Instantly Cold Email Strategy ♟✉️

If you want to use the exact strategy for getting amazing results with cold emailing we are using - here's the secret sauce 🥫

Raul Kaevand avatar
Written by Raul Kaevand
Updated over a week ago

How We Get 1-10 Demos Every Day By Automatically Sending 1000+ Cold Emails Daily With A 50%+ Open Rate.

⭐️ This is the best minimal effort maximum gain system for high ticket B2B offers we’ve found.

👉 You can set everything up in 1-2 hours. Then you just have to wait for the new emails to warm up for around 14 days and you’re ready to go. Once you understand the system you can give this tutorial to your VA’s and make your life even easier.

👉 If you combine this strategy with personalized first lines, you can get even better results. But this strategy works even without personalization.

⭐️ Before starting, create a free Instantly account here. We’re going to be using Instantly for automating email sending.

Before we get into the specifics here are the rough estimates. You can set up this exact system for 1 email account too, but this is to show you the potential and scalability.

Numbers:

✅ 1000 emails daily

✅ 30K monthly (50% open rate)

✅ 15K opens (5% reply rate)

✅ 750 replies (15% positive)

✅ 112 booked meetings (75% show-up rate)

✅ 84 live demos (20% close rate)

✅ 16 closes ($1K ticket)

✅ 16K/mo

Cost / Tech Stack:

✅ 10 Domains - $90

✅ 30 Google Workspace users/email addresses - $180

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✅ Leads from Lead Finder, Apollo.io or other tools

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✅ 30K Leads Cleaning with BulkEmailChecker - $30 (when using Lead Finder you can skip this)

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✅ 30K Leads Sending with Instantly $97

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💳 Total: $593 the first month, then $503/mo

💰 Investment Gain - $15,396.00

🤑 ROI - 5,596.26%

Not too shabby right? Let's get this set up

Step-By-Step Instructions

🥫 Domain & Email Setup

Here’s the checklist you can use to keep track of all the steps for Domain & Email setup and also give to your VAs.

We want to buy secondary domains for cold emailing so we don’t damage the reputation of your main domain. And for each domain, we want to create max 2-3 email accounts. From each email, we’re going to be sending only 30-50 emails a day to not get stuck in spam.

🥫 Buying Domains (10 mins)

Buy domains that are similar to your main domain. Top-level domains work best. We’ve had success with domains like .agency .tech too, but if possible, buy .com domains.

If your business is called Shrimp.com, then buy domains like:

👉 Getshrimp.com

👉 Tryshrimp.com

👉 TastyShrimpApp.com

Here’s a list of domains with the worst reputation. Don’t use these.

We use GoDaddy for buying Domains, because we’ve used it for a long time and it has tons of integrations and tutorials. You do you.

TIP: Make sure you go to https://account.godaddy.com/subscriptions and cancel all renewals if you do not want to use these domains for more than a year.

🥫 Setting Up Google Workspace (3 mins)

Go to https://workspace.google.com/ and click Get Started. Follow the on-screen instructions until your Google Workspace account is set up. You can safely create 2-3 emails per domain (by adding users in your Google Workspace admin).

Connect 3 domains per Google Workspace.


🥫 Setting Up Domains - SPF, DKIM, DMARC & Forwarding (15-20 mins)

Now we get to the fun part! You should authenticate all the domains you are sending emails from. Here are the three parameters you have to set up for each domain: SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

1) Set up SPF

Assuming you are using Google Workspace you can follow this guide to set up SPF.

You can check if your SPF is properly set up using this tool.

2) Set up DKIM

Again, assuming you are using Google Workspace you can follow this guide to set up DKIM.

You can check if your DKIM is properly set up using this tool.

3) Set up DMARC

​​Important: Configure DKIM and SPF before configuring DMARC. DKIM and SPF should be authenticating messages for at least 48 hours before turning on DMARC.

Assuming you are using Google Workspace you can follow this guide to set up DMARC.

You can check if your DMARC is properly set up using this tool.

4) Set up Forwarding

Also, you want to forward the new domains to your main domain. This can be done in the settings of your domain provider. If you are using GoDaddy, you can follow this guide.


🥫 Setting Up Emails Accounts & Forwarding (10 mins)

In order to later warm up your emails on Instantly, you need to make a few changes in the settings of your Google Workspace account and separate emails.

You can do this by following this guide.

Then forward all of your created email accounts to your main account for easier monitoring. You can do this in Gmail by following this guide.

This way you will have a master inbox where all the replies are stored.


🥫 Warming Up Emails (15 mins)

In Instantly click the flame icon for all your email accounts you added to enable warm-up

We recommend using the suggested sending limits.

Warm Up your emails for at least 2 weeks before starting your campaigns. As you can see in the image below we have 30+ domains warming up at any given time for our agency. That will allow you to really scale it up and get to that 5+ demos/day mark sooner.

Always keep the warm up inbox on - never turn it off.


🥫 Making sure everything is set up correctly

Before starting your campaigns, you want to make sure the domain and email set up is done correctly.

For domains, use SPF & DKIM check.

For testing email spamminess, use Mail Tester.

If something's wrong, go back and quickly fix it :)

🥫 Leads & Targeting

Finding leads is easy, the harder part is knowing exactly which kinds of leads are the best. We approach it based on case studies. Who are the people who have gotten the most value out of your or your client's service? And who in that company is in charge of dealing with your offering?

If you don’t exactly know who to target just try different options until you find a targeting & email combo that works. Then just get as many similar leads as possible.


🥫 Getting Leads (1-10 mins)

➕ Easy to use.

➕ Import leads into the campaign in 60 seconds

➕ Verified leads (no need to pay for third-party verifier)

➕ Advanced filters like technology, domain enrichment, lead enrichment are available

They have a huge database of B2B leads and you can filter them with tens of filters like revenue, employee count, niche, tech stack etc.

➕ Great Database

➕ Great Filters

➖ The main plan allows you to export 25 leads at a time.

🥫 Cleaning Leads (5 mins)

If we’re not in a rush this is our go-to. It’s quite slow but the cheapest.

➕ Cheap

➖ Slow

👉 On the left-hand side select Bulk Verify.

👉 On the right-hand side select This file contains multiple columns of data in a csv spreadsheet. Select the file with your leads and click Upload.

👉 Wait 2-3 minutes for the next window to appear and click the green button Check Status.

👉 Select the column with the email address. Click the green button Select.

👉 Wait 5 minutes until the next window appears to start the validation process.

👉 Click the green button to start the validation process. We recommend the slower validation method since it is significantly cheaper.

Once the lead list has finished validating and you have exported the lead list from Bulkemailchecker make sure to format and clean it before sending emails.

You do that by only keeping the rows that say “The address passed all tests” in the Details column (the last column all the way to the right). Remove any rows that don’t say The address passed all tests, such as Dupe., The address does not have a valid dns., None., Is a Catchall mx server config., Greylisting is active on this server. Etc.

The following step-by-step instructions show you how to do this fast and accurately.

👉 Upload the .csv to your GDrive as a Google Sheet. Apply filters on the entire sheet.

👉 Once the filter is applied to the entire sheet go to the column Details. Click on the filter symbol inside of that column header. Click Clear and type in the search box passed so you can find all email addresses that have passed the validation stage. Click on the result and press OK.

👉 Select all, copy and paste into a new sheet inside the same spreadsheet. Add -only-passed at the end of the new sheet name where you pasted in the results.

👉 Delete the original tab/sheet so you only have the [NAME]-only-passed sheet left in the spreadsheet.

This makes sure that you’re only sending to valid emails and keeping your spam score low. Once you’ve done that you are ready to proceed and start sending in Instantly :)

➕ Faster

➖ More Expensive.

Make sure that the lead list that you’re going to upload on the next step only contains the validated emails and not the negative results.

🥫 Setting Up The Campaign With Instantly

We use Instantly because you can connect unlimited email accounts (it’s not pay per account like most similar software) and it’s the easiest software to use (because we built it like that).

Create a free trial account here.


🥫 Connecting Email Accounts (10 mins)

Simply connect all your emails with Instantly here: https://app.instantly.ai/app/account/connect

We recommend using 2FA whenever possible because it’s much more secure and stable.

🥫 Uploading Leads (1 min)

Just upload all the cleaned leads via CSV.


🥫 Setting Up The Sequence (5 mins)

Email Copy:

Keep your emails short and sweet. We don’t use any links. Try pattern interrupts and get creative. Don’t send that boring shit that everybody’s sending.

Here are a bunch of great cold email sequences from Lemlist users.

Here’s another list of cold email templates from Hunter.io

For first lines we recommend Listkit.

We use a 3 step sequence.

Step 1 - Initial Cold Email.

Step 2 - Quick bump.

Step 3 - Break-up Email.


🥫 Scheduling (1 min)

Here just start with work-hours in the time zone where your leads for this campaign are located at.

🥫 Advanced Options (1 min)

Emails To Use - Just select all the accounts for this campaign you want to use. This is the real superpower of Instantly. It will start sending emails from all of these accounts automatically.

Stop sending emails on reply - Stops the sequence for the user who has replied. This is recommended.

Open tracking - you can disable open tracking and the tracking pixel in your emails with this option. It will improve your deliverability but you won't be able to track the open rate.

Delivery optimization - To improve deliverability, you can send your emails as text-only. This function disables the tracking pixes so you won't be able to track the open rates.

Daily Sending Limit - We recommend sending max 30-50 emails a day for best results, so just multiply your added accounts in this campaign by 30 to set this number.

That’s it. Now you can launch your campaign.

Congrats! Instantly will start sending out emails every day automatically from all your connected accounts and you just need to keep an eye on the campaigns.

🥫 Analyzing Campaigns

Use the Analytics Tab to keep an eye on your campaigns and pause the ones that aren’t delivering results.

🎯 Benchmarks

We want to hit:

🎯 50% Open Rate

🎯 5+% Reply Rate

If the open rate is lower (check this article), try a different subject line and make sure your emails are not getting stuck in spam. If they are in spam, pause the campaign for a couple of days and let the warm-up run until you’re out of spam.

If the reply rate is lower, change your email copy and/or targeting. It can take a couple of different tests until you find a working combo.


🥫 Scaling Up

Scaling up is super easy. Just create more domains/email accounts, and add them to your Instantly campaign and increase the daily sending limit.

Feel free to send this tutorial to VA’s and just have them set up as many domains and emails as you need.


The End. Feedback & Suggestions

That’s it. Thanks for reading and now it’s time to start executing.

Always happy to hear from you guys what you think we can improve to make this system & instantly even better/cheaper/quicker.

If you have any questions or want us to set this system up for you, contact us directly via the Live Chat on Instantly.ai

See ya.

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