Instantly - Ai Masterclass - Land in The Inbox Every Single Time With Our Ultimate Cold Email Framework

Instantly.
ai Masterclass - Land in the Inbox Every

Single Time With Our Ultimate Cold Email
Framework
Setting up and running a cold email outreach system can be a time consuming process - you
need to create email accounts, connect them to a sending tool, write the email copy, find leads
to send emails to and constantly monitor and reiterate all steps of this process.
It would be an absolute shame if all of this time and effort (and money) you put into your email
outreach would go to waste just because you landed in spam, where the email is never even
seen, let alone opened or read.
The purpose of the following guide is to help you avoid landing in spam and teach you all the
steps you need to take in order for your emails to get opened, read and replied to.
Ontop of teaching all the steps, this guide will also cover the why of things. We believe it’s
important to understand why something works the way it does, so that you can prioritize and
understand the importance of each aspect.
This guide takes you through the creation of your sending domains, the entire technical setup,
starting, scaling and optimizing your campaigns as well as troubleshooting any issues you may
encounter on the way.
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Instantly.ai Masterclass - How to Always Land in the Inbox and 2x Your Positive Replies
Technical Setup 🛠
Buying domains and creating email accounts.
SPF, DKIM & DMARC
What is SPF?
What is DKIM?
What is DMARC?
How to set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC?
Custom Tracking Domain
Domain Forwarding
Making sure that the technical setup has been done correctly
Running email campaigns 👨‍💻

Email Account Warmup
How does warmup work and why is it important?
How to properly warm up your sending accounts?
Finding and Verifying Leads to Contact
Writing Copies That Keep You Out of Spam and Get You Clients
Using Spintax
Launching and Scaling Cold Email Campaigns
Troubleshooting, Testing & Optimizing 👷‍♂️

Troubleshooting
Common Deliverability Problems
Other Deliverability Problems
Testing deliverability issues
Bounces
📊
Troubleshooting Sequences
Further Testing & Optimizing
Disabling open tracking & focusing on reply rates
Lowering your outgoing volume
Disabling Bad Performers
Checking Your Campaigns Daily
Testing Different Copies
Testing Different Leads
Bonus: Become A Cold Email Expert

1. Instantly Cold Email Setup - Step-By-Step Guide
2. Instantly Youtube Channel
3. Instantly Blog
4. Cold Email Powerhouse (Gumroad Course)
5. Cold Email Masterclass (Facebook Group)
Technical Setup 🛠
Tech setup - the most boring but absolutely critical part of doing cold email outreach.
You can do every aspect of cold emailing perfectly, but if you do not have your domains and
emails set up perfectly you will face major deliverability issues that can ruin your whole
outreach.
On top of covering how to set up your domains and email accounts for sending, we will also tell
you why these things matter, so you can understand their importance.
We will go through:
1. Buying domains and creating email accounts.

2. Setting up SPF, DKIM & DMARC.
3. Setting up your own Custom Tracking Domain.
4. Setting up forwarding to your main domain.
The good thing about technical setup is that it’s the easiest part of the cold email process to
outsource because it is the exact same process every time. Once you understand it yourself,
you can delegate it to VA’s who can just follow guides and set this up for you while you work on
other tasks like copywriting, lead sourcing and campaign optimization.
Let’s get into it.
Buying domains and creating email accounts.
Before getting into the actual technical specifics, we strongly advise you to go with the biggest
and most popular domain and email service providers.
Time and time again we see people trying to save money by opting for alternative services only
to face problems and lackluster support, making the already daunting process of technical setup
much more difficult and sometimes even impossible.
We strongly recommend getting your domains from Google or Godaddy and your email
accounts from Google or Zoho. We consistently see cold emailers face the least amount
of problems using these providers.
Now let’s go over how many domains you should buy and how many email accounts you should
create.
The first thing you should ask yourself is how many cold emails per day you would like to send.
This usually comes down to how many leads you think you can find and how much resources
you have at hand to deal with replies, meetings and potential customers.
A person with a lead list of 100,000 people will need to send more emails per day to cover the
list in a reasonable amount of time compared to someone who only wants to reach out to 1000
people.
Here’s a general guideline:
1. The recommended amount of emails you can send per day per email account is about 50.
2. If you want to send 1000 emails per day, you will need 1000/50=20 email accounts.
3. It is recommended to create 3-5 email accounts per domain, which means for 20 email
accounts you need about 4-7 domains.
This means that the generic formula to calculate how many email accounts and domains you
need is:
Total required emails per day / 50 = Number of needed email accounts

Number of needed email accounts / 5 = Number of needed domains
Keep in mind that these numbers are not set in stone, that’s why we are giving you a range of
3-5 email accounts per domain. Lower end numbers are always safer.
Here’s 3 examples of how you can approach this:
However, it is always recommended to buy extra domains and create extra accounts just in
case. If you want to increase your sending volume, you can do it right away. If something
happens to your existing domains/accounts, you can swap them out right away.
SPF, DKIM & DMARC
If you have any previous experience with cold emailing then you have probably heard these
terms a million times, but barely anyone knows what they mean and what they actually do. They
are all entries in your domain’s DNS settings, which can be accessed in your domain provider’s
settings.
The most popular domain providers are:
GoDaddy
Namecheap
Google Domains
Understanding the importance of SPF, DKIM and DMARC requires you to also understand what
they are.
What is SPF?
SPF stands for “Sender Policy Framework” and it is used to specify which servers are allowed to
send emails on your domain’s behalf. It is simply an entry in your domain provider’s DNS
records.
If you are using Google Workspace as your email provider, having Google’s SPF records set up
for your domain will signal that Google’s servers are authorized to send emails on your domain’s
behalf. This assures other email servers that emails from your domain coming through
Google’s servers are legitimate and should be put into the main inbox for the recipient to
see.
What is DKIM?
DKIM stands for “Domain Keys Identified Mail” and it is used to ensure that an email was sent
and authorized by your domain by adding a signature to all of your emails. Again, DKIM is
simply an entry in your domain provider’s DNS records.
Once your recipient’s email servers verify that your email is signed with a valid DKIM signature,
it is then more likely to be put into the inbox as it is seen as low risk.
What is DMARC?
DMARC stands for “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance”. A

DMARC record allows a sender to indicate that their messages are protected by SPF and DKIM
and remove the guesswork from your recipient’s email servers, making them more likely to be
put into the inbox.
Put simply, you need all four of the above records for your email account to function well. As a
matter of fact, email providers like Google may scrutinize your account if you don't have those
set up.
How to set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC?
Here are the guides including videos on how to set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for the most
widely used domain and email service providers:
GoDaddy:
1. RECOMMENDED: Setting up SPF, DMARC and DKIM for GoDaddy & Google
Workspace
2. RECOMMENDED: Setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for GoDaddy & Zoho
3. Setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for Godaddy & Microsoft/Office 365
NameCheap:
1. Setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for NameCheap & Google Workspace
2. Setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for NameCheap & Zoho
3. Setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for NameCheap and Microsoft/Office 365
Custom Tracking Domain
Now you need to set up your own custom tracking domain, which is your personal domain (or
sub-domain) used to track opens and clicks in your emails. This is super important in order to
protect your email deliverability.
If you do not set up your own custom tracking domain, a public tracking domain will be used
which is much like sharing a toothbrush with everyone else sending out emails. This is obviously
not good for the health of your domains and deliverability.
Just like SPF, DKIM and DMARC, your custom tracking domain can be set up with a simple
DNS record entry in your domain provider’s settings.
Here’s how to set it up:
1. Go into your domain settings at your domain provider.

2. Add a new CNAME type record.
3. Set the value as prox.itrackly.com
4. Set the name as inst
5. Insert your custom tracking domain in Instantly, it will be formatted as
inst.yourdomain.com
Here are guides on how to do it with the most popular domain providers:
1. Setting up custom tracking domain with GoDaddy

2. Setting up custom tracking domain with NameCheap
For other sending accounts with the same domain, you can go ahead and update Custom
Tracking Domain settings by entering the same tracking domain that you've just created.
For instance, use inst.domain1.com for all sending accounts with domain1.com.
If you have sending accounts using other domains, you will need to repeat the process above to
set up custom tracking domains separately for separate domains, so that domain2.com sending
accounts will use inst.domain2.com as their custom tracking domain.
Domain Forwarding
Lastly, you want to make sure that all of your sending domains are forwarded to your main
domain. This is the easiest part of the technical setup process, you are almost done!
The main reason for setting up forwarding is that when people manually check where your email
came from, they will be forwarded to your main business domain where they can find out more
about you and see that you are legitimate. The other reason is that a permanent (301)
forwarding links your secondary domains to your main domain.
Forwarding, just like previous steps, is also set up in your domain provider’s settings. Here’s
how you do it with GoDaddy and NameCheap.
Making sure that the technical setup has been done correctly
After connecting your sending accounts to Instantly, you can check if SPF, DKIM and DMARC
are set up correctly by clicking on the “Test Domain Setup” button.
If everything is done correctly, you will see a confirmation message pop up.
You can make sure that your custom tracking domain works by clicking “Check status” in each
of your sending account’s settings. If everything is correct, you will see green check marks next
to CNAME verified and SSL verified.
To check if your forwarding works, simply visit the webpage of your secondary domain and see if
it automatically forwards you to your main business website.
Running email campaigns 👨‍💻
After making sure your technical setup is all done properly, you can move on to the fun part -
creating and optimizing your cold email campaigns for maximum deliverability and performance.
In this section we will cover:
1. Email account warmup

2. Finding and verifying leads to contact
3. Writing copies that keep you out of spam and get you clients
4. Launching and scaling campaigns
Let’s get right to it.
Email Account Warmup
Properly warming up your email sending accounts (and domains) can make the difference
between a highly successful cold email campaign and a campaign plagued by low open rates &
no replies. Additionally, warmup plays an important role in maintaining your sending reputation
and continuously making sure that you are landing in the inbox.
How does warmup work and why is it important?
Warmup works by mimicking human conversations between email accounts.
Think of it as you emailing back and forth with your friends - on autopilot, but in this case, your
‘friends’ are other Instantly.ai users that have also enabled the warmup feature. You can be sure
that all of them will open your email and a high percentage will write you back with a ‘thoughtful’
and positive sentiment.
The emails written by the Instantly AI algorithm signal to Google, Outlook, and others email
providers that your email account and sending domain is relevant and legitimate. This increases
the likelihood that the messages that are sent to the cold leads in your outreach campaigns will
also land in their inbox and subsequently be opened and replied to.
On top of the deliverability benefits, your outreach email accounts will also stay alive for longer
and the likelihood of you ‘burning’ through an account is significantly lower.
Here’s what a typical warmup email looks like:
Notice that all warmup emails have [IWE] (which stands for Instanly Warmup email) at the end
of their subject lines, notifying you that these are AI generated emails that require no attention
from you.
The recommended default settings for warmup are as follows:
Increase per day - 1

Daily warmup limit - 20
Reply rate % - 30%
The increase per day setting works by slowly increasing your warmup daily limit by 1 email
every day until it reaches your daily warmup limit. Disabling slow warmup is only recommended
to accounts that have already been warmed up and are older than 14 days.
Daily warmup limit is simply the number of warmup emails that your email account will send in a
day.
The reply rate setting is used to set the percentage of replies that your outgoing warmup emails
get. Some people may ask why this should not be 100% as more replies should be a good
thing, right? Well no, getting replies to all of your emails is suspicious and something that does
not happen to real people sending emails.
Advanced Warmup Settings
In the advanced warmup settings you have 3 options:
1. Read Emulation
2. Warm custom tracking domain
3. Random email range (coming soon)
The recommended settings are to keep both read emulation and warm custom tracking
domain enabled.
Read emulation mimics human human-like behavior by actually taking time to scroll through the
warm-up emails, making it look realistic to email service providers.
Warm custom tracking domain works by including your custom tracking domain in your warmup
emails, showing email service providers that attachments from that specific domain are safe,
because they are regularly being opened and replied to.
Both great settings you want to enable.
The third option will allow you to set a custom email range for warmup emails, so that you will
send a randomized different number of warmup emails each day. This option will be available in
the near future.
How to properly warm up your sending accounts?
For fresh domains and sending accounts, it is recommended that you just enable warmup by
clicking on the flame icon next to your sending accounts in your Instantly account and let our
system run with default settings as shown above.
Warm up your fresh sending accounts for at least 2 weeks before sending out any cold
emails.
Once your sending accounts are warm and you are ready to send out cold emails, make sure
you still keep warm up enabled at all times. Think of warmup and cold email sending as
counteracting forces, warmup is constantly working to build & protect your sending reputation
while cold email sending is hurting it with potential bounces, reports as spam from recipients
and anti-spam bots.
A good rule of thumb is to keep a 50:50 balance between your cold emails and your
warmup emails. For example, if you are sending out 20 cold emails per email account per day
then match it with 20 warmup emails per email account per day.
If you want to bump up the volume of your outreach, you can move on to a split of 25 cold
emails per day per account and 25 warmup emails per day per account. These settings can be
edited in the settings of each sending account within Instantly.
If you wish to scale warmup emails up by 5 as in the above example, you can disable the slow
warmup setting, since your email accounts are already warm and this way they will send out the
desired amount right away.
NB. Keep warmup enabled at all times!
The warmup system is continuously working to better your domain and email account
reputations, acting as a counter-force to the “damage” that sending cold emails can do to
domains. For this reason you should always keep warmup enabled and never turn it off as long
as you are using the domains and email accounts for cold email outreach.
Finding and Verifying Leads to Contact
One of the most important parts of a successful cold email campaign is finding the right contacts
to target with your campaigns to maximize conversions and to verify them properly to minimize
bounces, which is one of the main ways people destroy their sending reputation and get stuck in
spam.
A bounce is when your email is unable to be sent to your recipient. Most bounces happen when
the email address you are sending to no longer exists. Thankfully bounces can be fully
eliminated by verifying your contacts before sending.
This part of the cold emailing process is so important that we cover everything about lead
mining and verifying in depth in a separate document, which you can read here:
Instantly Cold Email Lead Mining Masterclass by Instantly.ai
The 2 most important things regarding leads are
1) Make sure the leads you are using are relevant to your offer to maximize replies.
2) Make sure the leads you are using are fully verified to minimize bounces.
Writing Copies That Keep You Out of Spam and Get You
Clients
Another critical part of a successful cold emailing campaign is copywriting. You can have
everything done perfectly, but without a good email copy you will fail to get replies, meetings and
revenue for your business.
Thankfully just like for lead finding & verifying, we have a separate long-format document going
over every part of copywriting that will help you convert leads into paying customers. You can
read it here:
Instantly - How We Get 400+ Replies Monthly With Our Cold Email Copywriting Framework
Also, check out our Youtube playlist that cover all parts of email copywriting here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyn3P_Bl8i2EsGDidzb6c1jXjbfczS2wk
Using Spintax
Also an important part of email copywriting is using spintax. If you like listening more than
reading, check out this video on this topic:
How to Use Spintax in Instantly
Spintax is used to randomize the content of your copy by offering alternative words, sentences
or even phrases for the sequence to use.
This is what a spintax looks like and how it should be formatted:

{{RANDOM | Text1 | Text2 | Text3}}
So it is basically just text separated by the vertical bar symbol | enclosed in curly brackets.
The example above provides 3 variations of a text, but you can use just 2 variables or more
than 3, it does not change the way spintax works.
It is also important that you include RANDOM as the first variable as shown in the example
within Instantly, because that will make sure that the spintax will automatically choose one of the
following variables and insert it into your copy.
Why is Spintax necessary?
Spintax will make sure that all of your outgoing emails are as unique as possible, which will in
turn increase your deliverability because email service providers have spam bots that scan the
content of emails and if they detect a copy that has been used many times they are more likely
to send it to spam.
A real life example of using copy with Spintax:
You can make sure your Spintax works properly by clicking the eye icon at the bottom of the
sequence editor to display a preview of your email, this will randomize all the spintaxed text and
should show you a natural variation of your email like this.
Now you may think that adding a bunch of different variations will make a couple unique
variations of your copy which will not help much, but actually even adding a couple of spintaxes
will make hundreds or even thousands of different variations of your email.
An easy way to check how many variations your copy can produce is by going to this website
and pasting in your copy.
The example used above will generate 486 unique variations of your email. (Keep in mind that
you want to remove the RANDOM when checking the variation count as this tool will also count
the word RANDOM as a legitimate variable and inflate the number of results).
As you can see, Spintax can also be used in the subject line. If you have additional follow ups,
Instantly’s system will make sure that all additional steps will use the random subject line
generated for the initial step, so that threading works naturally and recipients can see the full
context of your previous emails.
Launching and Scaling Cold Email Campaigns
The way you start your cold outreach can be detrimental to your results, so it’s important to
understand the basics from the get go, so that once you scale to bigger volumes you are doing
everything right. Here we have the most critical basics split into separate lessons.
First lesson: do not send more than ~50 emails per day per email account, this includes
warm-up emails.
The number 50 is not a rule set in stone, but rather a best practice that we’ve seen constantly
bring great results. People that are pushing this limit will most likely find themselves
troubleshooting deliverability issues and spending time that could be put to better use. We’ve
gotten the best results with a split of 20±5 cold emails and 20±5 warm up emails per day
per account.
The risk-reward ratio of pushing the per-account level sending limit further is just not worth it, as
you risk losing your entire domain and accounts for a little bit of extra volume. This brings us to
the next lesson.
Second lesson: always scale total outreach volume by buying more domains and
creating more email accounts rather than pushing the daily sending limits of existing
accounts further (and risking burning them).
Some people make it work with higher sending volumes per account, but from our experience it
is not worth the risk of burning your existing domains that have a solid sending reputation
already. Building a solid reputation takes a lot of time and effort, meaning that you should take
good care of your domains that get to the point of good deliverability.
Now all of this does not mean that you should go straight into sending 50 emails per day from
the first day.
Third lesson: start low and scale your cold outreach volumes up slowly while monitoring
stats closely.
Starting your outreach right from the maximum recommended sending limit of 50 emails per
account per day will damage the reputation of your accounts and domains right away, since
spam filters and bots treat fresh domains and email accounts more harshly.
For this reason it is recommended to start low, on the first day send out no more than 5 cold
emails per day per email account while keeping the warmup system at 20 emails per day.
While keeping a close eye on metrics like open rate, reply rate and warmup health score slowly
scale up the cold email sending volume until you reach the maximum recommended limit of 50
emails per day per account.
There is no fixed rule on how this should be done exactly, but you can follow this guideline we
successfully used while running our cold email lead generation agency:
Scaling campaigns from scratch
In a simplified manner, you can approach it like the following example.
Starting sending cold emails safely with an email account that has been warmed up for at least
14 days:
Day 1 - 5 emails per day

Day 20 - 25 cold emails per day AND increase daily warmup limit to 25 warm up emails per day.
At this point you are at the maximum recommended sending limit of a single email account,
which is a total of 50 emails per day.
You can increase these limits gradually each day if you want to be extra cautious, but increasing
them every 5 days like shown in the above example works well too.
It’s also important to understand that none of the numbers mentioned in this section are the only
correct way of doing things. These numbers allow leeway in both directions and can still work
perfectly well. You can think of it as a recommended speed limit in a corner of a racing track,
even if you go a little faster or slower, you will still make it through. Most of the problems arise
when the recommended limits are exceeded/ignored substantially.
Fourth lesson: do not scale up your sending volume per account unless your open rate
is above ~40% and warmup health score is above ~98%.
You want to make sure that your deliverability is top notch before you scale your outreach
volumes. Sending emails that get stuck in spam and that no one opens or replies to will only
hurt you more. Notice that I again used the approximation sign “~”, the reason is that none of
these numbers are set in stone, it’s the idea that matters.
The reasoning behind these numbers is that it’s very unlikely that being in spam is an issue for
your campaigns if you are seeing a healthy open rate, meaning that you can safely scale your
volumes up.
Fifth lesson: if your open rates and/or warmup health score are low, stop all cold
outreach and let only warmup run for a few days before trying again.
The whole reason for the warmup system is to build your sending reputation with positive
interactions, so if you find yourself having a low open rate and/or low warmup health score, stop
all cold outreach and just let warmup run on its own. Then try again with a low volume to see if
there was any improvement. You might have to let warm up run for 1-2 weeks to improve a
damaged reputation.
This same strategy can be used at any point later on. If you ever suspect being stuck in spam
then stop all cold outreach and let the warmup system run on its own before trying again with
lower volumes.
Once you reach a point where all of your sending accounts are sending out around ~50 emails
per day with good results and you wish to scale further go ahead and buy more domains and
create more email accounts.
Then do everything you did with the previous domains/accounts again and start the whole
process from scratch until these new accounts are also sending out ~50 emails per day.
Keep in mind that these new accounts need to be scaled up slowly, which means that it’s a good
idea to create separate new campaigns for new accounts to keep the volumes and analytics
separate for future decisions. You also want to keep an eye on how the new accounts are doing
separately.
We recommend starting the scaling by duplicating the best performing campaigns and making
sure those are the ones that see increased volumes first, after which you can move forward with
testing new campaigns using the new accounts.
To summarize the main things to keep in mind are:
1. Do not send more than 50 emails per day per email account. This includes warmup emails.
2. Start low and slow.
2. Do not scale sending volume if metrics are not healthy.
3. If metrics are not healthy, then stop cold outreach completely and only let warmup run. Then
try again starting low and slow.
4. Only scale sending volumes by buying more domains + creating more email accounts, not by
constantly increasing daily sending limits per account.
Troubleshooting, Testing & Optimizing 👷‍♂️
Now that you know how to properly set up your domains and sending accounts, write copies,
source leads and launch your email campaigns it is time to learn all about testing, optimizing
and troubleshooting.
Knowing how to continuously improve and troubleshoot your existing cold email campaigns is
what separates a cold email master from a trainee.
Troubleshooting
If for any reason your campaigns are not getting good results and/or open rates are looking bad,
there are quite a few steps you can take depending on the problem you are facing.
Common Deliverability Problems
The most common deliverability problem usually stems from sending out way too many emails
too fast per account. Email service providers seeing a single domain doing unusually large
volumes and too many people reporting you as spam are surefire ways to ruin your domains
and sending accounts.
This is why it’s important to follow the guidelines laid out in the Launching and Scaling Cold
Email Campaigns section
Here we cover other common deliverability problems and how to fix them:
Open rates are slightly low (30-50%):
This usually refers to a problem with your target audience and/or subject line and isn’t definite
proof of inboxing issues. It could also indicate a problem with the beginning of your email body
copy, as your prospects see it as a snippet under your subject line.
Some kinds of demographics are tougher to reach than others (for example CEO’s of big
financial companies in the USA) and we always recommend testing other C-suite positions and
even assistants to see if that makes a difference.
On top of that we recommend changing up and testing different subject lines.
Some of the best performing subject lines are:
{{firstName}} - quick question
{{firstname}} - (your name)
Thought you’d like this {{first name}}
Quick question
Interview request
Question about {{companyName}}
Weird question {{firstName}}?
Thoughts?
Thoughts {{firstName}}?
Can you help {{firstName}}?
Love {{companyName}}!
If playing around with targeting and/or subject lines does not help, suspect it to be a
deliverability issue.
Open rates are very low (<30%):
This usually means there is a problem with deliverability, meaning your domains/accounts are
either blacklisted or stuck in people’s promotions folder where they never get seen or opened.
The best fix for this is to completely pause the cold outreach of your campaigns and only let
Instantly warmup run for a week.
On top of this, you should create new sending accounts and start warming them up in case your
previous domains permanently end up on blocklists. We’ve seen that it’s more time and cost
efficient to create new sending accounts from scratch as opposed to dealing with getting out of
blocklists.
After a week’s pause you can restart the campaigns slowly like they were brand new and later
add in the new accounts you’ve created. We’ve seen this approach fix the problematic situation
in most cases.
Also, make sure you are not sending more than 50 emails per day per email account.
If this too does not help, you can give the warmup system even longer to run on its own and if
the metrics are still bad you should consider those domains and accounts burnt out and replace
them completely.
Open rates are good, but reply rate is bad:
This usually indicates a problem with your copy, offer and/or targeting and is a sign that it is just
not resonating with the people you’re sending your emails to.
Refer back to the Copywriting and Lead Mining sections and test out different copies, different
lead sources and different job titles, countries, company sizes, etc.
Also, it might be the case that your prospects are checking out your website/company and not
finding it trustworthy enough to reply. Consider working on your online presence.
We’ve seen people with websites only in their local language trying to reach out to English
speaking clients, which usually never works (most people check out the website before
replying).
Open rates are good, reply rates are good, but no positive replies:
This is similar to the previous problem and most likely indicates an issue with the offer not being
attractive enough for people to give it a chance.
In addition to the recommendations in the previous step, one thing we recommend trying is
moving towards a more soft call to action at the end of the email.
Instead of pushing or asking for a call right in the first email, try to instead ask for permission to
send more information over or ask for interest in hearing more.
Again, refer back to the Copywriting and Lead Mining guides and test out different copies,
different lead sources and different job titles, countries, company sizes, etc.
Other Deliverability Problems
❌ Email accounts not set up properly

Not having SPF, DKIM, DMARC set up properly for your accounts.
❌ Bad subject lines

If your subject line is generic, salesy and not targeted, there’s less chance people will open it.
Check out our copywriting guide HERE.
❌ Email account not warmed up enough or not using warm-up.
If you haven’t warmed up your emails for at least 2 weeks before sending cold emails you might
see lower open rates. Your own domain’s reputation and how old it is, along with the reputation
of your sending accounts affect your deliverability.
❌ Email account sending too many emails

If you’re sending too many emails you might get flagged and most of your emails will end up in
spam and won’t be opened. Do not send over 50 emails per day per account.
❌ Using Spam words

Don’t use words from this list.
❌ Non personalized Email

If it’s obvious from the email snippet that the email is generic and not targeted, there's a lower
chance of being opened.
❌ Unverified Lead List

If you don’t verify your email lists there are going to be a lot of email accounts that don’t exist
and bounce, which means your open rate is lower. Bounces are overall very bad for your
sending reputation, avoid them at all costs. Check out our lead mining and verifying guide
HERE.
❌ Using Images in your Copy

Using images might cause your emails to go into spam and lower deliverability.
❌ Using Links in your copy

Using links might cause more of your emails to go into spam and lower deliverability.
❌ Not using a custom tracking domain

Not using a custom tracking domain means you’re using the same tracking domain as other
people and that won’t get you as good of a deliverability as using your own custom tracking
domain.
❌ Blacklists
If the domain associated with your email addresses, custom tracking domain, or any links
associated included in your email body are on a blacklist, that will negatively impact
deliverability.
Usually being on 1-2 blacklists is not a major concern and you should still be able to get high
inbox rates. However, if your domain is listed on a bunch of different blacklists you are usually
better off by considering that domain burnt and replacing it completely with a new sending
domain and accounts.
You can check blacklist status on third-party services like https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
❌ Sending to a generic email

You are less likely to get an open or reply from a generic email like info@company vs a personal
one like name@company
❌ Sending at the wrong times

If you send emails after work hours, over the weekend or on holidays, people will open them
less.
❌ Reputation of email service provider's IP

While most major providers (like Google, Zoho, Outlook, etc.) automatically take care of the
sending server’s IP reputation, this could yet be another reason for low deliverability. Please
make sure your email service provider’s IP address is not in a blacklist.
❌ Pixel Disabled by certain email clients

Certain email clients, like the iPhone's stock Mail app, for example, have privacy settings that
remove the loading of images by default (to prevent tracking). In case that happens, a tracking
event will not get fired. This is an industry-wide problem regardless of which email open tracking
tool you use.
❌ Your email’s domain not pointing to an actual website

To fix this, we recommend you to point to your main business website by adding a cname record
(make sure to use SSL in this case) or by redirecting this domain to your main website.
Here is a deliverability audit sheet you can copy for yourself and use it to go over each section
of your cold emailing system:
Instantly Deliverability Audit (COPY & FILL THIS BEFORE OUR CALL)
Testing deliverability issues
Within Instantly:
The easiest way to test deliverability issues is by sending a test email through Instantly, by going
to your sequence editor, clicking on 'preview email', then on 'check deliverability score'.
Ideally you would want to reach a deliverability score of 100/100, when you scroll down in your
deliverability report you can see the reasons your deliverability might be low and then you can
prioritize dealing with them separately.
Main reasons you are not getting a 100/100 deliverability score are a combination of all the
common problems listed above, in the Common Deliverability Problems and Other Deliverability
Problems sections. If you fix all of these problems, you should be getting a perfect score.
Alternative method:
Alternatively you can use a tool called GlockApps to test your deliverability. This is how you do
it:
Create an account, then click on Inbox Insight and then choose Start New Test.
Then select the providers you want to test, it is recommended to only select US related
providers if you are only sending to US targets.
Then just copy and paste the test id string in your email body, copy the recipients into the
address bar and send out your email through your email account that you want to test.
After sending out your test email, click on View Report and wait until the report fills up with data.
After the report is complete, you can see the percentage of emails that went into the inbox and
what percentage failed to inbox.
If your inbox rate is over 90% I wouldn’t worry about being listed in a singular blocklist or any
minor problems that might appear from the report. The main idea is that the overwhelming
majority of your emails went straight into the inbox.
Blocklists become a problem when you are listed in a lot of them and then the recommended
course of action is just to create new domains and sending accounts as getting yourself out of
blocklists takes a lot of more effort than creating new domains.
You can click on the “Action Steps” tab to see what GlockApps recommends you to do in order
to improve your deliverability. Often times they are a combination of the same steps laid out
above in the Common Deliverability Problems section.
Bounces
One of the worst things that can happen to your domains and accounts is excessive bounces, it
will ruin your domain reputation and will get you stuck in spam. Bounces are basically emails
that have failed to be delivered, mostly because the recipient’s email address no longer exists.
So how do you check it and how do you avoid it?
You can see your bounces on the campaign level by navigating to a specific campaign within
Instantly and going to the Leads tab.
There you will see the number of bounces for that specific campaign, so what is a good bounce
rate to aim for?
Well, the perfect bounce rate is 0%, but that can be pretty unrealistic so you should aim to make
sure that your bounce rate is not more than 2% from your total outgoing emails.
How does a high bounce rate happen?
Bounces happen when your lead lists are not properly cleaned & verified and your sent emails
are failing to be delivered.
How do I clean & verify my lists?
The topic of lead mining and verifying is covered in the following guide, navigate to the “Lead
Validation” section:
To cover it shortly, you have to run all of your leads through a lead verifying system. The ones
we recommend are:
Bulkemailchecker
Pros: Cheap
Cons: Slow
And
Millionverifier
Cons:
More expensive at lower packages than Bulkemailchecker
Pros:
Same price as Bulkemailchecker for the 100k+ credits packages
MUCH faster
The way lead verifying tools work is by confirming that the contact email addresses exist and
can receive your email before you actually send out your email. This makes sure that emails
that don’t exist will be removed from your lead lists, allowing you to avoid excessive bounces.
However, none of these tools are 100% accurate so completely eliminating bounces is difficult.
The main goal for you is to get your bounce rate below 2%.
Troubleshooting Sequences
As mentioned previously in the common deliverability problems section, links, images and
attachments in your email sequences lower your deliverability substantially. The reason for this
is because attachments are always seen as risky by bots that are pre-scanning emails, because
oftentimes viruses and malware can be hidden in the form of attachments.
Only use attachments in your emails if you’re confident that the added value from the
attachments outweighs the damage they do to your chances of landing in people’s inboxes.
Also, the same goes for different fonts, colors and custom formatting. It is always better to send
emails in plain-text format.
One way to make sure that your emails are in plain text format is to clean out all HTML code.
You can make sure there is no HTML (the stuff that makes your email too fancy for good
deliverability) in your email body by highlighting your entire copy and clicking the “Clean HTML”
button.
Sometimes there is HTML code hidden in your copy that you do not know is even there. This
mainly happens when you copy-paste text over from other sources, which can attach custom
HTML code into your text that is not even visible in the text itself.
Either way, making sure that your emails are in plain text format (with no HTML) is always a step
to take to improve your deliverability.
Also, another thing that might seem obvious is to check out the scheduled time-window of your
campaigns.
Make sure that your campaigns are going out at the most optimal time when your target
audience is most likely to see and respond to your emails. This is usually during working hours.
For this reason it is important to separate your campaigns and lead lists based on location, so
that people get your emails when it’s working hours in their location.
Sending emails during off-hours means that they will get buried by all the other emails that the
person will receive by the time they get to look at them, substantially lowering your chances of
the person opening and replying to your email.
Further Testing & Optimizing 📊
Now we will cover things that you can do to further improve your cold email performance and
things you can keep in mind, even if you are not facing any blatantly obvious issues.
The first and probably most controversial topic is open rates, which deserves a separate
headline.
Disabling open tracking & focusing on reply rates
Even though open rates are an important metric, they can be super misleading AND hurt your
deliverability on top of it. To understand this better, it’s important to understand how open
tracking works.
If you like listening more than reading, feel free to watch this video about this topic:
Open Rates = Fake News
Open rates are measured by a tracking pixel within your email body copy.
A tracking pixel is just a 1 by 1 pixel tiny transparent image that is attached to your email. Any
time this tiny image gets loaded, it is recorded as an open event as the image only gets loaded
when the email is opened.
Now this can be an issue in multiple ways:
Firstly, the tracking pixel itself is an attachment, which as we know from the previous section
lowers deliverability as attachments are often where viruses and malware are hidden, making it
more likely to land in spam.
Additionally, email service providers have ways to differentiate between a regular image
attachment versus a tracking pixel attachment. People who use tracking pixels are more likely to
be marketers, which means that emails from there are more likely to be put in spam.
Secondly, email providers have bots that pre-scan emails to make sure they are safe, this
pre-scanning can trigger open events, making the open rate you see misleading as these opens
could be bots and not actual people.
On top of this, some email providers and companies (like Apple) have privacy features in place
that can block the loading of the tracking pixel, making it impossible to track opens even when a
person could have opened your email.
How big is the difference in deliverability? Pretty huge - tracking opens can lower your inbox
rates by up to 20%
To summarize, open rates are not accurate and tracking them lowers deliverability by up
to 20%.
So what to do?
Our recommendation is that you should keep open tracking disabled for most of your campaigns
and focus purely on reply rates and positive replies.
You can disable open tracking (and enable plain-text sending) in every individual campaign’s
settings.
You can have a few campaigns where you keep open tracking enabled just to have a general
idea of your open rates, but keep it disabled for the majority of your campaigns.
People sometimes see their open rate drop by 10% and think that there is something wrong with
their deliverability (which could be the case) and then spend a lot of time trying to fix it. When in
reality the drop was caused by the email service provider’s privacy features blocking the loading
of the tracking pixel and thus showing you lower open rates for that day.
Instead of open rates you can then focus on business metrics that really matter, like reply rates,
positive reply rates, meetings booked and revenue generated.
Knowing how many people opened your email does not really directly help your business,
especially if you know that the number is not even accurate.
These are all stats that cannot be misleading and things that should be the ultimate focus when
running cold email campaigns.
Lowering your outgoing volume
Sometimes all you have to do to get better results is to lower your outgoing volume per email
account per day. Even though the recommended amount of emails to send per day per account
is 50, you can try lowering it and then monitor results for the next couple of weeks.
To make it super simple, you can actually limit your account specific sending volumes directly in
the email account’s settings in Instantly.
This means that you do not have to go through each campaign and adjust campaign sending
limits. You can just change the daily campaign limit in your email account settings and be sure
that no more emails are going to be sent out.
Disabling Bad Performers
Sometimes your overall cold email stats are looking good, but they could be a lot better if you
disabled a few bad apple campaigns that are getting worse than usual results.
You can try troubleshooting why some of the campaigns are getting bad results, but we’ve seen
that cutting the worst performers off can do a lot of good for your overall results.
You can then allocate more sending volume to the good performing campaigns, which will in
turn generate positive interactions and increase your sending reputation which further increases
your results. Like a positive snowball effect.
This brings us to the next point, daily health checkups.
Checking Your Campaigns Daily
As mentioned in previous sections, sending further emails with bad deliverability will hurt your
sending reputation even more. Think of it again as a snowball effect, but negative.
This is why it’s extremely important that you stop your cold outreach (or lower it significantly) as
soon as you notice signs of bad deliverability like low open rates, low reply rates, high number
of bounces.
Some people launch their campaigns and completely forget about them for a few days or even
weeks, which means that any issues will go unnoticed and your domains/accounts could end up
ruining their sending reputation.
The best way to approach this is to assign a 30-minute slot in your calendar every day where
you take your time and go through your campaigns to identify any issues with your results,
deliverability and overall account health.
Testing Different Copies
Usually the first few copies you write are not going to be the best performers. On top of that, you
should keep testing different copies even if your campaigns are working super well.
This means that copywriting is a constant process of testing and reiterating.
A quote from our copywriting framework document:
For some offers we found a working campaign after 3 tries, for others it took 3 months and 40
campaigns.
You need to get into the habit of testing new things daily and weekly. When people ask me how
many campaigns do you usually create, my answer is: “As many as it takes”.
How to succeed with our copywriting framework
1. Create a 15 or 30 minute Copywriting calendar event for every morning.
2. When you’re first starting out with a new client or for yourself, create at least 4 different
campaigns in Instantly each with a different strategy from this guide.
3. Create a new campaign daily in Instantly with a different angle or a strategy from this guide.
4. Keep testing new angles until you find a winning combo and double down on that.
5. Keep testing new angles and strategies next to your winners because every strategy will get
saturated and stop working at some point.
Instantly - How We Get 400+ Replies Monthly With Our Cold Email Copywriting Framework
Testing Different Leads
Like with everything - the goal is to get into a habit of testing different angles and databases
weekly because if you’re starting off fresh you won’t know what works.
Depending on your offer and goals you can test different job titles, different locations, different
company sizes, different niches, different stages of funding. The possibilities are basically
endless.
Sometimes it works right away, other times you need to test 10+ different databases and target
groups.
If you’re getting results with a specific lead database - double down on that and export all
the leads possible.
If you’re not getting results with a specific lead source - try a different one.
Read more about lead mining and verifying in our guide:
Bonus: Become A Cold Email Expert 👨‍🚀
Thanks for reading - hopefully you found a bunch of methods to inspire your cold email
copywriting. Feel free to reach out on Twitter or via Instantly’s Live Chat if you have any
suggestions.
If you want to take your cold email to the next level - here is more content we’ve created on
Cold Emailing.
1. Instantly Cold Email Quickstart Guide
2. Instantly Youtube Channel
3. Instantly Blog
4. Cold Email Masterclass (Facebook Group)

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Running email campaigns 👨‍💻

Troubleshooting, Testing & Optimizing 👷‍♂️

Bonus: Become A Cold Email Expert

1. Buying domains and creating email accounts.

Let’s get into it.

Here’s a general guideline:

Total required emails per day / 50 = Number of needed email accounts

Here’s 3 examples of how you can approach this:

The most popular domain providers are:

DMARC stands for “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance”. A

How to set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC?

Here’s how to set it up:

1. Go into your domain settings at your domain provider.

1. Setting up custom tracking domain with GoDaddy

In this section we will cover:

1. Email account warmup

Let’s get right to it.

How does warmup work and why is it important?

Warmup works by mimicking human conversations between email accounts.

Here’s what a typical warmup email looks like:

Increase per day - 1

Advanced Warmup Settings

How to properly warm up your sending accounts?

Instantly Cold Email Lead Mining Masterclass by Instantly.ai

The 2 most important things regarding leads are

How to Use Spintax in Instantly

This is what a spintax looks like and how it should be formatted:

Why is Spintax necessary?

A real life example of using copy with Spintax:

Scaling campaigns from scratch

In a simplified manner, you can approach it like the following example.

Day 1 - 5 emails per day

To summarize the main things to keep in mind are:

Common Deliverability Problems

Open rates are slightly low (30-50%):

On top of that we recommend changing up and testing different subject lines.

Some of the best performing subject lines are:

{{firstName}} - quick question

Thought you’d like this {{first name}}

Question about {{companyName}}

Weird question {{firstName}}?

Can you help {{firstName}}?

Open rates are very low (<30%):

Open rates are good, but reply rate is bad:

Other Deliverability Problems

❌ Email accounts not set up properly

❌ Bad subject lines

❌ Email account sending too many emails

❌ Using Spam words

❌ Non personalized Email

❌ Unverified Lead List

❌ Using Images in your Copy

❌ Using Links in your copy

❌ Not using a custom tracking domain

You can check blacklist status on third-party services like https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx

❌ Sending to a generic email