A lot has changed since 2015 on the cold email game. You used to be able to hook up your trusty old gmail that your company gave you, fire it up into a sequencer, toggle it to “500/day” and sit back.

Those days are over. Email restrictions are rampant, its incredibly challenging to get to the inbox, and for many sales teams it just seems like outbound is dead.

The good news is, its not dead ;) I’m going to go over 3 things that are a requirement if you want to hit the inbox in 2024.

1. Private Mailboxes

As opposed to using a gmail or outlook mailbox, private mailboxes are from independent providers (this is what we use for all of our clients). Gmail and Outlook hate cold email because they need to decipher between true scammers, and legitimate businesses.

Most of the time, they are going to lean on the harsh side and suspend your account if they even sniff there is something fishy going on.  

Using a private mailbox provider allows you to fly under the radar. Private providers don’t have the same restrictions as Gmail/Outlook, so they won’t internally disconnect you. That doesn’t mean your deliverability is guaranteed to be good, but it does mean that you wont be banned for simply doing your job as a sales person.

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2. Mailbox Distribution

Most sales teams I talk to are still sending way too many emails from a single account. I hear many people say 250-500/day is their usual. This is out of control and, if left unchecked, will absolutely destroy your company’s domain reputation in the long run.

Instead, you want to use multiple mailboxes, and automatically rotate them when you send a campaign.

Here’s an example, let’s say you want to send 20,000 emails/month from 1 SDRs account. That means that they need the capability to send 1,000 emails/day. Sound like a lot, but is it?

Since we know that the maximum safe daily sending threshold per mailbox is about 30, we can simply divide 1,000 / 30 and get 33. This means we need to create 33 mailboxes, and send 30/day each, giving us a total of 1,000/day capacity.

You want to use a tool that doesn’t charge per email account and has auto-rotation capabilities, you do not want to be messing with that manually.

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3. Metrics

The third thing we need to nail down is the metrics. What exactly are we aiming for? What benchmarks can we look for to see if we’re running a healthy outbound motion?

For cold email, your #1 metric to zero in on is reply rate, followed by lead rate. Reply rate should be the total number of replies (including OOO) over the total unique emails sent (not including follow-ups).

Reply Rate: If we have a 3-5% reply rate, that is solid from a deliverability perspective. If we have under 3%, that is when we begin to investigate further to see if there is an issue. If we have over 5%, we’re usually jump over here in the office.

Lead Rate: This is the total positive responses or opportunities divided by the total replies. We usually aim for at least a 10% lead rate or higher. That being said, some markets and offers are more challenging, and will work fine with a 5% lead rate if you’re doing higher volume.

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4. Disconnect Monitoring

Lastly, disconnect monitoring is crucial. Depending on what email tool you are using, disconnects are going to happen. Sometimes, email accounts get suspended (using Gmail or Outlook), sometimes the login connection gets disrupted, sometimes, your own email sending tool may block you because of warm-up related reasons.

No matter what the reason is, its your job to monitor for a disconnect, and if it happens, fix it ASAP. If you wait too long, you will lose valuable time for warming your email account. This could easily lead to a once healthy inbox now going to spam because it wasn’t maintained.

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5. Want Someone Else to Handle All This Hooblah?

Reading through this and thinking “My gosh, why as a sales professional do i even have to bother with this? I should be selling things and making money” We totally agree, that’s why OrganicOutreach sends cold emails for sales teams.

Our managed sending service provides

• Private mailboxes on a dedicated server
• Maibox rotation
• Unlimited copy revisions of your campaigns
• Metric monitoring to ensure deliverability and campaign health are kept in check.
• 24/5 disconnect monitoring