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2:10 – 3:45: Selecting Data Providers for Cold Email Campaigns
8:12 – 9:05: Cleaning Email Lists for Effective Campaigns
12:25 – 13:10: Crafting Compelling Cold Email Copy
17:35 – 18:20: Strategies for Scaling Cold Email Campaigns
22:08 – 22:50: Monitoring and Analyzing Cold Email Campaign Results
28:05 – 28:43: Achieving Profitable Results with Cold Email Marketing

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In the video, Jay delves deep into the art of cold emailing, from crafting compelling subject lines to ensuring your emails land in the inbox. Discover the importance of data, open and reply rates, and the tools that can help you clean and send emails effectively. He also touches upon the legalities of cold emailing and the significance of the CAN-SPAM Act.

Whether you’re just starting out or looking to refine your approach, this video guide offers valuable insights to help you scale your email campaigns and achieve better results.

I thought this video by Lead Gen Jay, was very good and he has an immense amount of material on cold emailing on his channel if you are thinking of going down that route. I have no affiliation with him and he does have his own agency for lead generation, but I thought it was a well put together video. He also does a 20 Hour Course (FREE) on lead generation.

Transcript For FREE 2024 Cold Email Marketing Course for Beginners

The single thing that allowed me to scale my agency to six hundred thousand dollars per month with absolutely no money in my bank was cold email. Now, in this video, I’m going to be dumping all of the knowledge that I have on cold email into your brain so that by the end of this video, you’re gonna have no excuse to go ahead and set up all your own email campaigns and start generating unlimited leads for your company for basically free. Seriously, it’s a superpower, so let’s get right into it.

So here is what we will be discussing in this video, and yes, it is everything, so feel free to jump around in this video using the timestamps, and definitely save this video so that you can come back and reference different sections as you’re going along your cold email journey. You’re going to be like, “Oh yeah, I forgot how to do that,” come back to this video, go to the timestamp, and you’ll be able to figure it out. I’m also going to be linking to other videos within this video so that you can dive deeper on specific subjects that I’m not going to be able to cover in depth in this video.

Alright, so a little outline of what we’re going to be discussing during this video. So we’re going to start with is your offer even cold friendly? There are specific circumstances in which cold email will not work, so we gotta make sure that you don’t fall into one of those buckets. Next, we’re going to talk about setting up cold email domains. Now, you do not want to email from your core domain, so we’re going to be talking about how to purchase those domains and how to set up the DNS records so that you don’t end up in spam.

Next, we’ve got to choose the right email provider. You choose the wrong one, you’re going to end up in spam, you’re going to waste money, and have a bad time, so we’re going to talk about some of the options that I recommend that you choose. Next, we’re going to talk about some of the limitations so that you need to adhere to while you’re sending cold emails. If you mess up these numbers, you will end up in spam. We’re going to talk about other ways to avoid spam such as words that you can’t use in your emails, such as domain reputation and server reputation.

We’re going to talk about list cleanliness. If too many emails bounce, you will end up in spam. Almost most importantly, avoiding legal action. There’s a law that’s in place that you need to abide by while sending cold emails, and I actually almost got sued for a lot of money because I wasn’t adhering to these laws. I’m going to teach you how to follow them easily. Next, we’re going to talk about some sending software options including some of my recommendations, some budget-friendly options, and depending on your goals, I might put you in a different direction.

Getting email addresses: how to actually find people to send emails to. We’re going to be talking about some of my favorite providers databases, and I’m even going to show you how to get 8 million contacts absolutely free. But getting contacts isn’t enough, you need to clean them, so I’m going to show you how to do that and what tools to use. Then email copy creation: how to write a good subject line, how to write a good first line, how to add personalization. All these things are really important in order to get cold email to work.

Last but not least, I’m going to show you how to scale your email campaigns up to a hundred thousand emails per month because no matter how good you are, this is a numbers game. Alright, let’s get right into it with step number one: how do you know if your offer is cold friendly? So I run a lead generation agency and customers come to me all the time asking how to make cold email work for them, and the truth is it doesn’t work for everybody. So if you’re in one of these scenarios, cold email might not work for you.

The first one: you sell low ticket. If your offer is worth less than 500, cold email is not going to be the best option for your marketing strategy. The other scenario in which you might not want to use cold email is if you sell B2C. For example, if you sell solar and you’re just looking for people with houses, cold email might not be right because you’re not going to be able to get large amounts of emails of people with houses, and if you send untargeted emails, you’re going to end up in spam and it’s not going to work. So in order for cold email to work: one, you need to be B2B, you need to be able to go into a lead database, filter them based on their industry, based on their location, and then you need to be able to sell them something that’s worth a lot of money because it’s such a numbers game. If you send 10,000 emails and you’re only able to make a hundred dollars, cold email is not going to work out for you in terms of financial investment.

Some examples of businesses that work really well with cold email B2B marketing agencies love cold email. Any B2B service business works really well. Coaches and consultants, this works really well as long as it’s business consulting. Who doesn’t work very well for e-commerce companies who sell low-ticket stuff. Doesn’t work very well. Even if you can target the person, hyper-target, say they’re a business owner and they live in a certain location, you have a product to sell them, it still won’t work very well if the product is low-ticket. However, if you have a product that’s worth five thousand dollars and you sell it to Med Spas, different story, cold email will work for you.

Alright, let’s move on to point number two, setting up email domains. This is arguably the most important thing because if you don’t set these up correctly, everything else will fail. Now you do not want to use your root email domain. For example, “otter PR” is my core domain. We have 55 employees, we’re communicating with prospects and customers all the time, and we do not want to put this domain at risk because if it goes at risk, the whole company fails. So what we do to avoid this happening is we buy other domains. So instead of “otterpr.com”, we buy “otterpublicrelations.com”, we buy “o-dash-otterpr.com”, “e-utterpr.com”, these are different domains that are similar enough. So when someone receives the email, they will see and notice your brand name. They’ll click on it and you’ll forward that domain to your actual domain. For example, one of my cold email sending domains might be “getotterpr.com”. So you get an email from Jay at “getotterpr.com” and then you’re like, “Who’s getotterpr.com?” I’m going to highlight that, I’m going to put it in my search bar, “getotterpr.com”. As soon as I click go, it’s going to redirect to “otterpr.com”, none the wiser. So you want to do this in order to protect your root domain. But these new domains have a low reputation because they’re new and because there’s no activity on them. So you need to build that reputation, and to do that, you need to warm up those domains.

First, you need to purchase the domains. I don’t care where you purchase them from. If you decide to use Gmail to send emails, you should purchase them from “domains.google.com”, that way there’s a one-click integration to set up all the DNS records. It makes your life very easy. And if you choose to go the Google route, I have a video linked right here where you can actually learn step by step how to purchase the domain, set up the DNS records, set up the sender accounts, and get them warming. If you decide to go with Office, I suggest that you use GoDaddy. GoDaddy makes it very easy to buy domains. You can set up DNS templates, and you can apply those DNS templates to all of your domains. And as you’re scaling this, it’s going to be really important to make it seamless for you to buy new domains, set up the DNS records, and implement new sender accounts quickly.

So I recommend either using Google Workspace, so “admin.google.com” where you can purchase the domains and “domains.google.com” and manage all of them there. That’s if you’re sending with Gmail. And if you decide to send with Office, you can purchase them with GoDaddy, keep all of your domains there, apply DNS templates, set up your senders in Office. There’s a lot of options for places to buy domains or places to set up email sender accounts. I recommend sticking with one of these two. There was a big fiasco with Zoho about six months back where everybody was setting up email else with Zoho because it’s one dollar per month per email, very affordable. However, eventually they shut the entire thing down. They stripped people’s Zoho accounts, canceled their accounts, didn’t give them their money back. So for now, stick to old reliable. Google and Office have been allowing cold email for a long time, and I don’t see that changing in the foreseeable future.

Now let’s talk about sending limitations. Once you set up your domain, you set up all your records, you set up your sender accounts, how many sender accounts can you have per domain? Can you just buy one new domain and set up a thousand sender accounts just so you can save a few bucks on the domains and make it simpler? No, leading experts such as myself will recommend using either two or three sender accounts per domain. So if I want to do Jay at “otterpr.com” or j.feldman at “otterpr.com”, that’s two senders attached to that one domain. Now, I can do three, but you have to keep the sending volume per domain under 100 per day. These are the limits that I recommend, and if you stick to them, you will not break the limits, you will not go to spam, and these campaigns will run for as long as you’re obeying the rest of these rules.

So what does this mean? If you’re using two senders per domain, 50 emails per day per sender account. If you’re using three emails per domain, 33 emails per day per sender account. As long as the maximum doesn’t go over that 100 limit. Bonus tip: I recommend that you put images on every single sender account, whether using Google or Office. You’re allowed to upload an image that represents your Google account. If you do this, it’ll add an extra layer of credibility and people will see that image and they’re much more likely to interact with an email that has someone’s picture on it.

While we’re on sending limitations and we’re on setting up domains, let’s talk a little bit about warming. So you bought a new domain, it’s got no reputation, you’ve set up a new sender, it’s got no reputation. If you start blasting cold emails to a list of a thousand people and say 20 of them mark you spam, you’re automatically going to get flagged as a spammer. And that sender account, unlikely the entire domain, will be flagged and you’re not going to be able to use it anymore. You need to protect this from happening, and the way that you do that is through warming.

So you set these emails up with a warming tool. There’s a lot of them, I’m going to give my recommendation in just a second. But these warming tools will connect to your email account and they will automatically send and receive emails that are going to be marked as important, they’re going to be replied to at a specific rate. And if you do this for long enough, eventually you build up a reputation score, and if you keep this running, you’re able to stay out of spam for the long term. Now, you want to warm at a really realistic rate. I like to warm up my warming so starting at two emails per day, increasing by two emails per day until we get to about 50 emails per day. We want to hit that rate at which we’re going to be sending emails normally, we want to look human, that’s the key here, look human. So we’re going to ramp up our warming from 2 to 50 at a reply rate of 30.

Now, the tool that I recommend using for warming, I’ll just say it now, is instantly.ai. It integrates warming and sending into the same platform. You get unlimited warming and it’s a really advanced warming tool. There’s a lot of different types of warming tools out there. The reason I recommend instantly is because they’ve got a lot of really cool AI features, including human-like scrolling and other features that actually mimic human behavior so that we don’t get caught. Google and Office, they’re not dummies.

Now let’s discuss Point number five, and that’s avoiding spam. This is probably the hardest thing for new cold emailers because if you mess up something, you’re going to end up in the spam box and you might not even know why. So follow these simple rules and I promise you you’re going to land in the inbox every time. The first thing is avoiding spam-like words. So there’s tools, the one that I recommend is mailmedia.com, Spam Checker. As you can see and here you can write your email copy and it will highlight words that it regards as spam. You want this to be as clean as possible, remove anything that is highlighted in red or orange. Sometimes you have to get really creative with the copy here, but if you send words that contain spam-like words, they’re much more likely to identify that email as spam.

And even if they don’t send it to the spam box, sometimes emails appear with a giant yellow or red flag on it and saying, “This email looks suspicious, should be marked as spam.” And almost every time that recipient will say yes, and then you’ll end up in spam. So we want to avoid that, and we want to avoid those big ugly flags. The next thing is records. So this goes back to setting up your domains correctly, you want all of the right records in there. The important ones are DKIM and DMARC, and if you really want to get fancy, you can use a tool like dmarcreport.com to monitor all of your DMARC reports for all of your sending email campaigns. Now this is pretty advanced, but you can create a DMARC record for free.

Now, in order to create these records, you can use free tools like easydmark.com where you can create a DKIM, you can create a DMARC, and then just put that in your domain DNS records. If all of your records aren’t perfect, you will end up in spam. So one thing that I recommend that you do when you set up new email accounts is you go into instantly, and another reason this is why one of the they are the best tools you can check all of your email records at once by clicking this test domain setup button, and as you can see, it’s checking all domains for a DKIM and DMARC records, and if any of them are wrong, it will highlight them in red right under that email campaign. So you can see all of mine are set up correctly.

Last but not least, one of the most important things for avoiding spam in the long run is not getting marked as spam. If you get marked as spam too much, your whole domain reputation will suffer. So the important things to keep in mind for sending cold emails is that you want them to be relevant to the person you’re sending an email to. Think from their perspective. If you received that email, is that something you would want to receive or is that something that you would mark as spam? If the answer is you would mark it as spam, they’re likely going to do the same, and if you get too many spam reports, your whole domain is going to be fried. So the copy is not only important, but the audience is going to be very important.

That’s also the reason that you need to clean your lists before sending emails to them. If I give you or you buy for twenty dollars a list of a thousand emails from me and I hand you over the Excel sheet you upload it into your sending tool and you start emailing those people without ever checking for them fifty percent or more will be invalid I almost guarantee it and if you get too many bounces from your email provider those are ounces back to your server Google knows office knows this is very bad for your reputation because it’s a signal to them that you purchased your list so you absolutely need to clean your list before using it too many bounces you get too many spam reports your domains will be fried you will end up in Spain

all right I’m going to link several videos down in the description about how to avoid ending up in spam very detailed videos so feel free to watch all of those bookmark them for after all right next and arguably also the most important which is avoiding legal action avoiding going to a cold email prison when you’re sending emails so there’s a lot in place called The can spam act this law allows us to send cold emails but it has certain restrictions on what we can do what we can say and certain things that we need to include in our cold emails now I’m not going to spend 20 minutes talking to you about this can spam act if you want more info on it it’ll be linked down in the description for another video that I did but the basics of what to do here so as you can see from this email in my instantly account

One of the things that you’re going to need to have in your email is a mailing address. The CAN-SPAM Act mandates that you have an address in every single cold email. If you’re worried about an address, you can set up an anonymous PO box and use that address.

Another thing you need to have is a way to opt out. Some people get creative and say “reply stop” to opt out, but I recommend just using an opt-out link. This will collect people who have actually unsubscribed, making it easier for both you and your recipients.

The last thing you want is some angry person receiving three cold emails in a row from you and reporting you, leading to fines. Another point to keep in mind with the CAN-SPAM Act is that you can’t bait people. It has to clearly be a marketing email. You can’t say something alarming just to get them to open the email and then hit them with a marketing message. This could get you in trouble, so just follow the rules and send emails that people actually want to receive.

Choosing a sending tool is crucial. There are many options out there, but only a few are really necessary. The first tool you absolutely need is a sending tool that imports your leads, connects your email addresses, and delivers the emails. I exclusively use Instantly.ai for this purpose.

It’s scalable and integrates warming, making it the best option I’ve found so far. While it might not be the cheapest, it’s worth the investment for its efficiency and effectiveness. Next is getting email addresses. This is often the most expensive part of cold emailing because good data isn’t cheap.

You want to invest in good data, which means finding a provider that offers clean and relevant data. Apollo.io is a tool I use for this purpose, but there are other options like Seamless.ai and ZoomInfo. Alternatively, I offer 8 million free emails in my free course and community, which you can access through the link in the description.

Once you have your email addresses, it’s crucial to clean them. Don’t just import them and start sending away. Find an email cleaning tool that pings the emails to determine if they’re valid, risky, or unknown. You only want to send emails to valid addresses, but in some cases, sending to risky emails might be worth trying.

Cleaning your emails ensures that you’re sending to real, active addresses, increasing the effectiveness of your campaigns.

I use Million Verifier. I don’t have a partnership with them; I pay them a lot of money. But I will say it is a highly affordable email cleaning tool. We buy lots of credits at once, so they give us a great deal, and it spits out the information in a format that’s really clean and easy for us to upload into Instantly. Here’s what it looks like after you clean a list: you’ll have the good, the risky, and the bad. The good is usually about 56-61%, risky can be 36-24%, so it can be a lot of data.

You may want to use the risky; you might not. For example, we split ours into different campaigns: one for Only the Good emails and one for the risky ones. Now, if you want to save a few bucks, I always recommend hopping on AppSumo, seeing what their latest lifetime deal is. As you can see here, we have Reon Email Verifier for $79 one time, and now you have an email cleaning tool. So this is another alternative that you might want to think about. It’s got great reviews; it’s an awesome email cleaning tool.

Let’s talk about the most important thing for making this all work: what do you say to people via cold email? You’ve got all the other parts right; now what do you actually say? What do you write as your call to action? What do you use as your subject line? How do you get people to open the email? What do you ask them to do? We’re going to talk about all of that right now.

Taking a look at my Instantly dashboard right now, I’ve sent about 20,000 emails, with a 75% open rate and almost 4% reply rate. These are awesome numbers. First, I want to touch on what these numbers mean. So, open rate: this is the percentage of people who actually opened your email. If it’s not you’ll see less than 40 opens; chances are you’re in their spam, or your subject line just sucks. The goal is to get to 60. Honestly, 60 is a really good number; that means your data is good, your subject line solid, and most people are opening that email. That’s a good sign. I’ll show you how to get to 75% in just a second.

A good reply rate is about 1%. If you’ve got a 1% reply rate, that means cold email is probably working. Assuming that people aren’t saying go F yourself in that email reply. Always check the replies and see what they’re actually saying. But if you’re getting 1% positive replies, you’ll be able to make this work. I’m going to show you how to get way above that. We’re getting about 3.7% on this very simple campaign that’s not that targeted, not that personalized, just because we upload so much data to it.

Now, if you’re using a lot of links in your cold emails, you might want to monitor your link click percentage. We turn that off because every tracking code that you put in an email is more of a chance for that email to go to spam or to get flagged. So, for example, when I know a campaign’s working, in some cases I will turn open tracking off, and I will send emails only as text, not HTML. This will prevent any additional code from being added and will increase your deliverability rates.

So, let’s pop the hood and see what this email actually looks like. We’re going to dive into some of the components and the important things to discuss to get that open rate and then get that reply rate. As you can see from this cold email, we have a lot of split tests, which I definitely recommend that you do: make multiple variations to see what people are actually responding to. And if you go into analytics, you’ll see that there’s a pretty significant difference. For example, F got a 35% open rate and only a 1% reply rate, whereas A is getting 73% opens and 2% replies. This is a huge difference; if I didn’t run that split test, I might not know that.

So, some elements that you should have in every cold email are some social proof, a little bit about what you do, and a call to action. Keep it open-ended, focus really hard on your first line, focus really hard on your subject line, and you’ll be just fine. Now, let’s talk about sequencing. It’s usually not enough to send somebody a single email; oftentimes, you want to send someone as many as seven to nine emails. Remember, the more emails that are in your sequence, the less people that you’re going to be able to contact.

I recommend using at least a two-step sequence. People need a reminder; people are busy; you may have hit them at an inconvenient time. So, for that second email, we keep it really simple, we leave the subject line empty, which means that it’ll go in the exact same thread, and we include a link here. Sometimes they just want to book, so we’ll put the link, let them book. Steps three through seven, honestly, that’s up to you. Experiment, put it in the same thread, put it in a new thread, send them an offer, send them a different offer. Experiment, see what you can do to get them to open that email, to get them to reply to it. But I recommend using at least two steps, and for us, we use three.

That’s everything you need to know in order to have a successful email campaign, but you need to be able to scale that email campaign to numbers that actually make sense. I made a really helpful video on breaking down the numbers: exactly how many domains you need, how many senders you need, how much it’s going to cost you, how many emails per day. Cold email is a numbers game; my goal for you is to get to a hundred thousand emails per month, and this is very doable. All you have to do is repeat the process for steps one and two: more domains, more senders, have a sending tool that can support it like Instantly, and then load up those senders onto your platform, warm them up, pile them onto your campaign until your general rating results that make sense.

Remember, it is a numbers game, but your numbers need to work; you need to have a high-ticket product, you need to send enough emails, so those emails need to have strong enough responses, and your results need to output to more money than you’re putting in. Our cold email campaigns cost us somewhere around two or three thousand dollars per month for all of our emails, all our senders, all our tools, all our softwares, but it makes us hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. This will work for you. I encourage you to experiment and definitely join my free course and community so that you can access all of my videos that dive deep into each one of these topics, so that you can master cold email and you can scale your business to a million dollars today