💡How to Create High Deliverability Campaigns
Here we will delve into how to achieve excellent inbox deliverability on all of your campaigns. There are more ways to mess this up than to nail it and we want you to learn from our vast first hand experience on the exact right ways to do this.
Over-sending cold emails without adhering to best practices can lead to domain blacklisting, resulting in all your emails ending up in the spam/junk folder. This is irreversible.
By following the steps in this guide, you can significantly improve response rates from your campaigns. It's vital reading for sales, marketing and entrepreneurial personnel.
A: Buying new branded domains
This is an extremely important first step as you are laying the critical foundation for deliverability success and removing any risk to your main domains.
It's essential to send cold emails from a professional email address linked to a domain, not a personal email like @gmail.com, @outlook.com, or @yahoo.com.
This approach ensures credibility and responses.
For instance, [email protected] is linked to the domain growtoro.com. This would be considered the “primary/main” domain - which is the domain your website is hosted on.
It's crucial to avoid sending cold emails from your primary domain, which hosts your company's public website. If you disregard this advice, you risk domain burning that leads to blacklisting and all emails being flagged as spam/junk. And if you burn your main domain - then all of your email marketing, customer service and order emails will go to spam, and you simply cannot have that happen.
To mitigate this risk, purchase a “branded domain” similar to your primary one. This secondary domain will serve as the source for your cold email campaigns. If it gets burned (and eventually, it will), your primary domain remains unaffected and you can simply buy a new branded domain for $9 for the year.
For example, if your main domain is growtoro.com, you could buy related domains like: trygrowtoro.com, usegrowtoro.com, thegrowtoro.com and so on...
Avoid hyphens and numbers in your domain names, and always opt for a .com extension.
If I'm Ashley, for instance, I can set up email addresses with these domains like:
And other variations - we always recommend including your first name in the email account, vs something like [email protected]
The next step after you have purchased your branded domains is to immediately redirect them back to your primary domain/website, so if a recipient copy and pastes this domain into their browser, they will be redirected right back to your main website and everything will appear uniform and credible.
So trygrowtoro.com would be redirected to growtoro.com
usegrowtoro.com would be redirected to growtoro.com
thegrowtoro.com would be redirected to growtoro.com
We recommend buying ALL of your domains from Namecheap.com - which is the far superior domain registrar to GoDaddy and others. It is far cheaper and offers amazing customer service for any of your needs.
B: Properly setting up your branded domains (SPF, DKIM, DMARC & Domain Forwarding)
Buying the branded domain is just the first step, now you have to ensure you set up these critical DNS records to ensure domain compliance and excellent deliverability.
Setting up these records (before you start any emailing) will significantly improve your deliverability and will ensure your emails land in the primary inbox.
SPF
If you are using Google Workspace (GSUITE) for your emails, adding an SPF record is just adding one line in your DNS settings. You can follow this guide here: https://support.google.com/a/answer/10684623
DKIM
This is another simple addition to your DNS records
If you are using Google Workspace (GSUITE), you can follow this guide: https://support.google.com/a/answer/174126?hl=en and this guide to help you verify you’ve set it up correctly: https://support.google.com/a/answer/11612790?hl=en
If you are using Microsoft Office 365, you can follow this guide: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/office-365-security/email-authentication-dkim-configure?view=o365-worldwide
If you are using Private Email (Namecheap's Email Service), you can follow this guide: https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/10383/2176/how-to-set-up-a-dkim-record-for-private-email/
DMARC
The final record to add is your DMARC. You have to set up SPF and DKIM prior to setting up DMARC, and you should always give this a few hours to a day before adding your DMARC record (to ensure SPF/DKIM have authenticated).
Follow this guide for Google Workspace (GSUITE) emails: https://support.google.com/a/answer/2466563?hl=en
If you are using Microsoft Office 365, you can follow this guide: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/office-365-security/email-authentication-dmarc-configure?view=o365-worldwide
If you are using Private Email (Namecheap's Email Service), you can follow this guide:https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/317/2237/how-do-i-add-txtspfdkimdmarc-records-for-my-domain/
TESTING YOU’VE SET UP YOUR RECORDS CORRECTLY
This tool is a lifesaver to ensuring you have set up all of your SPF, DKIM and DMARC records correctly: https://mxtoolbox.com
Just plug your domain in there and it will automatically check that you have set everything up properly.
FORWARDING YOUR DOMAINS
As mentioned above, it is critical to forward / redirect your branded domains back to your primary domain/website.
If a recipient enters the domain that you send cold emails from into their browser, you want the prospect to see your company’s real website right away. This does not happen often (a lot of recipients can be lazy) but when they do, you want to appear credible and uniform.
If one of your domain/email providers is not listed above and you are having trouble setting up these DNS records, let us know and we will gladly help.
C: Setting up your email accounts
You have now set up all of your domains for proper outbound sending. Now its time to create your new email accounts under these new domains.
Once you have connected your new domain to your Google Workspace, Office 365, Namecheap or other email provider, creating an email account is straightforward. If you do not know how to do this, just message us in the platform letting us know which email provider you have and we’ll send you bespoke instructions.
The key here is you should only set up one email account per domain. You can get away with two (if you plan to do really low daily sending volume), but we recommend just 1x email per 1x domain.
Make sure your first name and last name is inserted properly so your recipients will see your full name when they get an email from you. You do not need to set up a fancy signature and if you do - DO NOT put a picture in your signatures as this is a one way ticket to spamville.
We like to use very simple, basic signatures like these:
Best,
Greg Watkins | Cofounder | https://growtoro.com
You should always use your primary/main domain in your email signature and NOT your branded domain. So the only time someone will see your branded domain is if they click the little arrow below your name, like here:
Otherwise, they will just see your primary domain in the signature, click on that and go directly to your main website or landing page.
D: Warming up your email accounts
You have now set up all of your domains for proper outbound sending. Now its time for the final act of infrastructure setup - warming up your accounts.
We have made warming up your newly created email accounts extremely easy. As a matter of fact, when you connect your new email account to the Growtoro platform, our smart warmup is automatically turned on for you, as you will see here:
Our warmup system will start sending out warmup emails for you daily starting low volume and ramping up, maxing out at around 40 warmup emails per day.
Our system will automatically see the volume of your sending history and inbox health, then intelligently structure and tweak the settings for you as we go along - so you don’t have to worry about a thing.
For more on how warmup works, read this guide: www.guidewarmup.com
For more on how to connect an email account to Growtoro: www.guidewarmup.com
As you will see throughout our guides, videos and tutorials - we take a conservative sending ideology and a more quality vs quantity approach.
Sure, you can blast out 1 million emails in a week - but they will all land in the spam folder and you will waste a ton of time/resources/good leads in doing so.
Our key volume recommendation is to max out at 60 live campaign sent emails per day, per account.
The combination of warmup emails + a low volume of live campaign emails sent to a good list with amazing copy (all critical components) guarantees your engagement to be high (in positive actions) and your health score to be good.
The longer your email account gets warmed up, the more positive engagement you receive on that account and the more your reputation gets built - the more you can increase your volumes but again - once you have a good thing going with an account, stick to it and maintain that volume that’s working - don’t try to get “greedy”. Just buy another domain/set up an email account instead.
Think of each email account as its own lead delivery pipeline - with certain levels of capacity and high potential. The more pipelines you set up, the better your campaigns will be and the more leads you will accrue overall. Always spread your sending across many inboxes VS just a 1.
We recommend keeping your warmup turned on permanently, 24/7 for every email inbox account you connect to the platform.
We also strongly recommend that for brand new domains & email accounts, you should connect them to warmup immediately and let that run for 2 weeks.
That’s right - no live campaign emails should go out in the first 2 weeks, just intelligent warmup. Then at the 2 week mark, you can start live campaign sending!
Read below for the best way to ramp your sending & volume up.
D: Finding leads for the campaigns
After you have your domains purchased/set up properly, email accounts set up and placed into warmup - now it’s time to gather targeted leads for the campaign.
There are so many places and ways to get contact data in 2023, it’s almost dizzying.
Fortunately for you, we have tried most of these sources over the years and now firmly know how to procure the best targeted data for any campaign.
We recommend that you use our Custom Lead Order tool inside the platform to get the exact leads you are looking for:
You can fill out the exact types of leads you want — across B2B or B2C — and we will go out there, compile your list, verify your emails and upload that list right back into your dashboard. You can then use them in your campaigns or export out.
This is not an “automatic” process, which ultimately serves you very well. Yes, you have to wait 1 day or so to get your leads, but you are getting freshly acquired data completely customized to your specifications.
You can of course source your campaign leads elsewhere to use, just make sure your emails are verified and your list is relevant to the campaign you are creating/the copy you are writing.
E: Writing Compelling & Persuasive Copy for the Campaigns
Now that you have your fresh list acquired, it’s time to write killer copy for these campaigns.
The key principles to keep in mind here are:
Brevity (has to be short)
Creativity or Wit (has to be creative or interesting or smart)
Informative (has to clearly inform the recipient)
Value Driven (has to offer something of value)
Without question, creativity and wit has evolved into an essential ingredient in any successful marketing campaign, more specifically, in direct marketing and direct, cold outreach.
When applied to your copy, email personalization, call-to-action (CTA) questions, facts, opening lines, subject lines, and more — creativity/wit can indeed be the difference between a reply of interest and a swift click on the delete or spam button.
You want to treat your copy as your most important “weapon” of all and channel all of your creative focus to achieve an outstanding copy.
Your copy has to speak directly to the reader while shining a strong light on your product/service/brand and why it’s truly beneficial to them.
During your 2 week warmup window, we recommend that you learn as much as possible about writing effective cold email copy - simply enter something along the lines of “how to write effective cold email copy” on Google and YouTube, and just spend some time immersing yourself in there to get a foundational feel for the needed principles.
Once you’re educated up, you can head back to the Growtoro platform to capitalize on your newly acquired knowledge with some sweet tools.
The first main tool you can use to write some baseline copy is GrowtoroGPT. This is literally just OpenAI’s GPT4 (their most advanced model) stuffed right inside our platform - so don’t worry about not using the best generative AI tool out there, you will be.
This is where you can find GrowtoroGPT:
Having this super advance copy writing tool at your disposal is a great advantage… but don’t solely rely on this.
We also have 200+ high converting email templates you can steal and modify to your liking/needs.
Here:
The benefit of us coming from a cold email agency is that we ran literally thousands of successful campaigns over the years and saved all of those templates… so you can now use them.
So you can use a combination of GPT4 (GrowtoroGPT) and these awesome templates to create completely original and powerful copy that’s perfect for your business, style and overall objectives.
We recommend you write at least 2, 6 step unique copies that you can deploy at the same time to A/B test.
A/B testing copies + subject lines is a huge component of campaign success in finding your winning creatives, then being able to scale.
The Growtoro platform is set up perfectly for this as it’s an A/B testing wonderland.
F: Creating & Launching the Campaigns
You have your connected and fully warmed up email accounts to the platform… You have gathered your highly targeted, fresh lists… You have written some amazing copy that’s sure to turn heads and generate responses.
Now there is only one thing left to do: create and launch your campaigns!
The Growtoro platform is designed to be user friendly and highly intuitive, allowing you to set up and deploy campaigns with ease.
Please see our tutorial here on the exact steps of how to set up a campaign & launch: www.youtube.com
We will stick to high level concepts and principles for the purpose of this guide.
Aside from the above essential elements (proper domain setup, good list, great copy) – the other key components of a successful campaign include structuring your follow up steps correctly and tweaking your campaign settings to max optimization.
We believe email campaign follow up steps should be completely random - as a real human would send - and staggered between multiple days. You should rarely send your Step #2 email the day after Step #1 (unless it’s some kind of super urgent, last minute thing you’re promoting) but even then - people rarely want to be emailed by a random person on back to back days.
You can set Step #2 as 6 or 7 days after Step #1, and then Step #3 as 4-5 days after Step #2, and then Step #4 as 8-9 days after Step #3, etc.
This is something you can totally test and measure results easily - which time frame between steps is generating the most engagement and positive responses?
With Growtoro, you are able to set up a Sending Schedule for your campaign, VS having to choose exactly when the next email should go out.
This is what your Sending Schedule looks like:
You can choose the starting and ending times for when emails should go out, the timezone they should be delivered in and the days they can go out on.
We recommend not sending on the weekends in most cases — but for certain campaigns + purposes, this is fine.
Our system will intelligently decide the exact time the campaigns need to deliver on so you don’t have to choose exact hours + minutes + seconds on your own.
Once you have configured your follow up steps, created & saved your sending schedule - now you are onto the final step of arranging your campaign settings.
One great thing about the Growtoro platform is that you can use multiple email accounts/sending accounts for every campaign (to further enhance deliverability and getting to the primary inbox) and how this works is you can choose which email accounts you want to send out on here:
And then the system will automatically divvy the volume out equally from all your sending accounts. So if you have a campaign with 90 recipients, then the above 3 email accounts would send out 30 each.
The next step is set up the max # of emails per day overall for the campaign, here:
We recommend not going higher than 150 per day, unless you have a ton of sending accounts on the campaigns. But even so, the max you can go is 200 emails per day per campaign, and never higher. We are enforcing this is a deliverability safeguard for you, and it’s in your campaign’s best interest.
We know how finicky and tricky it is to reach the inbox with consistency and reliability, and the daily volume you send is perhaps the #1 influential factor that decides whether your emails are hitting the primary inbox or not.
If you want to send more emails out to a particular audience, simply create a new campaign in the platform and use different email addresses to do the sending.
In a structural sense, there is no real limit to how many emails you can send out — it’s just how you go about it and that you distribute the volume wisely across many campaigns + email accounts.
The next step is the Delay between emails sent, here:
We recommend at least 4 minutes or more here. The more time between emails sent and the more random you can structure your sending behavior - the more likely you are to appear a real human sender and thus increase your ability to bypass spam filters and folders. This is half art, half science and a ton of experimenting until you hit your groove.
You can either choose to Enable open tracking here or not:
This of course tells you how your subject line / first email preview line is faring and is an important metric.
With the recent iOs15 changes and open rates skyrocketing in some cases, you want to view these metrics with a grain of salt - but they are still important and need to be measured, analyzed and tweaked.
The final campaign setting is Completing on reply, here:
We highly recommend turning this on so you don’t email your freshly responded prospects again on the same sequence and look stupid or piss them off.
Once a prospect / recipient replies, they are taken out of the sequence and will not receive any follow up emails.
Now, it’s time to save your campaign or launch it:
Now that your campaign is underway, it’s time to rinse and repeat to massive success.
G: Scaling & maintaining your campaign success
Now that your campaign is launched, you can check your progress in the Campaign Analytics section of your individual campaign analytic dashboard.
You’ll be able to see open rate, replies, unsubscribes, deliveries and clicks.
You can also view an aggregate of all your campaign statistics in the main analytic section of the platform here:
If you love the way a campaign is set up and want to tweak just 1 or 2 things for A/B purposes, you can simply duplicate the campaign here:
Give it a new name, tweak your settings and then closely monitor them both.
We can’t emphasize enough how important A/B/C/D+ testing is in your campaigns!
There is truly no one size fits all, silver bullet solution for cold outreach success and it varies wildly from business to business, but the core principles remain:
Excellent deliverability
Targeted, verified list
Super creative/smart copy
Analytics to measure success and know where to click
You need to closely stay on top of your campaign's success and see what’s going right and what’s not going well - so you know exactly what to adjust.
Cold outreach campaigns are similar to a high level sports game — in order to be successful, you have to make in-game adjustments based on the data and performance. Get what your recipients are giving you and follow their lead.
Your recipients are your data generators and your success indicators, if you simply listen to them (through opens, replies, clicks, unsubscribes) you will know exactly what to tweak.
There is really no hard/defined time frame in terms of when you will see campaign success - for some campaigns, maybe on Day 1 and for others, Day 25.
You have to keep trying and most importantly - NEVER GIVE UP. In our years of manually doing this for hundreds of clients agency style (coaching + advising even more people), it was extremely rare where some modicum of success wasn’t achieved. You just need to be patient, hard working and decisive - that is, you need to make quick decisions and tweaks and not overthink things.
It’s easy to assume how a campaign is going to go… or how your copy is going to sound… or how your recipients will view you… but you genuinely will never know until you get out there and try, and try… and try again.
The beauty in this kind of outreach is its low cost (much lower than other forms of paid marketing), so you have a lot of flexibility, freedom and time to keep experimenting and running campaigns until something works. And it will work, we can promise you.
We will always offer you unrivaled support so if your campaigns just are not working for any reason - simply reach out to us and we'll take a deep dive for you, then provide you with some specific tweaks you can make 😊
Technical Scaling
In terms of how to scale volume wise once you discovered some success, the main thing is to always distribue your volume across several inboxes and not just the ones you currently have running. If you want to increase your volume with good deliverability = get more domains/set up more email accounts/connect them to the platform/begin immediate warmup and let them simmer.
Once you have your winning subjects/copies/call to actions - simply duplicate your winning campaigns on the newly activated and warmed up email accounts and boom — you are great to go.
You can now scale as high and far as you want and watch the leads + responses roll in.
If you have any questions at all on how to properly set up accounts, get lists, create copy and launch campaigns — email us at [email protected] or message us inside the platform and we will be glad to help you.
Your success = our success 💜.
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