Mastering Cold Outreach Part 4 of 5: Email Infrastructure

Scaling Your Cold Email Outreach with Domain Strategy and Automation

When scaling cold email outreach campaigns, it's essential to set up a robust email and domain infrastructure. Using services like Opps.ai and Plus.Opps.ai for campaign automation can significantly enhance your strategy. 

In this article you will learn about

• The new bulk sender rules from Yahoo and Google.

• How to setup DKMIS DMARC and SPF

• Where to host your emails

• How to scale your cold email outreach in spite of this

And more!

Strategies for Compliance and Effective Outreach

1. Avoid Using Your Main Domain: Protect your main domain's integrity by registering lookalike or branded domains for cold outreach. This shields your primary domain's authority score and keeps it away from potential blacklisting by email firewalls.

2. Warm Up Email Addresses: Before launching large campaigns, use tools like Opps+ to warm up your email addresses, gradually increasing send volumes to establish a positive sending reputation.

3. Compliance is Critical: Adhering to Google and Yahoo's bulk sender rules is non-negotiable. Maintain low volumes per day for each email and closely monitor your reputation score to stay compliant.

4. Quality Over Quantity: Ensure your data is accurate and your messaging relevant. This not only improves engagement rates but also maintains a healthy sender reputation.

5. Scale With Strategy: By segmenting campaigns and spreading them across multiple domains, you can enhance outreach without overwhelming any single email service provider. For example, running five campaign segments with 50 messages a day across seven domains can efficiently distribute your outreach.

By strategically setting up your email infrastructure and leveraging automation tools, you can scale your cold email outreach effectively while preserving your domain's reputation and ensuring compliance with email service providers.

Creating Effective B2B Email Campaigns Under New Google and Yahoo Rules

Staying compliant with the latest email regulations is crucial for businesses looking to leverage B2B email campaigns effectively. 

With Google and Yahoo implementing new "bulk sender" rules in 2024, businesses must adapt to ensure their messages reach their intended recipients without being flagged as spam.

Understanding the New Regulations

The essence of these new regulations is to enhance email security and deliverability. 

By enforcing stricter authentication protocols and engagement metrics, Google and Yahoo aim to curb spam and phishing attempts, ensuring a safer email environment for users. Compliance hinges on implementing DMARC, DKIM, and SPF records, which authenticate your emails and verify that they're coming from a legitimate source.

Here is an article on how to set these records up on your Domain Host (we use Namecheap)

Strategies for Compliance and Effective Outreach

1. Email Authentication: Begin by setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records for your domain. These protocols prove the legitimacy of your emails, reducing the likelihood of them being marked as spam.

2. Maintain a Healthy Sender Reputation: Regularly monitor your email delivery rates and engagement metrics. High bounce rates and spam complaints can tarnish your reputation, so clean your mailing list regularly to include only engaged subscribers.

3. Engagement Is Key: Tailor your content to your audience's interests and needs. Personalized, relevant content is more likely to be engaged with, thereby improving your sender reputation and deliverability.

4. Transparent Unsubscribe Options: Ensure that your emails contain a clear, straightforward way for recipients to unsubscribe. This not only complies with the new rules but also respects the recipient's choice and can help maintain a cleaner mailing list.

5. Compliance and Beyond: While meeting these new requirements is essential, don't stop there. Use this opportunity to review and enhance all aspects of your email marketing strategy—from segmentation and personalization to analytics and A/B testing.

Where to host your email accounts

We’ll consider four main places to host your sender email accounts:

• Google Workspace

• Sendoso

• Outlook.com

• Mailscale.io

When choosing where to host your cold outreach email accounts, consider these options:

1. Google Workspace: 

   - Pros: Integrates seamlessly with other Google services; high deliverability; robust security features.

   - Cons: Can be costly for large teams; strict compliance and bulk sending rules. Must manually setup DKMIS, DMARC, SPF records, domain registration is a separate feature and now that Google Sold their Domain Registration business to Squarespace (ick), you will need another domain registrar. We use Namecheap for example.

2. Sendoso:

   - Pros: Specializes in sending emails and direct mail as part of outreach campaigns; integrates with CRM.

   - Cons: More suited for direct mail than traditional cold emailing; only offers annual plans?

3. Outlook.com:

   - Pros: Familiar interface; integrates with Microsoft Office products; reasonable deliverability.

   - Cons: Might require additional setup for bulk sending capabilities; less flexible than other dedicated services. You will need to setup manually setup DKMIS, DMARC, SPF records at your registrar e.g. Namecheap.

4. Mailscale.io:

   - Pros: Designed specifically for cold email campaigns; offers features to improve deliverability and compliance. Great setup of both domains, email hosting and configuring the DKMIS, DMARC and SPF records for each.

   - Cons: Relatively new, might lack some advanced features of established providers; focused mainly on email sending without a comprehensive suite of business tools.

Each platform has its unique advantages and considerations, so your choice should align with your campaign goals, budget, and preferred workflow.

How to Warm up Email Addresses in Opps+ or similar software.

Email warm-ups refer to the process of improving an email account's sending reputation to ensure the delivery of emails directly to the recipient's inboxes rather than landing in spam folders. This is particularly crucial for cold outreach campaigns.

Once you enable email warm-up for any of your email accounts, the email account is added to our email warm-up pool, which includes other warm-up users mailboxes.

To enhance the credibility of your email sender profile, Opps.ai + proactively dispatches introductory emails from your account to fellow participants of the warm-up initiative.

The platform employs a refined algorithm that replicates authentic user interactions with these introductory emails, encompassing actions such as dispatching, opening, marking as not spam, and responding to them.

This simulation of real-life email activity by Opps.ai + plays a crucial role in fostering a trustworthy reputation for your email account.

By incorporating a unique tag identifier directly into the body of your warm-up emails, Opps.ai + ensures that these emails are perceived as genuine interpersonal communication rather than automated spam, effectively bypassing email service provider (ESP) spam filters.

Upon initiating the warm-up procedure, you will begin to receive introductory emails from unfamiliar individuals. This is an integral component of the email warm-up process, designed to establish and maintain a robust sender reputation.

How to identify emails sent through Opps+ warm-up?

Warm-up emails that are sent from Opps.ai + will contain a unique "Custom warm-up identifier Tag"

Refer to the screenshot below:

Note:

Warm-up emails have nothing to do with your Email campaigns. The emails from warm-up don't consume your daily sending limit set for your email accounts.

How to scale Campaigns Using This Setup

Our goal is to maintain the reputation of all of our outbound branded omain email addresses. We do this by setting them up to comply with Google and Yahoo and keeping outbound sales volume per day per account.

If you had talked to me a year ago, we were able to safely send 200 emails/day/email address.

Now I think you start with an initial volume of 10 emails/day/address and slowly scale to 50 emails/day/address.

So how to achieve volume?

Software like Opps.ai + allows you to add multiple sending domains per campaign. That means if you see a campaign copy and audience are working and you want to scale it up, you can set for example a campaign volume to 200 outbound emails a day (as an example) and then balance this across multiple outbound email accounts.

To illustrate here is a breakdown

So now you maintain a low daily volume per email account while scaling up the volume of emails daily on a given campaign.

Then you would segment Campaigns across data sets that mirror your Ideal Customer Profile target B2B customer data sets. See: Previous article on finding data to match your ICP.

So you might run 5 campaigns each with 4 email accounts. Now instead of being stuck at 20-50 emails a day, you can get the volume you need with multiple campaigns and data sets.

One of the biggest issues I see with Sales and Marketing teams trying to use cold outreach is volume.

The Volume Math

Do not be scared or clutch your pearls over volume. Leaders or Investors have no problem hoisting quotas on sales that are aggressive. You need to generate leads to reach goals.

If you are a VC backed startup, you need 5x growth. How can you possibly do this by sending 50 emails a day?? You CANNOT.

You need to send hundreds to thousands a day per sales rep.

Think about it.

Lets say you need 100 demos a month.

You get 0.1% conversion to demo ratio on your outreach. (Again thats really high)

That means you need at least 100,000 emails a month. Minimum.

Most like 2x that. If your OPEN RATE is 50% (thats high) you really need to send emails to 200,000 contacts that match your various ICPs.

Lets do that math:

200,000 emails x 50% open rate

100,000 opens x 0.1%

100 demos booked.

I think thats a SUPER SUCCESSFUL campaign

Imagine you’re sending 50 emails a day?

You are going to only send 1000 emails a month. 😮 

At 0.1% demo book rate —> are you booking 1 demo/month? maybe? if you are lucky. Mathematically its a ZERO. 1000 *.1%

The second issue of course if you try to send any volume with your main company domain and the domain reputation takes a beating fast.

Unless you are Microsoft and have a domain authority score of 99 good luck.

The email accounts get blacklisted (check this on MX Toolkit) and email accounts kicked off ESPs and Hosts.

This strategy solves it and using software like Opps.ai + makes managing multiple domain assets and campaigns easy.

Sending 20-50 emails a day for a rep vs 250-1000 a day is a massive difference. Wondering why your SDRs are struggling? This is often the reason.

Final Thoughts

Adapting to the new Google and Yahoo email rules presents a unique opportunity for businesses to refine their email marketing strategies, prioritizing both compliance and effectiveness.

By focusing on authentic engagement and strict adherence to email authentication protocols, companies can ensure their B2B campaigns are both compliant and compelling. Remember, in the world of email marketing, the goal is not just to reach the inbox but to engage and convert the reader.

Navigating these changes may require some initial adjustment, but the benefits of improved deliverability and engagement are well worth the effort.

Using a multiple branded domain strategy coupled with automation software, warmup and reputation management is an effective way to grow your funnel of qualified leads. This can also be used to find partners, advisors.

As you implement these practices, keep your audience at the forefront of your strategy, crafting messages that resonate and drive action.

We’d love for you to try https://app.opps.ai and the new Opps+ for Cold Outreach.

Use code WolfCast1kFree for a free month of our PRO plan that includes 1,000 free records to find data on your Ideal Client or Ideal Investor. We use this data in cold outreach email and LinkedIn campaigns.

Coming Up:

Mastering Cold Outreach Part 5/5 Next Week on: How to set up LinkedIn Outreach.