The NEW WAY of Cold Emailing in 2024: Don't Make These Mistakes..

On October 3, 2023, Google made an announcement that will change the way that people will code email in 2024 and in beyond. So what you're seeing right now is the tweet made directly from Gmail which says new Gmail protections are coming to keep your inbox even safer and more spam free. And then what happened was a lot of people went online and they put out a lot of blogs and different forms of content, basically saying that cold emails is dead. Cold emails won't work in 2024, blah blah, blah, blah blah. But what I'm about to share with you in this video today is an absolute must. And why if you implement everything that I'm about to share with you, why cold emails will continue to work in 2024 and why I personally believe it'll become easier than ever before to continue succeeding with cold emails and continuously allowing you to book hundreds of sales calls every single month by leveraging cold emails. There was an update from Google talking about new Gmail protections that they are now implementing. What you're seeing right now is directly from the Google blog. You could go and search this up yourself and take a deeper read, but basically what you're seeing is the headline is new Gmail protections for a safer, less spammy inbox starting in 2024 will require bulk senders to authenticate their emails, allowing for easy unsubscriptions and stay under a reported spam throw threshold. Right. And if we take a look at this article, which is written by the Verge.com you can take a look again after this video. We see that they say that Google is preparing to enforcing new Gmail requirements that aim to reduce spam, improve email security, and make it easier to unsubscribe from commercial email senders. The new requirement will be imposed on both senders, defined as those who send over 5,000 messages to Gmail accounts each day by February 2020 24. As part of the requirements, Google will begin enforcing a clear spam rate threshold for bulk email senders to prevent them from bombarding Gmail users with unwanted messages. Gmail's existing bulk sender rules advise senders to keep their spam output below 0.3%. But this is currently worded as a recommendation. Google says the change should result in less spam clogging your inbox. So there's a ton of talk here for sure and obviously there's a ton more details. You can go check these things out yourself. There's read through these different blogs, but let me tell you why that there's actually no need to worry. And why, if you follow everything in this video, you will continue seeing success with cold emails in 2024. So, starting with the big thing, most of these rules mainly only apply to gmail.com email accounts. Meaning if you are reaching out to B2B businesses, there's a very strong chance that you're not even emailing private and personal gmail.com accounts. What you're actually doing is you are emailing business accounts. So, for example, my own business is Salesway IO. If you were to cold email me, the domain you'd be reaching out to is jimmyalesway IO. It wouldn't be jimmymail.com or gmailotmail.com. so that's the number one thing you have to understand is a lot of people got really confused. But most of these restrictions, these spam rate thresholds and things of that nature mainly only applies if you're emailingmail.com email accounts. So the key here is you're not taking random emails and you are just taking random data points, random list of emails and just blasting them. Thousands of emails a day. What you need to make sure is the data that you're getting is clean, making sure that you're emailing business accounts and making sure that you're following all the generally accepted guidelines in order to make sure that your emails continue hitting the inbox pretty much, and not landing in spam. So what we need to make sure is you're getting the best data available for your cold email campaigns. And in today's video, I'll be sharing with you every single practice that you need to implement if you want to ensure that your cold emails will continue succeeding in 2024. Awesome. So the very first thing you need to do to ensure that your cold emails will Continue Working in 2024 is the data that you're using in your cold emails. Meaning you're reaching out to these people over email. But who is it exactly that you're reaching out to? And I've separate videos on my YouTube channel talking about how to scrape leads off of Apollo I.O. and LinkedIn sales navigator right now. What you're seeing on your screen right now is Apollo I.O. where I'm not going to show you how to scrape leads because I have those other videos, but I want to highlight, to show you what you need to do after you pull the data from Apollo I.O. to ensure that your emails have maximum deliverability, to make sure that you don't mess with your domains in terms of its reputation and to make sure all your code emails will continue landing in the inbox. So this is Apollo I.O. right now we're scraping marketing agencies. Obviously I have a whole separate video talking about how to do this and set up the filterings. We see a 40,000 leads, basically that I have personally scraped. What I want to do is I'll go over to Saved and I'm just going to highlight 25 so that this video does not take three hours to record. And I'm going to export this list of 25 leads of these marketing agencies. I'm just going to download it after you have this on Apollo. Your very first step after this should be to head on over to an email verifying service. So obviously there's a bunch of stuff. There's neverbounce.com, there's million verifier, which is what you're seeing right now. And pretty much what this service does is it kind of verifies your email addresses for you. Because obviously if you're reaching out to people and people like those email addresses don't exist anymore, or those people quit or, or they moved on to a different company, then those email addresses will start to bounce. And if you email a ton of those people that no longer exist at these companies, then what will happen is your bounce rates will increase significantly. It'll go really high. And what will happen after that is your domain reputation will take a massive hit. And meaning if it takes a massive hit, all your emails eventually will start hitting the spam box because it's just bouncing a lot. So that's kind of why we need to verify all of our emails every single time before we set up an email campaign and before we actually send cold emails. So again, this is millionverifier.com this is personally what I use to verify the emails inside my own agency. We're going to take the CSV file and we're just going to upload it onto Million Verifier. Say yes, start verifying this 25. And usually this does take a couple of minutes. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to pause this video and resume once it's ready. All right, cool. So all of those 25 emails just finished verifying what. What you're seeing right now is of those 25 emails, of those 25 leads that we uploaded, we got 18 good ones, seven risky ones, and zero bad ones. In my own personal experience, what I've personally found is if you upload, let's say, 1,000 leads, 10,000 leads, 100,000 leads, generally 50 to 60% of them are good for cold email sending, meaning the other 40 to 50% of them, you do not want to reach out to those people because those leads, those email addresses are either incorrect or those people do not exist anymore at those companies. And we always want to make sure that the people were emailing falls under the category of good. So in this report we have 18. What we want to do is we just want to download the reports and good emails only. And these are the only 18 people that we want to be reaching out to. And when we do reach out to these people, the chance of those emails bouncing will be very, very slim. Meaning you will do your part to ensure that your data is clean, your leads lists are valid, and when you do email these people that they are accurate and your bounce rates will not be super, super high. Awesome. So that is pretty much how you verify your lead list. But one of the main things that you also need to make sure before you send any cold emails are that your domains are set up correctly. Meaning your dmarc, your dkim, your spf, your website forwarding, all of those things are set up the right way. And if you miss any of these things, then your emails will automatically land in the spam box. I know when I first started I didn't know how to do any of this and I think I started sending code emails without sending up my dmarc, dkim, all of that stuff. And before, like after a week or two weeks of actually sending cold emails, all my stuff just never got any replies and basically never got any meetings because all my emails were landing in the spam box. So what you're seeing is porkbund.com this is personally where I go and where I recommend everyone goes to buy domains. You know, GoDaddy is an alternative. Namecheap is another alternative. I personally just use Pork one. I personally find it to be the best mix of cost efficiency and ease of use. And what you're seeing right now is kind of all of my domains, right? So I have 32 domains that I use right now for from my own agency. These are kind of what that looks like. And what you want to do is after you buy all of your domains. So obviously these are all set up, but I'm just going to show you what you need to set up. And there's a ton of different guides online on how to set up your dmarc, your dkim, your SPF correctly and all the people I'm working with, one on one, I actually give them My exact sop, because obviously at my own agency I don't set these things up myself anymore. I hired a systems integrator and I recorded my screen of me going through and setting up all 32 of these accounts and I gave that to my systems integrator to help them set up all of my clients domains and email accounts. So if you want the specific sop, the specific shadowing session of me doing it live, I provide that to all the people I work with. But if that's not something that is possible, then I recommend you just go on Google, go on Pork Bun, go on Microsoft Outlook 365. There's a bunch of FAQ resources where, where you're just going to have to go through and figure out. Myself that's personally what I did. I took a couple of hours but I was still able to set everything up pretty well and make it work efficiently. Right. So jumping right into it, you just want to press this DNS button and what you're seeing right now is just a domain. Obviously these are the records that I have set up. So if you're using PorkBund.com to set up your own domains, make sure that your domain has similar, I guess, similar records as mine. Obviously the specific words and letters and stuff like that might be a little bit different, but this is personally my own records. So the ones that you want to pay attention to. The first one is dmarc, right? So this is my dmarc. Obviously there's a bunch of text and yours will probably be different. And the main thing is is you just want to change up the specific email that you want to use. This is personally just what I use. It's. It doesn't really matter what email account you use there, it just sends the DMARC reports. I just put in some random beater email account and I put it in there. So that's the DMARC that you want to put in. The other one is spf. So obviously mine is connected to Outlook, so. So this is personally what mine looks like. SPF 1, include SPF Protection, outlook. Com. I don't really know what that means, but that's personally what I have inside of mine. And then you want to set up for example your email tracking so that to make sure if you're automating your cold emails using smartly AI or instantly AI, you need to have your email tracking key. Otherwise your analytics will be wrong. They'll report the wrong open rates, the report the wrong reply rates stuff with that nature. For smartly AI, this is the exact email tracking and cname whatever you want to call it that you want to put in open sledtrack.com that's personally what I use. And these two are DKIM keys that you want to set up through the Outlook 365 admin portal. So that's kind of what this looks like. I know again this could seem a little bit confusing and I promise you it is very frustrating for the very first one that you do. I think when I first started and did the first one I wanted to pull my hairs out. But the idea is after you get through the first one it only gets easier because you just have to repeat the exact same process and do that like let's say 30 times, 40 times, 50 times however amount of domains and email accounts you are setting up. But I've been getting a lot of questions inside my comments from Instagram DMS of people wanting to know how to set these things up. So I wanted to show you these are kind of my keys and you would just have to set up something similar for your own domains. Again, Porkbun and Outlook have tons of FAQs online teaching you how to do this. I do have specific shadowing sessions on me buying all these things, setting it all up, but I share that only with the people that I'm working with one on one that people looking to build their own Legion agencies or existing business owners who are looking to add cold emails into their system. So now after you set up all the stuff in parkman.com your domain provider, the DMARC, DKIM SPF, email tracking and you set up everything using Outlook 365 Business Basic. That's personally what I use at my own agency and for all my clients to send emails. The next step is to actually warn you these email accounts and I get a lot of questions about why you need to warm up your email accounts. Basically the overall premise is let's say you buy a ton of email accounts today, you wouldn't be able to start sending cold emails or at least a ton of those cold emails tomorrow because it looks very suspicious through the lens of the algorithm, the Gmail algorithms, the Outlook algorithms, all of these different algorithms and it looks very suspicious basically. So what we want to do is we want to warm up these email accounts. Basically it's a slow ramp up process to warm up your accounts. So and basically you want to do that for 14 days. So by the end of that 14 days, that's when you're able to actually start sending your cold emails. You Wouldn't want to send cold emails before that 14 day ramp up period because everything will just go straight to the spam box anyways. So you're basically wasting your own time, your resources and you're going to burn all your domains. So you want to make sure any email accounts, any domains that you're using for cold emails, that you're putting them through a warm up period right now what you're seeing is Smartly AI instantly. AI is also another really popular tool towards doing this. This is also the tool that we'll be using to actually automate our cold email sending process. But basically you just want to add the accounts. You just add your accounts. I use Outlook again. I used to use Gmail or Google Workspace and then I migrated everything over to Outlook365 Business Basic. I personally just find it to be the best mix of easiness to set up best deliverability. And obviously with the new upcoming rules with Google, I personally think Outlook is the smartest decision for email providers going forward. So you just want to set that up and once you have everything set up, you want to turn on your warmup. So warm up is enabled. As you can see, I have a few email accounts being warmed up and it's basically what you want to make sure you're doing. And if you're starting from beginning and you've never sent cold emails before, what I actually Recommend is smartly AI has a 14 day free trial and it just so happens that your warm up period is 14 days as well. So to maximize your dollars to make sure you're not wasting money on things that don't need to be spent on, I do recommend warming up all your email accounts using the 14 day Smart Lead AI trial so that by the time you start paying for your Smartly AI subscription, that's when you're actually sending cold emails and you get a return relatively quickly. Because if you just jump on the pay trial and spend the first half, you know the 14 days because it is billed monthly. So you spend half of the month, half of your subscription just warming up your accounts. You're not going to get a return relatively quickly that way. So that's personally what I recommend to people. That's personally what I do as well. But the key premise here is make sure you are warming up your email accounts for 14 days minimum and make sure after you're sending cold emails while your campaigns are live, make sure you keep your warm up on as well. So then awesome, you have your domains and your email account set up correctly. You're verifying your lead list, making sure that your data is clean, and making sure that it's accurate. The next thing that you want to make sure to ensure that your email reputation is relatively high and to make sure that your emails are not landing in spam is the specific words that you're saying. So what I actually did on Smartly AI is I whipped up just a generic cold email campaign. This is a very generic one. I spent like 10 seconds writing this. So do not copy this email script. Because I didn't spend too much effort doing it. I just wrote some ideas for the purposes of this video to show you how you need to make sure that the words that you're using in your code emails work. Again, do not copy this email script. Right? So I just wrote. Hi, John, reaching out to see if Facebook is interested in more sales calls. Now, obviously Facebook, they don't need sales calls and it's a tech company. But anyway, so reason why we work with tech companies and help them get more paid customers. If this is of interest, put together a quick video running through how we do this. Let me know and thanks for watching. Obviously, your complete code email script will be different. Again, do not copy this. I just whipped this up right now, but I'm showing you exactly what you need to do to make sure the words that you're saying in your cold emails do not get you into trouble. Basically. So what you want to do is after you write your cold email campaign, what you want to do is just highlight it, copy it, and go to a website called mail meteor.com as you can see, I pasted in the cold emails. I'm just going to do it again in front of you. So I pasted it in and pretty much this tool, this completely free tool, highlights your cold email and let you know if you are using the right words. Because the way that the algorithms work is if you use very, I guess, spammy words, then it will get caught by the algorithm and all your cold emails will go to spam. So if you're writing cold emails and you have a ton of these spammy words, then all your emails are going to land in the spam, right? So even in this email that I quickly whipped up, we see that the word sales, sales is one of those words that sound really shady and will trigger the algorithm. I think another word is the word money. See, money is another one. There's a bunch of these words. So make sure any cold email that you put together, you put it through mailmedia.com, the spam checker. And if it is highlighted, you need to reword your email. Right. So another way of saying, interested in more sales calls, might be interested in more meetings. So that sounds good, right? Help them get more, work with techniques and help them achieve more. Something like that. Right. And obviously you want to make this sound proper. And as we can see, after we reworded the specific words that are triggering the algorithm, we see that the overall score is great. And what we want to do after this is highlight this and head back into the email campaign and paste it in. Right. And now we remove the spam words. And as a result, the specific words that you're using in your code, emails that will not be triggering the spam filters. So that's how you make sure the words you're using are good. And finally, the final thing that you want to make sure you're doing is a technique called spintax. So the main idea of it is if you're automating your cold emails, let's say you're sending 1000 cold emails a day, 1500 cold emails a day, 2000 cold emails a day, you will flag the algorithm if you're sending 2,000 cold emails that are word for word, the exact same. So what we want to do is we want to make sure every single one of those emails, they are worded a little bit differently. Obviously, the messaging will be the same. You're saying the same thing is the specific words that you're using to say those things might be a little bit different. And we do that by using a technique called spintax. So they have this on both smartly AI and instantly AI. I'm going to show you how to do a smart lead. AI instantly is slightly differently. So if you're using instantly, make sure you go and do some research to make sure you're doing this correctly. But even words like, hi, John, we could rewrite that. It doesn't necessarily have to be, hi, John. It could be, hey, John. Hello, John. Good morning, John. How's it going, John? And each of those things could be individual spin taxes. So you want to just put these curly brackets. Hi. And then you want to put a straight line, hello, how's it going? Oops. How's it going, John? And this by itself is a spin text. I'm just going to save this. And by the way, this is exactly how you spin tax. And you just want to do that for every single line of your cold emails. And what I recommend is come up with as many spin taxes as you can, but don't force it. So if you end up creating these spin taxes, these really complex spin taxes, but it kind of breaks the sentence or it sounds very unnatural, then obviously that does more harm than good. For your cold emails, we just want to come up with a couple, a few different spin taxes of specific ways that we're saying things, but while keeping the message the same. Right. So reaching out to see if Facebook is interested. Right. We can say reason why, reason why I'm reaching out, or reason why I'm messaging you. Right. So that's another way of saying it. You can say something like that and that's basically what you want to do. So obviously this doesn't necessarily make sense, but for the purposes of this video, I hope you understand what I mean. Right. Rather than saying inside the cta. Right. Let me know and thanks, you can say something like kind regards. That's a really popular one. If any of you guys work a job working corporate, a lot of you say kind regards. So this is basically how you would spin tax it. And obviously after you spin tax it, you want to highlight this and paste the whole thing back into millimeter again, just to double check and make sure that your specific spin taxes are not hitting any spam words. And there's a ton of stuff that you could go and spin tax. Right. Other than say if this is of interest, you could say if you're interested. Rather than saying put together a quick video, you say, I created a quick vid. So I hope you see how you're able to use different words to say the exact same message. And that's basically what you want to do. And in this video, that's kind of what I wanted to walk you through the changes and the things that you must make sure you're doing to ensure that you're ensuring cold email success in 2024. And why, I think if you do all of these things, why it'll be easier than ever before to succeed with cold emails. Because a lot of your competition, they actually don't know any of these things. They don't know about warmups, they don't know about spin taxing, they don't know about spam checker words. And if you know how to do all of those things and implement them into your cold emails, then you are many steps ahead of your competitors and that's what will allow you to continue succeeding with code emails. So I hope you found this valuable video. Valuable. If you want more direct one on one help, I included a link to my calendar in the description below. Set up a call with me and we'll chat to see how I can help you. Right and this is relevant for you if you are looking to start your own lead generation agency or if you are existing business owner existing business and you want to implement cold emails as part of your outreach efforts. So I hope you found this video valuable. Thank you and take care. Bye bye.