Best Bulk Cold Emailing Solution 2021

[Shatzyo]

@Shatzyo - your knowledge is deeply appreciated!

A big THANK YOU from me

(And an even bigger THANK YOU from the readers who never bothered to say it out loud)

The cold mailing deliverability advice in this thread alone is worth millions of dollars to the right people



Ok ... I do have a question that has not been addressed too deeply

Do you think it's possible ... using best mailing practices, sharply written emails and well selected recipients ...

To achieve cold mailing success through B2C - business to consumers?


My plan is simple, and I would appreciate your feedback when you have time.

1. Isolate and collect the contact details of my exact consumer prospects.
2. Send a personalized, conversational style email, asking if I can help fix a problem they publicly disclosed online.
3. The five sentence email would simply ask the recipient to hit reply to start a conversation with me.
4. Once they reply, I would send further information and a link to an upcoming live webinar relating to their problem.
5. At that point, I would hope to see them in person, on camera to fix their problem live, and essentially close a deal.


My hope is ... that the initial email arrives in their inbox, and contains no links or tracking.

And my conversational style copy compels them to hit reply and ask for more information.

Do you think this is viable, or is it simply illegal and dangerous and not worth my effort?

Thanks for your time, and I wish you the best of luck in everything you do

P.S. - I really appreciate how well you dealt with the rude, argumentative and naive forum replies in this thread.

Hi mate,

Thanks for the feedback, it's much appreciated.

I think your strategy could work but it can be tough and it depends on many factors including :

1. To what extent do you solve a problem that people would be ready to pay to solve. Keeping in mind that consumers are way less ready to pay than a company. Especially during the crisis we're facing. B2B is easier to make sales, because people don't engage their personal money. What works best in B2C is to offer to make money, or save money, multiplied by ten with the crisis.

2. It's illegal but many people don't care, make money like that and never get caught and others get caught. That's up to you to take this risk or not.

3. The price has to be high enough for you to be really profitable but it also has to fit in what people are ready to pay to solve their problem.

You can test that strategy on 1000 people and see how they react. If you manage to get interested replies to watch your webinar, then prepare the webinar. If no or not enough interested replies, don't do the webinar.

The webinar can be a good move because when you do cold emailing, people expect a conversation with a human before spending money, usually by phone at least but as you show your face with a webinar, if you're convincing, you could manage to build enough trust and, if you really offer to remove a pain people have, then maybe get sales out of it.

In short, you can test that idea in half a day of work and get your answer, without having to prepare the webinar before the campaign.

 

[wolfman1]

Hi mate,

Thanks for the feedback, it's much appreciated.

I think your strategy could work but it can be tough and it depends on many factors including :

1. To what extent do you solve a problem that people would be ready to pay to solve. Keeping in mind that consumers are way less ready to pay than a company. Especially during the crisis we're facing. B2B is easier to make sales, because people don't engage their personal money. What works best in B2C is to offer to make money, or save money, multiplied by ten with the crisis.

2. It's illegal but many people don't care, make money like that and never get caught and others get caught. That's up to you to take this risk or not.

3. The price has to be high enough for you to be really profitable but it also has to fit in what people are ready to pay to solve their problem.

You can test that strategy on 1000 people and see how they react. If you manage to get interested replies to watch your webinar, then prepare the webinar. If no or not enough interested replies, don't do the webinar.

The webinar can be a good move because when you do cold emailing, people expect a conversation with a human before spending money, usually by phone at least but as you show your face with a webinar, if you're convincing, you could manage to build enough trust and, if you really offer to remove a pain people have, then maybe get sales out of it.

In short, you can test that idea in half a day of work and get your answer, without having to prepare the webinar before the campaign.

Thanks again for your time and wisdom @Shatzyo !

You mentioned an important idea earlier in the thread …

The idea of using a custom domain that allows tracking.

and why it’s important to separate yourself from other cold emailers possibly operating from the same server/ip/service/stack.

Do you happen to know which companies offer this service?

I’m guessing mailshake does, but as you mentioned - they are a little expensive possibly due to an integrated mail warmup feature which seems subpar.

I do realise the best path to high deliverability is to turn off all tracking eventually … but I’d like to start at the very least, by using my own custom tracking link.

anyone else using a service with custom tracking links?

 

[wolfman1]

Oh yes and one final question … and thank you again for everyone’s help and attention.

Which warm up services “don’t” include an easily identifiable marker, in the email content?

For example, if I want to get my inbox warmed up … are they really going to send hundreds of emails with the word “Mur-1765” in the email content somewhere?

Surely that would be detectable and rather pointless if the providers know your inbox is being warmed up …

 

[Shatzyo]

Thanks again for your time and wisdom @Shatzyo !

You mentioned an important idea earlier in the thread …

The idea of using a custom domain that allows tracking.

and why it’s important to separate yourself from other cold emailers possibly operating from the same server/ip/service/stack.

Do you happen to know which companies offer this service?

I’m guessing mailshake does, but as you mentioned - they are a little expensive possibly due to an integrated mail warmup feature which seems subpar.

I do realise the best path to high deliverability is to turn off all tracking eventually … but I’d like to start at the very least, by using my own custom tracking link.

anyone else using a service with custom tracking links?

90% of cold outreach solutions offer to customize your tracking domain.

If a solution doesn't offer it, it means they badly suck at cold emailing as it's a must have.

Mailshake does it, Lemlist, even Gmass, Woodpecker, Emelia, Reply offer it. Emelia is the cheapest option for you.

Oh yes and one final question … and thank you again for everyone’s help and attention.

Which warm up services “don’t” include an easily identifiable marker, in the email content?

For example, if I want to get my inbox warmed up … are they really going to send hundreds of emails with the word “Mur-1765” in the email content somewhere?

Surely that would be detectable and rather pointless if the providers know your inbox is being warmed up …

About that, Mailreach has the most "under the radar" behavior with two chains of characters inside the body. One is always the same (but different for each inbox) and one always changes. I think Warmy released the same thing recently as well.

 

[TargetShow]

Hey guys, I didn't know where else to post this..

I'm looking for a system that enables me to send 20k-100k cold emails per day, I'm a newb at this but I did a LOT of research for the past week and it seems to me in order to be able to do that, I need to use an SMTP service like Amazon SES, or create my own SMTP server that I link to a mail application like Mailwizz or Mautic in order to start sending emails.

I also learned that I need to warm up the server for a month at least, clean up the list and basically get 10/10 email scoring before I attempt my first send in order to have a chance to hit the inbox later on.

my question is, does anyone know of a way that I can use autoresponders like Activecampaign or Convertkit to be able to send thousands of cold emails a day? (any tricks to get past their scrutiny system?)

if that is not an option, is there a way to rent/buy pre-warmed up SMTP servers that can send 20k-100k cold emails per day with high inbox deliverability? how much would such service cost? (asking the experts)

I'm kindly asking experienced members to give their precious advice, although there are a lot of threads about this subject - I still wasn't able to find a real solution for this.

Thank you so much,

You need knowledge of coding to create your own service or pay to owners of the same services

 

[BigAllenEnergy]

Hey guys, I didn't know where else to post this..

I'm looking for a system that enables me to send 20k-100k cold emails per day, I'm a newb at this but I did a LOT of research for the past week and it seems to me in order to be able to do that, I need to use an SMTP service like Amazon SES, or create my own SMTP server that I link to a mail application like Mailwizz or Mautic in order to start sending emails.

I also learned that I need to warm up the server for a month at least, clean up the list and basically get 10/10 email scoring before I attempt my first send in order to have a chance to hit the inbox later on.

my question is, does anyone know of a way that I can use autoresponders like Activecampaign or Convertkit to be able to send thousands of cold emails a day? (any tricks to get past their scrutiny system?)

if that is not an option, is there a way to rent/buy pre-warmed up SMTP servers that can send 20k-100k cold emails per day with high inbox deliverability? how much would such service cost? (asking the experts)

I'm kindly asking experienced members to give their precious advice, although there are a lot of threads about this subject - I still wasn't able to find a real solution for this.

Thank you so much,

Just sent you a message to discuss.

It's certainly possible, but you can't just immediately start sending and you certainly need some technical know-how.

 

[Oast2]

@Shatzyo besides of the two chains of characters, what else to look out for in a good warming tool?

Did you test or do you have an opinion on smartlead's, boxward's, or instantly's warm-up feature?

 

[Shatzyo]

@Shatzyo besides of the two chains of characters, what else to look out for in a good warming tool?

Did you test or do you have an opinion on smartlead's, boxward's, or instantly's warm-up feature?

A good email warmer is a solution that best replicates a very successful cold emailing activity. Meaning sending prospecting emails and getting interested replies that show a real interest in the sender's emails.

It's not just about getting replies and your emails opened, removed from spam. You need a tool that creates an email activity that is the closest to sending cold emails, offering to chat and, getting interested replies like "Thank you, yes, I'm available to chat with you".

The mailbox providers like O365 from Microsoft, Gmail, Gsuite have the technology to understand the interest of a recipient. They understand "Thank you", "yes", "I'm available" and their synonyms. I wouldn't even be surprised if they'd be now able to understand most of the content sent and received.

And the number of mailboxes that interact with yours is important as well. IMO the solution should have at least 8k mailboxes.

I don't know all the tools doing that as there are new ones every month.

I wouldn't go for Smartlead as they seem pretty new in this market. I've never heard about Boxwarm. I've heard about Instantly but I don't know the type of content they use.

For now, my go-to is always Mailreach for efficiency, easy UI and because they fully focus on deliverability. I usually avoid multi tools as they're generally not the best in each feature.

Why not trying these and tell us your results? Just avoid the ones using meaningless content.

 

[Oast2]

Thank you. I will probably test drive instantly and boxward. I will let you know if one of them provides good results. Cheers.

 

[BigAllenEnergy]

A good email warmer is a solution that best replicates a very successful cold emailing activity. Meaning sending prospecting emails and getting interested replies that show a real interest in the sender's emails.

It's not just about getting replies and your emails opened, removed from spam. You need a tool that creates an email activity that is the closest to sending cold emails, offering to chat and, getting interested replies like "Thank you, yes, I'm available to chat with you".

The mailbox providers like O365 from Microsoft, Gmail, Gsuite have the technology to understand the interest of a recipient. They understand "Thank you", "yes", "I'm available" and their synonyms. I wouldn't even be surprised if they'd be now able to understand most of the content sent and received.

And the number of mailboxes that interact with yours is important as well. IMO the solution should have at least 8k mailboxes.

I don't know all the tools doing that as there are new ones every month.

I wouldn't go for Smartlead as they seem pretty new in this market. I've never heard about Boxwarm. I've heard about Instantly but I don't know the type of content they use.

For now, my go-to is always Mailreach for efficiency, easy UI and because they fully focus on deliverability. I usually avoid multi tools as they're generally not the best in each feature.

Why not trying these and tell us your results? Just avoid the ones using meaningless content.

@Shatzyo besides of the two chains of characters, what else to look out for in a good warming tool?

Did you test or do you have an opinion on smartlead's, boxward's, or instantly's warm-up feature?

Seconded on using Mailreach. I wouldn't overthink email warming services, they're really just supplementary to your actual success. Meaning that if your actual sending has issues (bad copy, wrong audience, bad pacing of sending) then it won't matter what email warming service you used.

Just pick an affordable one with a good reputation (again, I love Mailreach but I don't get paid by them to say that–haha) and use it.

 

[gspartners]

A good email warmer is a solution that best replicates a very successful cold emailing activity. Meaning sending prospecting emails and getting interested replies that show a real interest in the sender's emails.

It's not just about getting replies and your emails opened, removed from spam. You need a tool that creates an email activity that is the closest to sending cold emails, offering to chat and, getting interested replies like "Thank you, yes, I'm available to chat with you".

The mailbox providers like O365 from Microsoft, Gmail, Gsuite have the technology to understand the interest of a recipient. They understand "Thank you", "yes", "I'm available" and their synonyms. I wouldn't even be surprised if they'd be now able to understand most of the content sent and received.

And the number of mailboxes that interact with yours is important as well. IMO the solution should have at least 8k mailboxes.

I don't know all the tools doing that as there are new ones every month.

I wouldn't go for Smartlead as they seem pretty new in this market. I've never heard about Boxwarm. I've heard about Instantly but I don't know the type of content they use.

For now, my go-to is always Mailreach for efficiency, easy UI and because they fully focus on deliverability. I usually avoid multi tools as they're generally not the best in each feature.

Why not trying these and tell us your results? Just avoid the ones using meaningless content.

Shatzyo -
Do you have concerns about big G increasingly pushing us to use 2FA and other ways they are seemingly making our lives harder as emailers?
Thanks
GSP

 

[Shatzyo]

Shatzyo -
Do you have concerns about big G increasingly pushing us to use 2FA and other ways they are seemingly making our lives harder as emailers?
Thanks
GSP

Email warm up tools have to adapt to stop using Gmail API as Google is now looking for email warming activity using their API.

For now, warmers just have to stop using the API and should be fine, but if Google decides to further investigate, it will push warmers to warm differently.

There are several ways to do email warming actually, so I'm not really worried. Google will try to kill the tools if they manage to detect them (they have the technology for it but some warmers are more difficult to identify depending how they work outside of the API).

When I heard of Gmass warmer getting flagged, I reached out to Mailreach, they briefly explained their plan and it looks pretty resilient to me.

It's gonna be fun to see how warmers will manage to adapt, or not, I'm curious.

 

[gspartners]

Email warm up tools have to adapt to stop using Gmail API as Google is now looking for email warming activity using their API.

For now, warmers just have to stop using the API and should be fine, but if Google decides to further investigate, it will push warmers to warm differently.

There are several ways to do email warming actually, so I'm not really worried. Google will try to kill the tools if they manage to detect them (they have the technology for it but some warmers are more difficult to identify depending how they work outside of the API).

When I heard of Gmass warmer getting flagged, I reached out to Mailreach, they briefly explained their plan and it looks pretty resilient to me.

It's gonna be fun to see how warmers will manage to adapt, or not, I'm curious.

I actually think the harder and more expensive email gets to do, the better for you and me. Just my 2c

 

[hackerig]

interested

 

[Boy20]

For anyone reading this, Debounce isn't currently accepting new customers, but it's worth putting yourself on the waitlist.

I recently did an audit for my own company of 15+ verification services comparing price, comprehensiveness of reporting, bounce criteria etc. I'd prefer not to share the full audit here, but below is quick table showing you pricing at the 10K tier.

Millionverifier is probably the best bang for your buck (outside Debounce). The UX isn't beautiful but the results are great.

Service Name	Price/10K emails	Price/Email
DeBounce	$15.00	$0.0015
MyEmailVerifier	$21.60	$0.0022
EmailListVerify	$24.00	$0.0024
Pabbly	$25.00	$0.0025
Millionverifier	$29.00	$0.0029
TrueMail	$44.00	$0.0044
Bouncer	$50.00	$0.0050
Emailable	$50.00	$0.0050
Neverbounce	$50.00	$0.0050
Clearout	$58.00	$0.0058
QuickEmailVerification	$60.00	$0.0060
CaptainVerify	$60.00	$0.0060
ZeroBounce	$65.00	$0.0065
xVerify	$70.00	$0.0070
Briteverify	$80.00	$0.0080
Kickbox	$80.00	$0.0080

your list is mostly highly premium ones so they are quite expensive
most affordable paid service is email-verify.my-addr.com, it is widely recommended by people in this forum

https://email-verify.my-addr.com/ (100-135USD per 1M)
https://www.mycleanlist.com/plans-and-pricing/ (250USD per 1M)
https://myemailverifier.com/ (300USD for 1M)
https://removebounce.com/pricing (320USD per 1M)

free online tool can be good like h-educate email validator, jitbit, bulkdata.io - also gmass (but temporarily closed now)

 

[Sandst]

Hello guys, just saw this: https://www.gmass.co/blog/warmup-shutting-down/

Do you believe other warmup tools like mailreach, warmupinbox etc will be closed soon too? Or that's impossible?

 

[Shatzyo]

Hello guys, just saw this: https://www.gmass.co/blog/warmup-shutting-down/

Do you believe other warmup tools like mailreach, warmupinbox etc will be closed soon too? Or that's impossible?

Don't worry, email warm up is not dead. There are several ways to do email warming, including some that can't get flagged, at all.

I'm not worried about this, the good tools will adapt their process. Gmass warm up was underperforming as it was only with Google inboxes, no warm up with Outlook inboxes.

As I use Mailreach, I talked about this with their team and they've already adapted the service to take that into account. From what they said, they didn't receive a Google warning as they're not an "officially audited Google App" but they still take this seriously. The updated process is now IMAP but even if IMAP would get flagged, they said that they have other plans to make it work.

I assume other solutions have B plans as well.

 

[wolfman1]

Thanks once again for all your replies and attention to detail @Shatzyo

This thread is a super masterclass on cold email and deliverability

But let me honest …

I spent many hours researching the suggestions in this thread …

Only to completely confuse myself

My gut feeling suggests that Mailshake and Mailreach are well respected.

Here is my scenario and I would appreciate any feedback …

I would like to email around 3000 influencers an email per month, with a business partnership proposal. In that sense, it’s more B2B than B2C.

Based on the advice here, that probably means I should open five Google workspace accounts, and warm each of them up for at least 14 days.

Then, I would setup each email account to send around 20 emails per day maximum.

That would mean, across a month … I would be able to deliver 3,000 cold emails.

(5 accounts * 20 emails per day * 30 days a month = 3k)

Does that seem like an appropriate strategy?

And based on my goal (to send 3k emails a month to elicit a reply) - could you suggest a more effective approach?

At this stage I’m contemplating five mailreach accounts, individually connected 1:1 to five google workspace accounts.

Each mailreach account would warm up its corresponding email GWS account …

And assuming I follow deliverability best practice (ie, well targeted list, short email, no links, request a reply, personalised subject line) …

Do you think this approach would work?

Would I be better off having a single google workspace account and create three inboxes at the same custom domain?

Or would five domains, each with a single google workspace email address provide higher deliverability etc.

I’m terribly sorry for so many questions. I’m quite confused

Ideally I was hoping to spend less than $150 a month in total.

Thanks again - you are fantastic

P.S. - Oh dang, I forgot about the fact that I might want to send a few follow-up emails to those people who don’t reply, so that destroys my attempts at maths above.

 

[Shatzyo]

Thanks once again for all your replies and attention to detail @Shatzyo

This thread is a super masterclass on cold email and deliverability

But let me honest …

I spent many hours researching the suggestions in this thread …

Only to completely confuse myself

My gut feeling suggests that Mailshake and Mailreach are well respected.

Here is my scenario and I would appreciate any feedback …

I would like to email around 3000 influencers an email per month, with a business partnership proposal. In that sense, it’s more B2B than B2C.

Based on the advice here, that probably means I should open five Google workspace accounts, and warm each of them up for at least 14 days.

Then, I would setup each email account to send around 20 emails per day maximum.

That would mean, across a month … I would be able to deliver 3,000 cold emails.

(5 accounts * 20 emails per day * 30 days a month = 3k)

Does that seem like an appropriate strategy?

And based on my goal (to send 3k emails a month to elicit a reply) - could you suggest a more effective approach?

At this stage I’m contemplating five mailreach accounts, individually connected 1:1 to five google workspace accounts.

Each mailreach account would warm up its corresponding email GWS account …

And assuming I follow deliverability best practice (ie, well targeted list, short email, no links, request a reply, personalised subject line) …

Do you think this approach would work?

Would I be better off having a single google workspace account and create three inboxes at the same custom domain?

Or would five domains, each with a single google workspace email address provide higher deliverability etc.

I’m terribly sorry for so many questions. I’m quite confused

Ideally I was hoping to spend less than $150 a month in total.

Thanks again - you are fantastic

P.S. - Oh dang, I forgot about the fact that I might want to send a few follow-up emails to those people who don’t reply, so that destroys my attempts at maths above.

Hey

You don't need 5 Google workspaces. You need one main Google Workspace with several inboxes and if you can, have several domains. You can easily plug several domains to a Google workspace.

20/day is good and very safe as it's a low volume but you can send 100 daily (without counting the follow ups) as well so you may need fewer inboxes. If you use a warmer like Mailreach, it will protect your reputation.

I don't recommend Mailshake anymore as they're very expensive and their warm up sucks, but Emelia as it's much cheaper and works well. It should fit your budget.

 

[wolfman1]

Thank you again. Much appreciated

One final question … I got confused about the Google workspace stuff, because in my own account, they were asking me to pay again.

I just checked this page:
https://support.google.com/a/answer/7502379
And it looks like I can setup … up to 20 domains as aliases, where my main primary email accounts are replicated.

for example, let’s say my main domain is domain1.com and my email is [email protected]

then as far as I can tell, I can add domain2.com and domain3.com and so on … as many as 20 domains in total.

that means I would have [email protected] for example.

But these are domain aliases.
Could you advise on this for me?

I appreciate your time, and just wanted to know if the aliases are fine as a stand alone thing for cold email, or would I be better off buying additional “users” which allow me to create a new domain and email essentially.

thanks mate