Cold email truths i learned the hard way
deliverability is the whole game spent the first 2 months obssessing over copy none of it mattered because half my emails were landing in spam fix infastructure first SPF DKIM DMARC on every sending domain custom tracking domain or just turn tracking off entierly and never ever send from your main domain buy lookalike domains the .help and .info and .site versions and burn those instead
one inbox 30 emails a day max doesnt matter what anyone tells you push 100 a day per inbox and google will quietly start sending you to spam without telling you want 500 a day in volume you need around 17 inboxes across multiple domains this is the math nobody mentions when they sell you the dream
turn off open tracking i know it feels insane but tracking pixels tank deliverability and apple killed open rates anyway reply rate is the only honest metric link tracking too if you can avoid it and dont put a link in the first email at all
your list is 80% of the result better to send 200 emails to a hand built list than 5000 to scraped data everyone else is also hitting triple verify with two services stacked catch all domains are a coin flip segment them seperately
short emails win under 75 words no i hope this finds you well no paragraph about your company one specific observation about them one specific outcome youve delivered for someone like them one easy question thats the whole email
the offer matters more than the copy i rewrote my opener fifteen times before realising the problem was that nobody wanted what i was selling at the price i was selling it a boring email with a great offer beats a clever email with a mediocre one every time
most replies come from follow ups 2 to 4 not the first email send 4 or 5 follow ups spaced 2 to 4 days apart the breakup email should i close your file consistently outperforms my best opener dont take this personally people are just busy
are you the right person to talk to about X outperforms direct pitches in cold outreach to bigger companies because its low commitment and people love forwarding things
segment tight VPs of Marketing at SaaS companies 50 to 200 employees in fintech who raised in the last 18 months beats VPs of Marketing you can write a genuinely relevant first line for the first list you cannot for the second
microsoft inboxes hate you specifically outlook and o365 are brutal compared to google if your prospects are mostly on microsoft expect lower deliverability and adjust volume way down test weekly so you actually know where your landing
warm up never stops its not a one time thing before you launch keep warm up running on every inbox forever at lower volume than your sending the day you turn it off deliverability starts drifting
spintax is mid it helps a tiny bit with pattern matching but doesnt save bad copy or bad lists dont rely on it
dont use your transactional email provider for cold they will ban you and theyre not built for it anyway use something actually built for this
the biggest mindset shift cold email isnt a copywriting problem its a systems problem infastructure list quality offer and follow up cadence will outperform any clever opener every single time