Three years ago, I sent a single week’s volume of cold emails to 4,000 contacts who were owners of small firms in Ohio and Indiana that might use accounting software. By Thursday of that week, the sending domain had been added to Spamhaus’s blocklist, and so every email that we sent out for the following 11 days went straight to the recipients’ spam folders. This included all of our support emails, as well as the emails of our CEO to two of his investors in the midst of some tough negotiations.
Most of the posts I have read stating that Cold Email is dead, came from people who ran terrible lists through cold email and thus concluded that cold email itself is terrible. I ran a terrible list of 4,000 through cold email, and now cold email is dead to me too.
Here's the thing I have yet to read about when it comes to cold email - the list was bought before it was cold. The list is already dead before it's cold. We had a list of 4,000 contacts that we paid $49 for on a data marketplace. From what I read, this is where "verified" leads are scraped from sources like old conference badges, LinkedIn exports, and God knows what else. Given that this list of contacts was scraped over a year ago, I wouldn't be surprised if 22% of the contacts on this list bounce on the first two sends of a cold email campaign.
** Why hygiene gets skipped **
The primary reason for not checking for list hygiene for cold emailing is tedious work which in the end costs more money. The initial list cost already was way too high for a bad list. Now you have to spend even more money on verifying the list, which in the end might even be more expensive than buying a new good list. I already explained before that volume-based pricing for cold email sending is a terrible model, because it encourages agencies to send as many emails as possible, instead of focusing on finding and sending to good leads.
Gmail and Outlook email providers are watching what’s happening with your cold email campaign. They don’t care how many cold emails you sent. Instead, they are concerned with what happens after you’ve hit send. Based on the following factors, email providers can determine whether or not to route your emails to the SPAM folder:
A bounce is not just a bad email. Every bounce in a large mailing will be interpreted by Gmail as evidence that the sender does not know who they are mailing. Thus, a large number of bounces can quickly result in your good emails being interpreted as spam and thus being routed to the spam folder.
*What actually happened when we fixed it *
Then I spent a weekend verifying the rest of the list using NeverBounce. In the end 1,340 addresses were found to be invalid or of a type that would be best left untouched. 560 addresses were found to be catch-alls. These are addresses where the mail server is set to accept any email that is sent to it. In these types of situations it is impossible to know if the email that is being sent is being sent to a real person or to a wall. I decided to set these aside for a later date when I would have had a chance to do some more research. In the end 2,100 addresses made it onto the list that I could trust to be valid.
First I removed the 1,340 invalid emails from the list, then I set aside the 560 catch-all addresses and sent them in a separate campaign later. In the end I was left with 2,100 real leads.
Nine days passed after we stopped sending on the domain that got blacklisted. We created a new subdomain, mail.clientdomain.com, and started to warm up the domain with Instantly’s warm-up feature. We started off with about 15 emails per day and gradually increased the amount of emails we sent over the course of three weeks. This slowly built up a track record of good engagement on the domain, and eventually we were able to switch over to using the main domain for our cold email campaigns.
After fixing the domain and warming up the subdomain, the open rate for the emails went up from 11% to 38%, and the reply rate went up from 0.4% to 6.1% (all numbers are averages).
*The one I still find embarrassing *
Buried in the original 4,000 contacts, we found three email addresses that actually turned out to be spam traps. As it turns out, email addresses left abandoned for years (or even never actually used in the first place) can, at some point, be reactivated by a mailbox provider. This way, they can test senders who don’t manage their lists properly. And they look exactly like a legitimate email address to you. The only difference is that they don’t get deleted immediately when you send them an email. Instead, they just sit there. And then, there’s the matter of actually identifying them as such.
They don’t bounce, so you have to manually verify them using specialized tools. (In our case, a verification tool flagged the domains of these three email addresses as “high risk”. Upon manual verification, we were able to find out that two of them belonged to a now-defunct company (which had shut down 4 years prior to that) and that the third one belonged to a conference attendee list (from a conference that hadn’t taken place in 8 years).)
The three emails were located within the 4,000 contacts of the list. It wasn’t until I manually checked each of the “High Risk” domains for verification that I discovered that two of the email addresses belonged to a company that went out of business four years prior. The third email address belonged to a conference attendee list for an event that was held three years prior. Again, none of the information above would have been visible in the spreadsheet of contacts that I was provided with prior to verification of the list of contacts.
This still gets my goat. With all of the hard work and many hours put in verifying bounces, warming up a domain, monitoring open rates, etc., it can all be for naught because of 3 or so undetected spam traps.
*The part people don't want to hear *
I also want to admit that list cleaning is not a fun activity to go through. At first glance, it may seem that the more the better (i.e., the bigger list of contacts, the better), but in reality, there’s nothing more frustrating than watching your list of contacts dwindling. As I was explaining to a founder of a small logistics software company that I worked with last year, cleaning a list of contacts is not the most productive activity. While you’re busy verifying the contacts on your list and watching your list of contacts dwindle, you may get the feeling that you’re just throwing your work away. This founder actually got frustrated with me over this exact issue. He had bought a 12,000-name list and wanted to send out a campaign to all of them immediately. I told him that he needed to verify the contacts on his list first, but he didn’t want to wait. So, he sent out the campaign to the full list of contacts on a domain that was only six weeks old.
Three days later his main sending domain, used for business emails, would be flagged by Google as sending spam and end up in the spam folder of every Gmail, Outlook.com etc user. It would take him 5 weeks to sort out the relations with a few key prospects and get his normal business emails delivered again. The biggest problem for him was not knowing whether his normal emails were being delivered or not.
That is the actual cost of sending a cold email campaign while not having done proper list hygiene. Instead of your campaign underperforming, your entire email stream is affected negatively by your burned domain.
*What good hygiene actually looks like *
Again, this is not rocket science and does not require any specific tools. First of all, verify your purchased or scraped list with tools like NeverBounce, Bouncer or ZeroBounce before you send out any emails. Next to that, make sure to separate catch-all addresses from the rest of your list and send them out in a subsequent and more careful email campaign. Last but not least, make sure to warm up your new domain or subdomain gradually before you send out high volumes of email. And last but not least, keep an eye on engagement metrics after the launch of your campaign. If your open rates are low and bounces start to rise during your campaign, stop it and re-check your list.
After 8 months with a clean list, lots of people will have left their jobs and thus won’t be on your list of contacts anymore. In fact, a list that was 95% valid 8 months ago will likely be around 80% valid today, due to ‘churn’ (the normal flow of people leaving companies, domains expiring, old inboxes being shut down, etc). That’s why it’s so important to re-verify lists that you have sat on for long periods of time.
*So is cold email actually dead? *
No, cold email is not dead, and I really don’t think the posts saying that actually believe that. What is dying is the type of cold email where people buy the cheapest list, send out emails from a recently set up domain (no warm up) and then blast out as many emails as possible in the hope that volume will make up for the lack of accuracy. This type of cold email has always been a dying breed and inbox providers are getting better and better at catching out these types of emails before they can cause too much damage.
Ultimately, it all works for me. I run cold email campaigns all the time and they perform great. Why? Because I’m spending so much time on creating and managing the list of email addresses that I could care less about crafting the perfect subject line. I know that in the end, it really doesn’t matter, because if the email never even makes it into the inbox of the recipient in the first place, then all that effort went down the drain.
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