Warming 🌡️

"Warming" is the process of loading your winnr accounts into a tool that can automatically warm them up. Tools like Apollo and Smartlead.ai do this by sending real, life-like emails back and forth between accounts they own and control. When mailbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo see these real messages flying back and forth between your accounts, they will trust them as legitimate and grant you good deliverability when you start sending your cold emails.

When you get your winnr accounts its very important to get the warming process right.This is the most important part of the entire process. Here are some guidelines for warming:

• Warm for at least 2 weeks per account. If the domains are newly purchased, its best to warm for 4 weeks
• Send about 15-25 emails per day
• Randomize the daily emails if possible
• Keep the warming process enabled even when you are sending cold emails. Doing this in tandem helps

These settings in Smartlead.ai look something like this:

Use a targeted, clean list 📨

Firstly, make sure you are using the right list. Think carefully about who you are targeting. There are a lot of sites that sell data for lists of leads. Make sure you are using one that is targeted for your use case and can give you a very focuses list of leads with the exact profile you are targeting. Or even better, you should manually generate your leads by scraping email addresses from reliable sources and finding a very targeted audience. If your list is too broad, no technical wizardry will get you good deliverability because no-one will open. Having a very strong list is the foundation of good deliverability with cold outreach.

After acquiring a list it's a great idea to run all leads through a verification service like Never Bounce.

Get the content right ✍🏼

When you start sending, here are a few very important pointers:

• Use plain text emails
• Don't use hyperlinks if possible - drive people to reply to your emails and then you can get them to your site
• Do NOT use open/click tracking, which many sales automation tools enable by default. Even if this is enabled by default, it should be easy to disable
• Keep the content very short if possible
• Use as much spintax as possible. "spintax" is the idea of slightly altering the wording of the email so that it doesn't appear to be a bulk send. This is easy to do in smartlead.ai by setting up different variations of your message

Ready to send? Be careful about volume 📈

When you are ready to send, the most important thing to be cognizant of is volume. Any massive spike in volume can trigger lots of tripwires and cause major deliverability issues. Follow these guidelines closely:

• Day 1-3: When you first start sending, take it extra slow the first 1-3 days. Maybe start by sending just 5 emails per day per account, and keep 10-15 warming emails going on each account
• Monitor your deliverability closely to make sure you are not seeing any major issues:

• If you are seeing a spike in bounces, STOP SENDING. This means your list is probably bad and you might want to rethink how you acquired it. Continuing to send to a bad list will only cause more permanent damage. You should see less than 3% bounces, ideally below 1%.
• Day 3-14: If you don't see any deliverability issues you can increase the volume, up to 50/day per account.
• Continue to watch for any deliverability issues, especially any spikes in bounces which could indicate your list is problematic or that you are being blocked by mailbox providers

‍

Carry on 📈

If you are doing everything right, you can keep feeding more high quality lists in and sending 50/day per account! If you really mess up — maybe you use a bad list and get a lot of spam complaints or bounces — it might be good to consider buying new domains and starting fresh or pausing sends altogether for 7 days. We can help with this. You will have to start back at step 1 and re-warm these new domains, but if you do things properly you'll be swimming in leads!

‍