I'm glad you decided to try cold emailing.

This guide will help you quickly set up cold emailing campaigns without wasting time searching the web or trying random resources.

Helping over 10,000+ companies, we know what it takes to succeed.

Let me walk through the guide. With 7 steps, you'll be ready to start and scale your outreach.

Here is a step-by-step challenge for you.

Step0️⃣: Welcome to Saleshandy 🙏

Step 1️⃣: Create ICP and build list 👨‍👦‍👦

Step 2️⃣: Create a compelling offer

Step3️⃣: Setup email accounts 📧

Step 4️⃣: Setup deliverability 📩

Step 5️⃣: Setup campaign ⚙️

Step 6️⃣: Setup reply tracking 📨

Step 7️⃣: Monitor and scale 📈

Tip💡To remind you, you can add these 7 steps to your Google Calendar as tasks.

To get the most out of this guide, I recommend blocking time in your calendar for each step and creating tasks for each checklist item. This will remind you daily to focus on completing the guide and its actionable steps.

Time 🕛 5 minutes

Goal 🥅 Create a free account on Saleshandy

To become successful in your 7-Step challenge, kick it off by creating a free account on Saleshandy.

You can visit Saleshandy and navigate to the big blue button on the website. Create a free account.

Here are some links you may find useful. We've got you covered when you're stuck during your 7-Step challenge.

Now, let’s jump on to the things in your checklist for the first Step.

As we've looked at creating a strong offer, let's find who will most likely buy it - your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

They are your best-fit target audience who will get the most value from your offer and pay you well.

Why is it important? So that you don’t just go after anyone in your market. Different customers have different needs and budgets. To get the best cold emailing results, identify your ICPs. Look at these 4 factors:

Here’s a step-by-step process with examples of how BANT helps you dig deeper and lets you find the required and right ICPs.

Ultimately, your ICP would look like these (examples) after implementing the BANT framework.

↳ Our ideal customer is a mid-market SaaS company

↳ It has $5-10 million in annual revenue, headquartered in the United States.

↳ They are spending heavily on AWS and struggling with high cloud costs.

↳ Their engineering team manages their cloud infrastructure.

↳ The company has been running for 5+ years and recently raised a Series A round of $5 million.

↳ The decision maker we want to reach is the VP of Engineering or CTO.

↳ Our ideal customer is a digital marketing agency

↳ It has $2-5 million in annual revenue

↳ It has at least $500k/year ad spend.

↳ They currently use Google Ads for client campaigns but have low ROI.

↳ Their in-house team runs all digital marketing efforts.

↳ The company is well-established, running for 7+ years.

↳ They have 50+ employees across 2 offices in the US.

↳ The decision maker we want to reach is the Head of Marketing or Founder/CEO.

However, you may wonder how to get this data and validate the BANT framework. Where can I get more information about my ICPs, demographics, and firmographics?

Here are two ways to find data for your ICPs.

#1: Create ICPs based on historical data

Your data is your gold mine. Let me share a template I’ve used for a long time to make my ICPs.

ICP Template (Shared)

You can use the shared template to fill in the following details from your historical data.

It can be the total sales you made over the past few years. Details can be organized in the sheet. See if your data shows any common traits or patterns.

What type of audience appears to be paying attention to your offer? How much is spent there? Check these details in your data and fill in the template shared above.

Tip💡To get effective results, create multiple ICPs based on job titles and paying segments. No company would pay you the same amount. Therefore, you should determine which segment of your ICP pays you the most, average, and least.

I segment my ICPs by their contract values, sharing an example:

HCV (High-Contract Value): $5000 + per month (Enterprise, 100+ employee size, $20 MN revenue, funded)

MCV (Mid-Contract Value): $2500-3000 per month (SMB, 50-100 employee size, $1-10 MN revenue)

LCV (Low-Contract Value): $1000 per month (New businesses, 11-50 employee size, > $1 MN revenue)

After you’re done with filling your data in the ICP template, let’s apply filters and create different segments.

For example, People with a lifetime spent more than $5000 +

ICPs with the designation/job title of “Founder”.

Next Step, we’ll export leads from databases and other sources based on these filtered sheets. In this way, we can create a highly targeted list for testing.

I’d recommend running campaigns for 100 leads pulling out of databases in each segment.

#2: Create ICP when you don’t have historical data.

Don't worry if you don't have historical data to create the ICP mentioned above template; everyone starts at some point. Let me tell you how I got started.

Creating mock ICP profiles helps you understand how the real ICPs look.

You can create a mock ICP profile and gradually gather more data.

If you don’t have a clue about ICPs, refer to the Masterclass: video

Also, you can go through the Ultimate Guide to Make ICP to create accurate mock ICPs.

What’s next?

After you’ve made your ICP profile, it’s time to gather actual data about them. How do you find actual data when you haven’t made any sales yet?

When you’re done gathering data about your prospects and talking to them, try to fill in the data in the shared template.

Up next, we'll use the ICP data exported to create filters in the database and highly targeted lists.

I often hear this hot question: Where can I find a good lead database?

However, there is no perfect source of leads!

It is all about experimenting and discovering what works for you and what doesn't. Sometimes, you may have to rely on multiple sources to get leads.

As we already created ICPs, it’s time for you to find leads from a lead database.

Firstly, let's discuss how the filters from the ICP templates can be applied to extract highly segmented leads from databases.

After that, let's talk about how you select your databases if you haven't found any yet.

It’s simple. Have a look at the column names of the exported ICP list. You can see fields like industry, location, revenue, designation, etc.

We’ll talk about how you can find good databases in the next section, but before let’s see how to export highly targeted data from any database.

Go to the sections of the sections, and apply the same filters from the ICP data sheet for different segments.

There are more options available in databases to make a targeted list. Here’s a series of snaps to see how these filters work and how to customize them to get results.

Build a lead list with Saleshandy Lead Finder

Whatever the database or lead source, it is recommended to start with a database or lead source that at least qualifies for the following:

✅ A way to verify your leads

✅ Latest industry data, regular updates

✅ Flexible integrations

✅ Ways to automate your workflow

✅ Fulfils your ICP information

✅ Relevant to your niche

✅ At least 50% verified leads 💪

✅ Bounce rates below 3%. ⚠️

✅ Good deliverability is a sign that your database leads are working well in quality.

✅ It's now time to test its response rates.

✅ You should increase your scraping efforts by twice as soon as you receive responses from a database.

✅ Consider using various lead sources and databases to make list-building effective.

Before launching your campaigns, you should to verify all the leads. A high bounce rate may hurt your sender's reputation.

The email gets hard bounced and fails to be delivered permanently if sent to a non-existent address. All these addresses should be removed from the list so that your sender's reputation does not get affected due to poor email deliverability.

You can use Saleshandy’s verification.

It’s recommended you test various verifiers to get results.

Here are some good verifiers you can use.

Although triggers are unnecessary for success, they can help you achieve better results. It is better if you can find triggers that are related to the problem you are solving.

After you’ve come up with triggers, you can add the next level of personalization using ice-breakers.

Ice-breakers help you start conversations with your prospects.

You can look at how you can make ice-breakers with the information available for each prospect.

Sample - Database export ICP - 11-50 United States

To learn more about Icebreakers checkout ❄️Personalized Icebreaker lines using Merge Tags

Follow these steps:

After you’ve exported your lead list from the database and verified the email addresses, follow these steps to include icebreakers and triggers.

When you’re done writing ice-breakers, download the sheet as CSV.

It doesn’t matter whether you’ve sent cold emails in the past. Your journey begins here.

The first thing everyone does is look at how strong their offer is for selling. The success of your cold emailing strongly relies on this.

In easy words, an offer is something that solves a problem for your prospects, who are willing to pay for it. It is not a good offer if no one is willing to pay.

It is possible that you do not have an offer at this point. But, more importantly, you should make it hard for your prospects to reject your offer.

Ultimately, they should feel FOMO 😱 before saying "No."

A great offer has 4 key parts. Before making your offer, ask yourself:

↳ It's something highly desirable and useful to them

↳ Identify their goals and outcomes

↳ Your offer shouldn’t be a normal one

↳ Put the benefits in numbers as much as possible

↳ Faster time-to-value is very appealing

↳ Explain how they'll see results rapidly

↳ Don't put in extra work on them to get the value

↳ Easier to achieve value is better

Here is a framework with examples for creating irresistible offers in IT Services, Marketing and Ads, SaaS, and Lead Generation Agency:

Now that you have an irresistible offer let's find the right people to take advantage of it.

Welcome to Step 3!

After working hard for the first two step, it feels good to start setting up your outreach.

The half-battle won as we created ICPs and a highly tailored lead list. But, the next half depends highly upon how you send your emails and how many you send.

Let’s start by asking a simple question: how many email accounts do you need?

How many email accounts do you need for outreach before you start cold emailing?

Well, the answer depends on:

Don’t worry; you don’t have to crunch numbers and burn your mind manually. I’ve got a calculator where you can find the answer to these questions.

Link to calculator

For example:

Therefore, to reach out to 30,000 prospects in 15 days, you would need 40 email accounts.

The calculation is based on the recommendation that you should send only 50 emails per email account daily.

Why 50 emails only? 🤔

That's a valid question. With all ESPs Saleshandy has tested, it was found that 50 is the safest email to send and land in the inbox without being flagged as suspicious.

You can't risk sending in bulk when your email accounts are new because it is super important for deliverability.

Now that you know how many email accounts you need, buy some domains!

Always use secondary domains, that is, domains that sound similar to your primary domain.

Suppose saleshandy.com is the primary domain; then, if I want to buy secondary, I can buy saleshandy.io, saleshandy.net, or saleshandyhq.com.

The fun part is brainstorming alternate domain names that fit like a glove. Here are the examples.

Generic Extensions Ideas

Country Specific Extensions

Sending geo-targeted emails? That's a game-changer.

Prefix / Suffix Magic

Are you ready to spice things up a bit?

Tip💡 Buy domains from ESP that has good sending limit, fits your budget and has flexible guidelines. One of the best recommendations is using Outlook for best deliverability practices.

Here are suggestions for the domain registrars.

Suggestions for the ESPs.

After you’ve purchased your domains, create email accounts and connect them with Saleshandy.

Here you can connect your email account:

For Google or Microsoft! Just pick one of the options below, and it’ll get you sorted:

Important: We have used "Google" as an example of an email provider.

Upload email accounts in Bulk

If you don’t have to connect it manually, you can connect your email accounts in bulk.

Refer to this sample CSV: Bulk Email Upload+Connect Demo

Follow this tutorial for step by step guide on how to upload your accounts.

As already discussed, for better deliverability, it is recommended to set the daily sending quote to 50 for each email account.

To set settings for email accounts in bulk, you can do it while uploading your email accounts via CSV, and you can update the email account settings,

Note: If the value is not found in the CSV corresponding to the email account, then the default value will be updated for the particular email account If a value is invalid (e.g., interval too low, updated text in percentage), then also default value will be updated. 🎛️

Take a rest. In the next step, we’ll ensure all your emails land in the primary folder.

Nothing can be more important than landing in the prospect’s inbox!

If you can’t get noticed, there’s no point in doing cold outreach.

The major test during the first 15 days of your cold emailing is to ensure that all your emails (or at least 95%) land in the target inbox.

Therefore, let’s take a challenge to gain > 95% deliverability within 15 days of creating your email accounts so you can start cold emailing with a high sending reputation.

Let’s see what’s the first step.

It’s again some time to crunch some numbers.

Let’s open the shared calculator again and put the number for prospects and time period again.

The calculator recommends 40 email accounts to reach 30,000 prospects in 15 days.

Now, pause for a while, and let’s think about this:

To answer this question, open the second tab in the spreadsheet with the name “Email Ramp-up.”

This sheet automatically calculates that 2000 emails would need to be sent per day from all 40 accounts to send desired emails.

Can you send 2000 emails from the very first day?

The answer is yes, you can! But it’s NOT RECOMMENDED.

Why? Because

Therefore, it is recommended that you follow the ramp-up process gradually to ensure your email accounts can send emails into the inbox.

Email ramp-up helps to increase your daily sending limit day by day gradually.

To enable email ramp-up in Saleshandy, go to settings > email accounts, select an email account, and toggle on the settings.

To set ramp-up settings for email accounts in bulk, you can do it while uploading your email accounts via CSV, and you can update the email account settings.

Follow this guide.

One of the most important traits for better deliverability is that your email sending should look like it has been sent from a human.

To make it look like human outreach, it’s important to set up intervals between each email.

ESP trusts you when you have set up your technical records for each domain you connect with Saleshandy.

To set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, follow this tutorial.

Guide

Video tutorials

DNS Settings for Common Hosting Provider:

Email deliverability depends widely on how you track your emails using the links you share with your audience. It affects your domain reputation and branding significantly.

Therefore, setting up your custom tracking domain is essential to double down on deliverability and reputation.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to set it up.

How to set up custom tracking domain | Saleshandy

Another important aspect of getting high deliverability is to make your inbox activity human-like. What happens is when you create email accounts, ESPs examine your email activities.

Therefore it’s important to act like a human.

Email warm-up tools help you interact with your inbox, gradually helping you increase your sending reputation.

One of the best tools to start your email warm-up activities is TrulyInbox.

Here’s how to connect your email accounts with TrulyInbox and enable email warm-up on automation. Your inbox will start receiving from and sending emails to a pool of warmed-up and safe inboxes.

You should ensure 95% of all emails land in the inbox during the 15-day period. How would you know how emails are behaving and how are your different ESPs receiving them?

That’s where the Deliverability Test comes into play.

GlockApps is the platform that helps you know if ESPs are receiving your emails.

Here’s the detailed guide on how to conduct a GlocksApp spam test

How to run an Email Spam Test with GlockApps

For each step, you should carry out a GlockApp test.

Doing it on an automated basis helps you manage your outreach better.

To create an automated email deliverability test, follow these steps.

Tip💡 Set up automated deliverability for every day during the 15-day ramp-up. Make sure you reach 95% deliverability.

Deliverability is not only about setting technical records and ramping up your emails. But it also highly depends on the nature of the content you deliver to your prospects.

Here’s a magic recipe that even top cold emailers miss out 😋

MULTIPLIER EFFECT 🪄

Deliverability setup at the end of the is all about how MORE HUMAN you can make your outreach.

Creating a multiplier effect allows you to create a unique email for each prospect in your list.

That’s possible?

Yes, that’s possible! Spintax and merge tags are the key!

What’s a spintax?

Spintax is a fantastic feature in Saleshandy that lets you create variations of sentences or words in your emails – making your cold outreach more personalized and diverse.

You can include multiple words or phrases between {spin} and {end spin}, separated by a vertical line | (pipe) to use Spintax.

For example:

{spin} Hey there | Hello | Hi {endspin}

Using Multiple Spintax in the Following Example:

The {spin} average | standard {endspin} tree planted in this {spin} region | area | territory {endspin} is around 10,000. The {spin} goal | purpose | objective {endspin} of this plantation is {spin} cleaner| oxygenated| fresher {endspin} air.

Saleshandy would generate up to 2*3*3*3 = 54 different variants of cold emails for the above content! This can be a powerful tool for creating unique and personalized email content and getting high deliverability.

Last but not least, here comes another secret from the box. As I said, it’s all about making things more human.

After all the steps setting up your deliverability, it’s time to revisit Saleshandy.

In the previous example, we discussed that for sending emails to 30,000 prospects, you would need 40 email accounts. And we added them in Saleshandy with the bulk method.

But, if all the emails associated with your outreach send the same volume, turn by turn, it can raise a flag of suspicion and suffer a low deliverability.

It’s important to take note of “how you send your emails?”.

Sender Rotation allows you to send email volume in a distributed and human manner that signals ESPs that you are not sending bulk emails to a random audience.

Every email account connected with Saleshandy’s sequence would take a turn and send emails at frequent intervals.

Here’s a complete guide to check detailed instructions, if you’ve any problem.

Finally, we’re done setting up your email accounts and deliverability!

A new step with a new set of actions!

The engine needs fuel, as you've already set up technical records and deliverability.

We will see how to write copies and set up your campaign so you can reach out to your highly targeted leads.

Your copies should be aligned with the ICPs and the offer we created in Step 1.

Following is the ideal structure of your email copy.

Steps to create an email template in Saleshandy:

Click on the blue button and it will create a new sequence for you. Sequences are a series of automated cold emails sent at set intervals.

Adding a new step allows you to create a new copy. Add a subject line, pre-header and the email body.

To start quickly, you can pick templates from the Saleshandy library. The templates here are tried and tested and can get you good results if you test for your outreach.

Remember we exported the lead list in Step 2?

With fields like first name, last name, company, industry, etc.

It’s time to make copies containing the fields available in your lead list. Use the merge tags from Saleshandy and put them directly into your copy.

If you want to add merge tags that are not by default available, you can go to Settings > Prospect Fields > Add Propsect Fields.

Do remember to create personalized tags as {{icebreaker}} and {{triggers}} in your custom fields. So, all the data in your prospect list gets automatically fed into your copies when you send.

You don’t need to manually put icebreakers in your copies.

Here's a concise list of spammy words and phrases to avoid in cold emails:

Email preheaders are like little secret!

Give your prospects a glimpse of what's inside your email.

After you’re done save the step.

Adding multiple follow-ups in emails is important because they:

Follow-up emails help maintain effective communication and ensure important matters aren't overlooked.

Adding multiple follow-ups with Saleshandy is quite easy:

You can customize each step in your sequence, which is calculated from the sent date of the previous step added.

This ensures that you can follow up with your prospects at the right time.

To get the best results out of your cold email outreach it is important to test your copies!

With A-Z Testing, you can create up to 26 different email copies to test different approaches and increase engagement.

Click "+ Add variants" for the specific step.

Create variants to test subject lines:

You can get an exhaustive list of subject lines for you check it out: Subject Lines

Test CTAs

It’s also important to test for CTAs.

Test for:

Tip💡 Keep 1 CTA per copy to get results.

Here is a link to 100+ CTA: CTA

Before you start your outreach, ensure whether you want to disable link tracking. If link tracking is important for you then it’s recommended to have a custom tracking domain already setup.

Go to Sequence > Settings > Safety Settings > Track Link Clicks (On/Off)

Sending emails in the prospect’s time zone is very important.

Imagine receiving the emails at odd times would you be irritated some of you might even delete it.

With Saleshandy it is easy to send emails at the time when your prospects engages with them the most.

To select a schedule for your sequence go to Settings > Safety Settings > Pick a schedule.

To add a new schedule, go to Main Settings > Schedules > Add New Schedule

Our campaign is all set!

But before activating the sequence, it’s a good idea to check what’s your Sequence Score.

Sequence Score allows you to see how you; 've set up your records, delivery, copies, and other stuff for the best results.

Make your Sequence Score “Very Good” to get the best results.

Go to Sequence > Sequence Score

Tip💡 Sequence Score allows you to check beforehand how your outreach would perform. Instead of learning after sending cold emails, let’s fix it before sending the outreach 😃

It’s time to upload your verified lead list created in Step 2. It’s simple.

Go to Sequence > Prospect’s Tab > Import CSV.

You’re all set and ready! 🚀

Here’s a checklist before you launch!

Send test emails before your launch.

Are you ready? 😃

Let’s roll and activate the sequence!

Voila!, good work! The hard work of all 5 Steps finally paid off!

Meanwhile, in the upcoming steps, we’ll see how to monitor your results and scale your outreach to get a desired benchmark.

Hey!

Now you would soon see the opens and responses coming in!

Therefore, it’s important to track and organize them for getting bookings.

Let’s see how you can track your emails with 1:1 tracking in Saleshandy.

How to do it?

Saleshandy Connect | Email Tracker & Finder

Imagine what would happen if you connected multiple email accounts to Saleshndy. We discussed the case of 30,000 prospects, where 40 email addresses were needed.

How would you track responses from the email accounts? 🤯

Unified Inbox helps you manage all your replies in one place in a single dashboard. Unified Inbox would automatically track all your responses so that you don’t have to switch between multiple email accounts.

Here’s a tutorial on how to do it: Introducing Unified Inbox | Saleshandy

It is possible to categorize your responses according to their intent.

As a default, AI tracks your replies' intent.

All your conversations are linked at your sequence level, so all can have a thorough look at the pipeline and chase only potential candidates.

After 6 Steps, you will start getting results through opens, replies, bookings, etc.

It’s now time to see how you can monitor the metrics to optimize and scale your outreach.

✅ Make sure you get 95% deliverability in your GlocksApp test

✅ Maintain a 15% ramp-up till 15 days

✅ It’s important to have > 50% open rates

✅ If your open rates < 50% but > 30% check your subject lines

✅ If your open rates are < 30% check your deliverability (make sure you have 95% deliverability)

You can follow this mindmap to keep track of your positive reply rates.

Win and loss analysis is a crucial part of improving your prospecting and sales processes. It helps you identify what's working and what's not, enabling you to refine your approach. Here's how you can conduct win and loss analysis when prospecting:

Analyze Wins:

For the "win" category, analyze what contributed to your success:

Analyze Losses:

For the "loss" category, focus on the reasons for rejection:

When you’re getting:

It’s time to scale your outreach.

Here’s a scale you can follow to scale your outreach in the same manner.

Follow the same steps to ramp up your outreach.

Funnel

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