What you need to send 100k+ cold emails a month

Mass cold emailing doesn’t have to be that hard.

There’s just a few key things to take care of and you can safely scale your outreach into the hundreds of thousands without landing in spam. And today, that’s what we’re going to cover.

Let’s jump right in!

Start with infrastructure

Arguably, the most important thing you need is rock solid infrastructure. That means domains and mailboxes. How many of those exactly depends on how many emails you want in your sequence and how many contacts you want to reach out to.

Every domain can have up to 3 mailboxes attached to it. We don’t recommend going above that number, because it will hurt your deliverability.

And from every mailbox you can send up to 50 emails per day. However, 20 of those should be always reserved for warm up emails, which I’ll cover below. That leaves 30 cold emails per mailbox per day.

So, let’s say you have 1000 leads in your list and your sequence has 3 emails. One initial email and two follow ups. That means if you want to process these contacts within a month (30 days), you will need to send 3000 emails in total, a 100 emails each day. And for that you will need 3 or 4 mailboxes. We’d recommend 4 to be on a safer side. Because each domain shouldn’t have more than 3 mailboxes attached to it, you would need 2 domains to process those 1000 leads.

As you scale 1000 to 100000 and beyond, the principle stays the same - just the numbers change.

What’s important to remember here is the set up of your domains and mailboxes. Before you start making any cold email moves, you need to make sure you’ve set up your DNS settings (SPF, DMARC and DKIM) - read our step-by-step guide here or choose an infrastructure tool like Mailforge or Infraforge which will take care of the set up automatically.

Don’t skip warm up

Now let’s move onto warming up your mailboxes. I’ve seen many people say warm up doesn’t work and/or doesn’t matter but that’s simply not the case. If you purchase a brand new domain and start blasting out emails by the hundreds out of the blue, every ESP will consider that suspicious and downright spammy.

While you can warm up mailboxes manually, it wouldn’t be a very viable option for anyone looking to send thousands of emails. That’s because warming up means essentially mimicking human-like activity on each one of your mailboxes.

That involves starting out sending just a few emails a day to different addresses, at random times, getting replies and sometimes replying back. We recommend ramping up to 20 of these emails a day within a span of 2 weeks.

Now, if you had even 5 mailboxes that would be a lot of work. And for sending hundreds of thousands of emails you will need A LOT more mailboxes. So connecting your domains to Salesforge would be the best option - you will get free, always-on warm up.

And that’s a key thing - the warm up should last at least 2 weeks before you send out any cold emails and you should keep it on after that too. That way you won’t risk any unnatural spikes in activity.

Things to keep an eye on

With mass email sending there’s a few things you need to monitor and make sure they’re always on point.

Bounce rate

One of the biggest signs something is wrong with your email lists or set up is your bounce rate. Generally speaking, the lower - the better. Anything above 2%, however, is cause for worry. And above 5% is cause to immediately stop all your sequences. If you notice your bounce rate creeping up, make sure to check your DNS settings are correct, you use spintax in your copy and that you have all your mailboxes warmed up.

Blacklists

Another thing that can cause a lot of headaches is blacklists. You can use our IP & Domain Blacklist Checker to see if any of your domains show up on any of the blacklists. In most cases, there’s an underlying reason for the blacklisting like spam complains, bounces, abusing daily sending limits etc. Most blacklists provide a process for your removal requests, often requiring you to demonstrate that the issue has been fixed. It is crucial to contact blacklist providers and submit a request removal to have the IP delisted. After submitting the request, continue monitoring your status regularly to ensure the problem doesn’t pop up again.

Unverified emails

A common pitfall in mass emailing is sending out emails to unverified prospects. I understand something can sneak by if you’ve got over 100000 different email addresses but that’s why tools like Salesforge have email verification built in. Sending to unverified emails can cause a lot of bounces, spam reports or even land you on blacklists.

All in all, the key to delivering that many emails is infrastructure. If you’d like to talk more about setting up yours, drop me a line.