them right away. You need to warm it up for 2 weeks.

Warming up means training the spam filters using emails with good engagement rates. This process helps your account appear trustworthy, increasing the likelihood that your cold emails will land in the primary inbox.

To do this, you join a warmup pool of email accounts, where everyone in the pool emails and engages with each other's emails automatically. For example, the email scheduling software Instantly has a warmup pool of over 1 million email accounts. A larger pool means a better reputation for everyone.

You can sign up for a free trial to join the warmup pool. (I found it kind of funny how your free account becomes part of their product because others in the pool are benefiting from it)

You should use the same warmup and scheduling software so you don't go over the sending limits accidentally.

Email scheduling software

When it comes to cold email scheduling in 2024, you have two solid options: Instantly and Smartlead.

I personally used Instantly for PressPulse's campaign but have also used Smartlead for clients' projects. Both have literally the same price, and you honestly can't go wrong with either.

These software have sophisticated scheduling algorithms that mimic realistic sending patterns, something hard to achieve with other mail merge tools.

For example, they wait a set number of minutes per account, determine which account should send follow-up emails, manage multiple email campaigns, and match your lead's email provider with your sending mailboxes.

Email list building

Now that your mailboxes are warming up, you can leave them and check back in 2 weeks. In the meantime, you can start creating your lead list and writing your email copy.

I already mentioned Clay when I showed how I created my ideal lead list of 19,000 prospects for PressPulse (If you missed it read it here). At its core, Clay is a no-code spreadsheet equipped with most of the data enrichment tools on the market, making it a powerful hub for all your list-building needs.

I'll give you a quick example to illustrate my point. Here's how you can build a ready-to-fire list of "1000 marketing agencies in New York City that offer conversion optimization services" in 20 minutes:

• Start by with a "marketing agency NYC" Google search result.

• Collect 1,000 company websites.

• Crawl each website with an AI-agent to check if they offer conversion optimization services.

• Filter for the ones offering the service.

• Find the CEO's name from each website.

• Find the CEO's email based on their name and website.

• Find the CEO's LinkedIn profile.

• Check the latest LinkedIn post from the CEO.

• Use AI to craft a personalized opener based on their latest LinkedIn posts.

• Send leads with personalized copies to Instantly.

• Queue 1,000 emails.

You can see the power of mixing and matching different data to create hyper-targeted, hyper-personalized campaigns.

There are numerous online resources about Clay. I’m also planning a dedicated issue to provide more guidance on getting started with it and to explain why I believe Clay is just like Minecraft but with real money-printing potential.

I reached out to the Clay team and got a special deal for this newsletter’s subscribers, signup on any plan with this link to get 3000 bonus credits. ($229 value)

Email verification

One last step before you click send.

Email addresses obtained from finders might not always be reliable due to potential issues with data accuracy, high bounce rates, and the inclusion of spam traps. So before you send an email to any address, you need to run them through a validation service like ZeroBounce to protect the deliverability of your mailboxes.

End-to-end Setup

Your cold email system will cost money to run. If you don't feel confident in investing money in growth, follow these steps to talk to more customers manually and refine your product until you do.

I'll also cover how you can run cold email with a positive cashflow in a dedicated issue.

I researched and ran the math on all the cold email software’s pricing and credit system, and came up with 2 options for you to choose from based on your current growth stage:

Tier 1 - Getting started

• Mailboxes:

  • Gsuite, Outlook 50/50. (via Coldsire)

  • 3 domains, 9 mailboxes.

  • $54/mo

• Scheduling:

  • Instantly growth plan

  • 5000 emails/mo

  • $37/mo

• Verification:

  • ZeroBounce

  • 2000 credits, pay as you go

  • $18

• List building:

  • Custom scraper or manual or Clay, depending on where your leads are

  • 2000 credits (+3000 bonus) if using Clay

  • $0 or $149/mo

  • (You can also make 2 months leads with a one-month subscription)

Total volume: 1667 leads reached per month

Total cost: $109 - $258 per month.

Cost per lead: $0.15

This setup is bounded by Instantly’s sending limit, once you feel confident with your pipeline, move up to the next tier below.

Tier 2 - Scaling up

• Mailboxes:

  • Gsuite, Outlook 50/50. (via Coldsire)

  • 20 domains, 60 mailboxes, 12000 leads

  • $360/mo

• Scheduling:

  • Instantly hypergrowth plan

  • $97/mo

• Verification:

  • ZeroBounce

  • 10,000 credits, pay as you go

  • $75

• List building:

  • Clay explorer plan or higher

  • 10000 credits (+3000 bonus)

  • $349/mo

  • Optimize clay credit usage by using DataGMA API for cheaper email lookup. ($69/mo)

  • Use your own OpenAI API key

Total volume: 10000 leads reached per month. This setup is usually just bounded by the size of your list.

Total cost: $950 per month

Cost per lead: $0.095

That's it for all the tools you need to setup a cold email system.

Next week, I'll share the exact copy I used for PressPulse.

And we’ll do something fun - instead of hearing it from me, we'll have a special guest: a copywriting agency owner and an actual recipient of my cold email. She'll analyze each word to show you why it works and how you can replicate it. (I've already read it, and it's amazing) You don't want to miss this!

Until next time,

Elvis Sun