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Cold Email Infrastructure
Magnum opus on a solid cold email setup.
Introduction
I am going to explain every intricate detail of our cold email infrastructure and leave no stone unturned so you can not only paint a picture of our service but potentially copy it for your own business.
I will walk through from setup to reply management and how we actually deliver our services to bring you all the leads you need.
If there are any questions regarding anything in this doc, you can email me at [email protected]
Talk soon,
Can
Cold Email Infrastructure
Table Of Contents
  • Who Is This For?
Who Is This For?
Exhaustive List Of Offers That Are Compatible With Cold Email
There are a few cases in which cold emailing doesn't make any sense. Most of the times, it is a viable option to book calls for way cheaper than with alternative solutions.
Here is an exhaustive list of offers that do and don't work with cold email.
Click The Button Below To Book A No-Obligations Call To Get A Definitive Answer.
Why Cold Email?

Volume negates luck
This is by far the most neglected and simple part of outbound that B2B companies seem to neglect 99% of the time.
If you send more emails = you will book more meetings.
It's basic math. The question is:
How many emails should I send?
→ This depends on how many meetings the emails generate and how many meetings your sales team can manage.
Here's what your Frontend Volume setup could look like:
30 Domains → 60 Email Accounts → 10,000 prospects reached per month → 50,000 emails per month
Again, volume negates luck.
Damn near impossible to not book meetings sending 55,000 targeted, relevant emails sent to your ICP every month.
With high volume, we give ourselves more chances to hit our dream prospect at the right time with our offer.
In a way, we're actually manufacturing luck.
For the actual tech used in our cold email setup, we go with:
  • Domains
  • GoDaddy
  • Porkbun
  • Cloudflare
  • Inboxes
  • Google Workspace
  • Outlook
  • Email Automation
  • Smartlead for Email Warmup & Sending
These service providers have proven to be best with deliverability and ease-of-use in 2024.
Technical Setup
Domains & Inboxes
Never use your main website domain when creating email accounts to send mass cold email from.
Because if that domain ever gets blacklisted, your website domain will be ruined.
Also, when creating secondary domains, follow these rules for best deliverability:
  1. Only use "com" domains (No "info" or "work" etc)
  1. Don't use numbers (Ex: agency123.com)
  1. Don't use hyphens (Ex: gud-agency.com)
Examples of good secondary domains:
  1. goagency.com
  1. agencynow.com
  1. weareagency.com
Make the investment in buying proper domains, don't be cheap and go for the spammy domains.
Deliverability
Email deliverability completely dictates whether your cold emails land in your prospects' inboxes or spam.
That is why it is absolutely crucial to have good deliverability or else your cold email campaigns will be ruined because of spam.
Each email account we use to send cold emails has a "reputation" with each email provider.
So to build a good email reputation when creating a new account, we have to "warm-up" our email accounts.
Before we start
There are a lot of people overthinking this part of running cold emails. It's almost as if there is no other topic to write content about. People are giving trivial advice on deliverability issues.
Deliverability is in it's fundamentals just like life: If it ever goes wrong, you are probably the reason for it going haywire.
Generally speaking, at some point, your domains won't be able to deliver as they used to. This is because of the advanced spam-filters that on a long enough time horizon see what you are actually doing with said domains.
Meaning: Always be creating new inboxes. Always create accounts with multiple, different email service providers.
  • Buy 2-3 domains every month (or more if you have the budget).
  • Always from different email service providers
  • Warm them up.
  • Add them to the mix.
  • Repeat and scale.
As you create new inboxes and as you make more money, you will securely and efficiently build a huge pool of domains to use and be able to scale sustainably.
“1” is the worst number in life — so don't hesitate to diversify.
Warm-up
What is email "warm-up" you may ask?
Email warm-up is a practice used to boost an email account's reputation through emailing other email accounts back and forth to show:
  1. Your emails are landing in people's inboxes
  1. People are responding to your emails
We use Smartlead.ai to automate email warm-up.
When an email account is brand new, you want to warm-up the email account for 14 days with software like Smartlead and not send any cold emails during this time.
Once the warm-up period is over, you can start sending cold emails while still running warm-up.
We recommend using the auto-adjust feature in Smartlead.ai as soon as you start sending cold emails.
Settings for your initial warm-ups
Total number of warm up emails per day: 40
Daily Warmup Rampup: 5
Reply Rate: 35%
→ Turn on auto-adjust feature only after the initial 14-day warm-up period.
Ramping-up
For a few years now cold emailers have been talking about ramp-ups and how important this is for deliverability. Guru stuff.
Frankly, we found that you don't need it. But still, let me explain the reasoning for ramp-ups and why you don't need them anymore with our way of warming-up your inboxes.
The reason cold emailers want to do this is because a drastic change (i.e. going from 0 to 30 cold emails/day immediately) in email-sending behaviour is a one-way ticket to the spam filter.
Here's what the ramp-up period should look like:
Week 1: 5-10 cold emails/account
Week 2: 15-20 cold emails/account
Week 3: 25-30 cold emails/account
Now because we are slowly ramping up to 40 warm-up emails over a 14-day time-period and instantly switch to auto-adjust, we don't need to do this anymore. We can switch to 40 cold emails per day in an instant and run at full speed and hit the ground running.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is essentially the percentage of emails you send that don't land or "bounce back" from a prospect's inbox.
The higher the bounce rate, the worse your email reputation becomes.
Emails bounce when you send an email to an unverified email address.
Over time, the more emails get bounced the more damage your email deliverability takes.
You want to keep your bounce rate below 2% for good deliverability.
Do this by double or triple verifying your lead-lists.
Spintax
Spintax is used to randomise words within an email to make every email you send unique.
Why is spintax important?
We want to use Spintax because spam filters will mark emails as spam if it notices the same exact email being sent thousands of times.
When you are sending 1000s of unique emails, it's a lot harder to detect that these emails would be automated.
Example of Spintax:
{Hey|Hi|Hello) {{first_name}}, {how are you l are you doing well?}
{We recently helped | Just worked with} {an apparel brand | a clothing company} {like yours | similar to yours} {generate | add} {$1,000,000 in new revenue | $1M to their MRR} {in just 90 days | in only 3 months}.
{Interested in | Opposed to) {learning more | exploring further)?
You really want to maximize spintax in your scripts as Email Service Providers are only becoming more advanced by the day and catching on to repeated patterns better.

My personal recommendation is to use spintax on synonyms on every part of the email BUT the offer. Using spintax on your offer might compromise the quality of it.
Recap
Recap of the best email deliverability practices:
  1. Warm-up email accounts for 14 days minimum
  1. Keep a low bounce rate
  1. Only use .com secondary domains
  1. Always use spintax (2 variations minimum)
Act on these action steps and you will have no problem hitting a 97% deliverability-rate.
Building Your List
You win and lose with prospecting. It is essential, as the starving crowd is the main factor when you want to sell out with your hot dog stand.
Your prospects not only determine who you talk to, but also massively influence your email scripts.
Let me explain further:
Let’s say you build a software that exclusively helps E-Commerce brands, that advertise on TikTok.
You could simply build a “throw shit at the wall and see what sticks” campaign by simply targeting any e-com brand you could get a hold of.
You might write your copy including something like:
“Noticed you run an e-commerce brand…”
The probability that this would somehow come across as “personalised” is not necessarily low, but there is room for improvement.
Dealing with all the positive replies from all the people that wouldn’t qualify for your product will be a huge time waste for both sides.
What about we target it in a different way?
→ That’s where segmented lists come into play.
Instead of just targeting “e-com brands”, we target “e-com brands with a TikTok pixel”
Way more specific. Way better.
Now the copy could look something like this:
“Came across your brand on TikTok and I thought that we both could benefit from a cooperation…”
Tailored to the prospect → Makes a personalised impression. Because it is.
So how do we actually create these segmented lists?
Finding Your ICP Companies
First, we need to actually find the companies we want to target that fit your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile).
There are plenty of different databases you can use to find the companies you want to target, here are a few:
  • Clutch.co (Agencies)
  • BrandNav/Storeleads (E-commerce Brands)
  • Seamless.ai (SaaS)
  • Crunchbase.com
  • Builtwith.com
  • SalesNav

My favourite is ListKit.
It has everything you need + triple verifies every lead for you and you get helpful data visualisation features that help you understand who you have in your list before exporting it. And the database is huge + up-to-date.
Use these sources to filter your ICP companies to get a list with as many information as you can get.
Typically, you’ll find these 4 filters in almost every database:
  1. Department/Industry
  1. Employee Count
  1. Technologies (like the TikTok pixel in the example above)
  1. Location
You can use these to target your niche down as much as possible.
Using these is as straight forward as they look. You'll then build the CSV files by using Chrome extensions like Instant Data Scraper. Scrape lists and export them to a .CSV — You can then move onto Anymailfinder or Apollo.
There are hundreds of videos on how to use both. Therefore I won't cover that here.
List Management
After having built and enriched your list with emails and company details, I recommend to move to Clay, which is a prospect-list-management tool.
Building filter views, exporting and managing large lists is way faster with Clay than it is with any other cloud-based tool that we have tested.
After importing your CSVs into Clay you will…
  • Create separate views for the timezones your prospects are in
  • Optionally invest Clay credits to further enrich your prospects with more data (like web-traffic data)
  • and generally prepare details for the campaign you are going to start.
  • Merge fields you want to use like clean company & city names.
  • Set up a "first-name" column.
  • Finally you are going to create the filter views you want to target separately and write copy for each filter view in the next step.
Scripting Your Email
  1. Greeting
  1. Angle
  1. Offer
  1. Call-to-Action
This is the structure of a solid email.
I am going to dissect each one for you so you know exactly how to write solid emails without needing endless templates from some Twitter gurus.
Greeting
The goal of the greeting is to show that you are real, actually did some research on your prospects company and explain why you are reaching out.
Most people overcomplicate this massively. There is no reason to come up with AI prompts and letting ChatGPT analyse SEO meta tags and descriptions only to come up with horrendous compliments.
This doesn't mean that you suddenly need to know what's in their SEO meta description and come up with an AI prompt to make a

1

Compliments
Leave them out. Especially if you don't mean it but even if you do: Tell them on the phone.

2

Company History
No-one needs you to recite that. And no-one needs you to tell them at which college they graduated.

3

Unapologetic
You are trying to help people. Don't be sorry for reaching out to your prospects.
Angle
You can get really creative with the angle you are taking for your email scripts. Depending on industry, service and ICP each email can look vastly different from one another by adjusting
  • Goal
  • Language
  • Benefit
  • Pain points
Use the angle to segue into your offer.

"We can help you by setting up our Klaviyo flows so you can get more customers from your email marketing.→ NOW THE OFFER"
Offer
Your offer accounts for 80% of your outreach-results. And the funny thing: Most get this completely wrong.
Most people advertise their service and not their offer!
Go look at your spam folder and analyse the cold emails you received. Without exception you will find +10 emails in which their offer is something along the lines of

"We do email marketing and have been in the game since the start of the Klaviyo hype. How about we meet up at Friday?"
Unbecoming.
Make sure your offer has these attributes when building it…
  • Quantifiable
  • Actionable
  • Irresistible

“We can help you with our Klaviyo flows so you can increase AOV and you only pay us per percentage increase. We guarantee to increase it by 20% this month or you don’t pay us until we do.“
Call-To-Action
There are three main types of call to actions you can use.
  1. Direct CTA
  1. Indirect CTA
  1. Value CTA
Direct CTA
This is a direct pitch for a call. This is also the most used call to action because it's the laziest. You are making an ask and that's rather frictionless for you.
But this presents the highest friction for your prospect.
It can be beneficial in some industries and with some scripts, so as with all of these, testing will give you a definitive answer. Always include a direct CTA in your emails.
Indirect CTA
Essentially, this is the same as the direct pitch. You simply ask for a meeting in a softer tone.
Instead of "What's your availability on Friday at 2 PM like?" you'd ask something along the lines of "Would you be against a meeting to discuss xyz further?".
Value CTA
This one by far offers the lowest friction for your prospect. So this one — in most cases — gets the highest response rates.
"Now how could you possibly provide value through an email?", you might be asking.
This can be done via
  • Loom videos → "Mind if I share a video in which I show you three ways to improve your website conversions?"
  • Free lead magnets → "Mind if I share a document showing you how you could run cold emails for your own company?"
  • Free services → "Would you be against a free landing page to see and test our design services?"
There are numerous ways to be useful for your prospects before jumping on a call, depending on your business. You can get really creative with this.
Rules Of Thumb For Good Scripts
What’s in it for me? – (WIIFM?)
Most people don't realize that they are running a service, and not an offer.
Biggest mistake you can make, and you know what? → 80% of business owners are guilty of doing this.
How do you benefit your audience? What kind of tasks do you take off of their plates?
Get rid of your company history and how great a job you are doing.
A good offer consists of quantifiable results, risk-reversal and has a messaging that is actionable — meaning that one could accept OR decline the proposition.
Bad Example: I do cold email outreach and set appointments by sending 10,000 emails per month.
  • No quantifiable results.
  • No risk reversal
  • Absolutely not actionable. My honest reaction to this would be "OK".
Good Example: I will add 10-20 demos per month to your calendar with my cold email system and you only pay per qualified sales call. If I bring you less than 10 meetings per month, you don't pay at all.
  • Results are very much quantifiable
  • There is a risk reversal.
  • I can accept or deny this, as this is actually an offering to me.
Avoid Book-Sized Messages
We are not aiming to write a 5 part book series that might make it to Hollywood.
Short.
Aim for about 50±10 words.
You'll quickly find out that the structure quickly shifts to what is vital and useful:
  1. First line (showing that you are a real person writing to that prospect).
  1. Your offer and how you can help them.
  1. Call to action.
Obvious Mistakes
Now this should be common sense, but unfortunately, it is not. Basic grammar or spelling errors happen. Especially in the first or second drafts. But for the sake of every dictionary: Do not leave your final version unchecked for obvious mistakes.
Make sure you look at punctuation, spelling, grammar, and basic sentence structures. Remove common mistakes. Read it out loud and then improve on found errors.
No need to overthink anything. Just go over it or use tools like Grammarly or ChatGPT to check your copy.
Go over your stuff
  • remove common mistakes
  • read it out loud.
  • improve on found errors
How Does Split-Testing Work?
We have established that an email consists of multiple sections/parts. In split-testing, we take each of those sections and test them in isolation. Meaning, that we send multiple of the same email scripts and change only one section of the structure in all of them
Doing this allows us the analyze the results and see how one section affects the entire performance of the email.
Here is how we do it — You can copy it.
The Four Variations You Can Use In Every Single Campaign
I have four variants I always start out with. I want to give you these four so you can get started with your first campaign as quickly as possible.
One-Sentence-Email
I start with this angle because the research needed to make it work makes it way easier to come up with sales arguments for the other variations.
There is a system to the one-sentence-email. Here is the structure that we are going to use.
Structure
  1. Greeting
  1. Question that leads to a pitch
You already know how to write a proper greeting, however the question that leads to a pitch is new. The train of thought behind the one-sentence-email is to get into conversation and then pitch your offer on the backend.
We are using the prospects desires, pain points or technologies they are using to spark a conversation.
Research is 50% of the work here. Find out the following three things so you can start brainstorming questions:
  • Their desires.
  • Technologies they use.
  • Their pain points.
Examples Of "One-Sentence-Emails"
#1
Hey FN, I was searching for a saas like yours on LinkedIn and saw your profile. Had a quick question.
Are you looking to build a reliable cold email outbound channel for {{company_name}}?
{Talk soon|Kind regards|Talk to you soon},
{Can|Can Ersöz}
#2
Hey FN, saw your profile on GetLatka as I was looking for saas ventures like yours.
Are you looking for a commission-only lead-gen expert?
{Talk soon|Kind regards|Talk to you soon},
{Can|Can Ersöz}
After creating a bunch of variations, pick one or two that you like and bring them into the mix. Now onto creating other variants ⬇️.
PAS Formula (Problem-Agitation-Solution)
Find a pain point of your target audience, that you can solve. Find a way to rub salt in the wound and then present your solution → Your offer!
Structure
  1. Greeting
  1. Pain Point (in their language)
  1. Offer
  1. Soft CTA
Direct Pitch
Structure
  1. Short Greeting
  1. Offer
  1. Direct CTA
Loom Video Pitch
Structure
  1. Greeting / Short Greeting
  1. Offer
  1. Value CTA
Managing Your Inbox
This is where the meetings are made, and where the money is earned.
Going for high volume means that you will receive a ton of replies.
You can either spend a lot of time managing the replies, following up with leads and setting appointments, or you do it the ce-res way.
But before we start with that, I want to introduce the most important things you need to prepare to make this as easy as possible for you.
  1. Lead Categories
  1. Automated Sequences
  1. Reply templates
I will give you these three and you simply set them up in Smartlead so you can hit the ground running.
Most Common Lead Sequences
From all the emails we have sent, we have found these ones to be the most common ones.
  1. Information Sequence
  1. Power/Meeting Sequence
  1. Custom Sequence
  1. Referral Sequence
  1. Out of office
If you use Smartlead → Create these lead categories.
  • Information Sequence
  • Power Sequence
  • Referral Sequence
  • Custom Sequence
Automated Sequences
The following graph shows how you can use the templates I am giving away down below. In the top row you can see the main sequence running with up to 3 (or 4 if you like) follow ups after the initial message.
Below that you can see all the different subsequences we more or less automate via the help of lead categories.
Now follow my instructions to set this up.
  1. Create said lead categories
  1. Create one subsequence for each campaign
  1. Set the trigger to all the lead categories you just created
  1. Add a delay of 3 days
  1. Start the subsequence scripts with the first follow up message (they will be the same in every reply category)
You will be replying to each lead manually, as you won't be able to fill in the blanks for 90% of the responses you will send.
AFTER replying to the lead (be it a referral, organise a meeting or simply providing more information), you will change the lead category of said lead to whatever suits the situation.
The subsequence you have set up will recognise that and Smartlead automatically adds that lead to the follow up sequence.
This means every single lead, no matter the category, lands in the same subsequence but you will still be able to track stats on each of the categories in hindsight.
Email Scripts For Each Sequence
Each sequence is made out of three steps.
  1. Custom copy to lead’s reply
  1. Follow up no.1
  1. Follow up no.2
  1. …
The follow ups will stay the same in the following templates, but you can of course change them to your liking. You will find them after the initial custom copy for each subsequence.

I recommend not sending more than 5 follow ups per month. Don't spam people. Rather focus on reaching out to new prospects that might want to buy now instead of trying to convince people that don't see fit right now.
You can always reach out to those people next quarter.
Now let's get started with some templates. Change these for your use-case! These are meant to give you a starting point.
Information Sequence
People want to know more about what you promise. This is where you can leverage your lead magnet or your step for step explanation of what you do at your business.
Hey {{first_name}}, no problem.
Here's the {information/document/leadmagnet}
Would you be available {{sl_date "now_wd 1Days" "DD MMM"}} or {{sl_date "now_wd 2Days" "DD MMM"}} to discuss this further if you'd like to learn more?
Otherwise, you can always pick a time that works for you.
Let me know and we'll go from there.
Power Sequence
People want to know more about what you promise. This is where you can leverage your lead magnet or your step for step explanation of what you do at your business.
Hi {{first_name}}.
Thanks for getting back to me.
Let's set up a time to talk. Which day is better for you -- {{sl_date "now_wd 1Days" "MM/DD"}} or {{sl_date "now_wd 2Days" "MM/DD"}}?
Regards,
YOUR_NAME
P.S If these times don't work for you - feel free to use this calendar link or send some times that work for you.
Referral Sequence
People want to know more about what you promise. This is where you can leverage your lead magnet or your step for step explanation of what you do at your business.
Hi {Referee Firstname},
{Referrer Fullname) suggested I contact you to discuss the email below.
Let's set up a time to talk. Which time is better for you – {{sl_date "now_wd 1days" "DD MMM"}} or {{sl_date "now_wd 2days" "DD MMM"}}?
Regards,
Clients
Follow Ups
#1 Follow Up
Hey {{first_name}}, good {{sl_time_of_day}}
Just following up here - when would it be a good time for us to chat?
Regards,
YOUR_NAME
#2 Follow Up
Hi {{first_name}},
We haven't been able to connect – is there someone else on your team I could discuss this with?
If you could point me in the right direction, I'd be grateful.
A reply with their name and email would be best.
Regards,
YOUR_NAME
Out of Office
Create a subsequence for the classic OOO messages you will receive. When creating, make sure you select that the people with the “out of office” lead category join this sequence after a delay of at least 30 days.
#1 Out-Of-Office
Hey {{first_name}},
I had bad timing last time.
Let me know if my previous message might be of interest to you.
#2 Out-Of-Office
I’ll assume that this is not a priority right now. Hope I did not bother you.
Automating Your Business
After having mastered the front end of lead generation and sales, it’s time to optimize for efficiency.
As this is extremely individual, I will give directions, but not a step for step tutorial, is this would not make sense for 99% of the readers.
This is how we go about it for our clients, after we have set up the basics.
  • Process Audit to Understand our Client’s Situation
  • Automating Onboarding to increase LTV
  • Implementing a CRM & equipping it with the needed automations
  • Continuous Operations Monitoring to improve anti-fragility of the system
Process Audit
We perform audits to understand our clients workflows and see how the two principles apply:
  1. Are these processes repetitive but require a human? (Candidate to be outsourced)
  1. Are these processes repetitive but don’t require a human? (Candidate to be automated)
For processes that can be delegated we provide a framework for creating SOPs that a VA or employee can follow.
Automating onboarding
If you are in business, you will know how time-consuming onboarding can be. By automating this we not only save a lot of valuable time, but make a good impression on our new found client.
This helps eliminate buyer's remorse and provides your client with a positive experience from the start. This will make them feel confident in their choice to work with you, and they'll be happier to keep working with you.
Create templates where applicable, and automate the execution of them with tools like Make or Zapier.
Automate this as much as possible and make it repeatable for every single client.
CRM Automations
If you dont use a CRM, it is time. You are bleeding revenue.
If you don’t automate it, you are wasting time.
You need to have a well thought out and solid pipeline structure that has automated sequences. This will significantly help your sales process because now you and your team can focus on the most important activity: Sales.
We will help you with this.
Monitoring and Improving Anti-Fragility
Automations can be very complex and daunting at times. And at the same time very fragile, if not done correctly.
To ensure that we will get notified in case of failure we will set up notifications in apps such as Make.com and Zapier to allow us to get insights into the chinks in our anti-fragility armour.
This allows us to react quickly if our automations make errors and efficiently test to improve the systems in the long run.
It is very important to stress test the entire workflow to prevent weird communication with clients and ensure smooth operations.
Conclusion
And there you have it. A quick recap of what we covered:
  1. How to create B2B Ecosystem to become an authority within your industry
  1. How to leverage Asset-Based Selling to increase conversions from outbound
  1. How to create the perfect Cold Email Infrastructure for targeted, high volume campaigns
  1. How to build out Backend Operations to maximize lead inflow conversions & client experience
If you follow this document word for word, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that you can book at least 5-20 sales calls every month.
It's quite a lot, but that is what's required in 2024. Market sophistication is at an all time high, having a system that's running at 95% isn't enough.
Your system needs to be hyper-optimized in every facet to generate results:
  1. Proper tech setup
  1. Volume
  1. Script writing
  1. A/B testing
  1. Targeted list building
  1. Lead pool maximization
  1. Consistent campaign creation
  1. Inbox management
  1. <5 minute reply times
  1. Lead nurturing
The list goes on. But it is what must be done.

So if you're a B2B business owner looking to skip all of this hassle, but want this system injected into your business you have two options
COLD EMAIL SETUP
We'll build out the entire infrastructure for you including:
  • Inboxes
  • Email templates
  • Prospect lists
  • Automations
  • SOPs
  • KPI and Path Tracking Spreadsheet
  • Premium support
→ All of this for $497.
FULL SERVICE LEAD GENERATION
We'll build out the entire infrastructure mentioned in this document, generate leads and work them for you.
→ $1500/mo.
If us building out this infrastructure for your business interests you book a call with me here and we'll discuss further:
Talk soon,
Can
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