Cold Mailing in 2025

Did you know that up to 60% of cold email messages never reach the recipient's inbox?

From this post, you will learn how to ensure delivery to the recipient's inbox at a level of >95% and receive specific instructions on what and how to prepare to give your campaign the best chance of success.

In the article, you will find answers to questions:

• Where to start to carry out cold mailing?
• How to prepare the sending infrastructure for cold mailing?
• How to plan message sending in the campaign?
• How to define the target group for the cold email campaign?
• How to find contacts for the designated target group?
• How to create a good message?
• How to prepare a database for sending?
• How to set up a campaign in the sending tool?

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What do I need to know to start?

Start by preparing a generalized list of tasks to be performed:

• Prepare mailboxes from which you will conduct sending - the sending infrastructure,
• Plan the sending schedule according to the campaign assumptions,
• Define your target group,
• Define the “Value Proposition” and “Relevancy” for this group,
• Define sources for obtaining contact data for the designated group,
• Create a good message,
• Define personalization elements for each prospect,
• Prepare a database for sending,
• Set up the campaign in the automated sending tool,
• Test the campaign assumptions and optimize the campaign,
• Summarize the campaign's effectiveness and draw conclusions.

How to prepare the sending infrastructure?

The sending infrastructure is the foundation of the campaign. Remember that one of your campaign's effectiveness parameters is getting your message to the recipient's inbox in the inbox folder, and this is secured by a well-prepared sending infrastructure.

Domain

In cold mailing, ALWAYS use a substitute domain. 

If your main domain is xyz.com, purchase a substitute domain named xyz.net, .co, .org, or use another variant of your domain name. Remember that tagging as SPAM can occur at the level of the mailbox, domain, and IP address from which the sending is conducted. Using your main domain for automated outbound purposes may expose it to being flagged as SPAM by systems monitoring the number of messages sent, their nature and repetition, the number of responses obtained, and the correctness of the addresses to which you send. Improperly conducting a cold email campaign can cause all messages sent by your organization to be marked as SPAM.

DNS Records: SPF, DKIM, DMARC

When you purchase a new domain for cold mailing purposes, you will need to set DNS records.

• SPF Record states that a server with a specified IP can use our domain for sending purposes. If this record is not present, a given server could use our domain without our knowledge and consent, causing our communication to be marked as SPAM from an unauthorized source.
• DKIM Record is the “key” to sent messages. Each sent message contains encrypted information that can only be decrypted by the information contained in the DKIM record. If the key matches the given information, it means that the sender is the owner of the domain from which the sending is conducted.
• DMARC Record is an additional step in authenticating sent messages and an instruction that informs what to do when a specific event occurs during sending. If the message passed verification and reached the recipient's inbox, the protocol's work ends here, but if the message did not pass verification, the mail may be blocked, the message may go to spam, or the message may go to the sender's inbox. In such events, the mailbox owner will receive a report on the event of using their domain and will be able to react appropriately, for example, when someone impersonates their email address.

How many mailboxes do I need?

It depends on how many addresses you want to send a certain number of messages to in a given time interval.

The most important metric to follow is not exceeding 50 messages sent per day per mailbox.

REMEMBER, an alias is not a separate mailbox.

If you send 3 email messages to each prospect on your list, one mailbox will be enough to contact a maximum of ~16 people per day, which in 4 full weeks of campaign operation gives you 320 people possible to contact. If you send 4 messages to each prospect, you can contact ~13 people per day because at the peak sending moment, the system will send 4 * 13 = 52 messages per day.

It can be simply said that one mailbox is enough to sensibly contact about 300 people per month.

How many domains do I need?

Depending on the designated number of mailboxes, I recommend having a maximum of 4 mailboxes on one domain.

How to plan cold email sending?

You need to consider several variables:

• Campaign start day,
• Number of mailboxes,
• Number of messages in the longest sending sequence,
• Number of email addresses in the campaign,
• Number of sending days,
• Number of days needed to send all messages to one prospect,
• Number of break days due to holidays, work breaks, etc.,
• Campaign end day.

To answer specific questions related to the sending schedule, you need to know data about at least a few of these variables. 

For example:

How many mailboxes do I need if I want to contact 1000 people starting the campaign in 30 days on a Monday and finish it in a maximum of 10 days by sending a maximum of 3 messages to each person over 5 days. There are no pauses during sending due to, e.g., holidays.

The answer is: 12 is enough, and 13 will be a safe amount.

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How to define the target group?

Give industry context

If you think your services or products are very generalized because, for example, you can do marketing in any industry, try to think about how you can help a law firm, a manufacturing plant, and a software house. 

I bet the set of services will differ significantly.

Who will the IT company come to? 

To a company that says:

• I am a marketing agency,

or

• I am a marketing agency specializing in IT

Size matters

Although problems in companies of different sizes are similar, their scale, the possibility of implementing a solution, and the speed of action are not. In smaller companies, the problem is often the budget, in larger ones, the complexity of action and required experience. Choose your group accordingly and consider whether putting companies with 11-50 employees and 200-1000 in one basket is sensible and whether the value and message to them should be the same.

Location

Your market is not Europe, but the countries or ethnic groups inhabiting it.

Country to country, language to language, society to society - we differ and look at the world differently.

In Europe, for example, we can find common features for countries in the DACH region, for the Baltic countries, i.e., Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, for the Scandinavian countries, etc. Before you start looking for people to contact, think about the characteristic features of the language of a given community. For example, Project Manager in different European languages sounds like this: Projektijuht, Responsabile del progetto, Projektleder, Gerente de proyecto, Projektmanager, Projektipäällikkö. I will also save you a lot of time and energy by saying that when you search for companies and specific positions by keywords in the language of a given country, the number of records found in some industries will increase by 30-40%, but not only the language is important. The way of being, character, communication. 

For example:

If you contact Mateusz Sekta from Poland, you will write to him:

• Dear Mr. Mateusz,
• Good morning Mr. Mateusz,
• Hey Mateusz,

If you contact Mateusz Sekta from Germany, you will write to him:

• Sehr geehrter Herr Sekta,

And this is important because it affects the conversion from the campaign or the sentiment of the response from country to country. A simple change from first name to last name conditioned by culture.

Location also matters from the perspective of contact time. A production hall director from Texas or Germany will probably not be happy with a message received in the middle of the night.

Case study

One of the simplest ways to define a target group is to analyze your old clients and projects for them. Consider whether you can find model-like clients. Consider evaluation criteria such as: industry, location, company size, 

What group to work on at the beginning

Choose the first contact group in such a way that it is as small as possible. For example, 500-1000 companies, in which there will be an adequate number of decision-makers for whom email addresses will be found. This is also an approach that allows validating a thesis on a small group, which can always be scaled instead of unnecessarily exploiting our target group with unnecessary communication. If something works, replicate it, if not, draw conclusions and “plow”.

The proposed sample size is not insignificant. Having a group of about 1000 companies, you probably won't find a person in all companies in a specific group of positions you're looking for, which gives a conversion from company to found decision-maker persona in this company ~60-80%. 

• But how, after all, you can always contact someone else in this company. 
• Sure, but will it be the same target group, the same needs, the same communication language. Probably not. An administration employee will have different needs than a salesperson.

Assuming the conversion will be lower (60%), your database will contain ~600 people, and you will need to find email addresses for them. The average conversion from found people to found, verified, corporate, personal email addresses for them is ~70%, which gives us a group prepared to contact about 420 people.

How to find contacts?

I will divide this list into three levels of advancement.

Contact sources for beginners

For beginners, Sales Navigator or similar tools that also rely on LinkedIn-based data will suffice. You will find a powerful database of people and companies there, relatively organized. The ease of this database comes from the coupling of people with companies. You know who works where. The biggest challenge is processing the amount of data and exporting it in a sensible form from the tool.

Contact sources for the initiated

This is any data list you find online by entering, for example, the phrase: list of startups in the agrarian industry in Germany or participating in an industry event and having access to the list of event participants. The challenge is to find a source of sensible, quality data, scrape it, and link the list of companies with the appropriate people. There are 2 options: manual or automatic scraping, and then searching for email addresses.

Contact sources for the advanced

Most countries maintain digitized company registers that categorize company data based on economic codes similar to PKD in Poland. Look for such registers, learn to use them and connect with them, and you will be among the top researchers in the world when it comes to finding specific companies. The challenge is the multitude of registers, but their data is relatively very organized and not often exploited by other companies because access is definitely more difficult. Also, registers of institutions of specific institutions associating organizations, for example, in the hotel or medical industry, are worth attention. The key in research is to use databases that are not exploited by others.

How to personalize the message?

Example sources of message personalization are:

• Current data on the project you can help with:some text
  • I saw that you are doing THIS and your goal is THIS. I have experience in this, maybe we can talk?
• Current data on interest in a specific:some text
  • I noticed that you are interested in THIS and THIS, I happen to be involved in THIS topic,
• Macro events and industry:some text
  • Recently, the European Union released such a document, it causes YOUR COMPANY to be forced to XYZ. I know that as THIS POSITION you will be responsible for THIS TOPIC…

How to prepare a database for sending?

The data structure is important from the perspective of later data description, their completeness in the CRM system for the information of other involved and further processing for recycling sales processes. 

My proposal for the structure of such data, which is always helpful for everyone involved in the sales process, is:

• Full Name,
• First Name,
• Last Name,
• Position,
• Email Address
• Company Name,
• Industry,
• Company Description,
• Company Size,
• Company LinkedIn,
• Person LinkedIn,
• Source of personal data acquisition,
• Campaign Name.

You can treat this list as columns for your sheet.

How to set up a campaign in the automated sending tool?

Remember to pay attention to when setting up a campaign:

• Number of people introduced to the sending sequence daily,
• Number of days after which each subsequent message is sent,
• Disabling message open tracking,
• Stopping the campaign when someone from the same domain responds on behalf of the contacted person,
• Checking the addition of the correct signature to the message where necessary,
• Setting the appropriate message sending time considering time zones,
• Formatting the message text,
• Checking the correctness of the message in A/B tests,
• Sending a test campaign to your email address,
• Checking the correctness of variable personalization elements in the campaign.