THE ROLE OF PERSONALIZATION IN COLD EMAIL: REPLYIFY'S APPROACH AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Awesome. Glad to be here, Harshit. Let’s do it.

Yeah, it’s boring.

I started on Wall Street answering a Craigslist ad, not real Wall Street where I was recruited from a top Ivy League school. I moved to New York with my girlfriend and now wife and needed a job. There was a stockbroker listing in the city and I applied and took it and studied for series seven and 63 and,

Kind of cut my teeth as a stockbroker, like coming up from nothing, I was making 500 calls a day, connecting with 50, executives pitching five of them and trying to close one account. Like it was a grind. So I moved from finance and kind of realized that I didn’t want to be in finance the rest of my life and building a book of business in New York when ultimately I wanted to have a family and kind of move.

So I got into tech started at, I worked at a couple of different startups there ultimately ended up at one called media. I was there for two years before we were acquired by Yahoo and then worked at Yahoo for the next couple of years building out business development and growth markets outside of the US.

So I was in, India, Hong Kong, London, Singapore Buenos Aires, all over the world, setting up ad exchanges and, doing sales and business development for Yahoo at that time. Oops. Left there in 2010 started my first startup, pivoted and went back and forth, and, ultimately when we closed down that startup that we were working on for a couple of years that didn’t go anywhere.

That’s what started me on the path for what turned out to be replyify. So the first thing that we built, the day after closing down startup number one was a Chrome plugin for LinkedIn for building prospect lists and getting email addresses from LinkedIn.

So the inspiration for creating replyify. It came from that first business that worked. It’s called cellhack. com. It’s still out there in the world. The list-building email verification space has been so over-commoditized and just, just this race to the bottom that, we saw the writing on the wall a couple of years ago and we built Replyify.

As a hedge against that, as a hedge against this, commoditization of the list building and email address market, we said, okay, we have, all these clients and people who were finding emails and building prospect lists, what do they do after they get the emails? We built Replyify to be, just simple to use cold email automation platform.

And the genesis of why we built it was, moving our cell hack business over to reply if I, and then we were our first customer we’ve always been our first customer. And when I say we, my CO-Founder and CTO, like we like building solutions for ourselves first, and then, really using and dogfooding.

Our products and services are what kind of help us deliver a consistent product to market. That’s brilliant.

Yeah. So it’s, some folks come to us and they’re familiar with cold email, they’ve been doing it for a while and they’re just looking for a better, faster easier-to-use option.

The other half of the folks who find us and you’d be surprised even today. It’s just folks who’ve had experience, either, only using MailChimp. And never, having previously used a cold email platform or they’re using a wonky mail merge set up on there, on their Office 365 or G suite.

And they’re looking to upgrade. So a lot of folks find us, like I said, coming in their only experience with email is using something like MailChimp to send out their newsletters. They’ve never done outreach. So for us, like the 1st thing that we’d want to clarify. And I guess for the people listening here.

If you have not used a dedicated kind of cold email automation platform, and all, is MailChimp or Marketo or Constant Contact or these there’s a big difference, right? So the biggest difference is a dedicated cold email platform like Replyify, we connect directly to your email account.

Using Oh, off right 1 click connect, connect your Gmail, connect your Office 365. We don’t want to store your passwords. You don’t have to do it right. Google Microsoft has this kind of 1 click connector. So you come in, connect your email account and Replyify sends the emails from your email account.

Okay, so the sent emails that go out through replyify, you can see them in the sent folder on your, Gmail or Outlook for the folks coming from MailChimp who might not have had experience with that MailChimp does not send emails directly from your email account. The emails that MailChimp sends, come from their IP addresses.

It may look and feel like it’s coming from you. It’s not from a deliverability standpoint. Then, your recipients, whoever you’re emailing, they’re going to be using Gmail or Microsoft or GoDaddy or whatever as their email host. Those email hosts, when they see these emails coming in from MailChimp or Constant Contact or whatever just look at your inbox so that those emails get classified.

As, a newsletter or promotion, they get put in the other inbox. Okay. Because they’re not coming directly from you. So replyify sends these emails directly from you. They look and feel like they’re coming from you. And that helps to get you inboxed at a much higher rate, especially when sending out to a list of prospects that you may not have ever engaged with.

So go. I guess going back to your original question, like what sets us apart? Anybody offering cold email services, let you connect your email address. They let you create a campaign or a sequence of emails, and those emails are separated by wait periods. They, everyone tracks open rates and clicks and has a dashboard so you can see what’s going on and upload.

That’s all basic stuff. Where we set ourselves apart. For Replyify, our number one goal is making sure that the emails that go out never look automated, right? They don’t look like any sort of machine had any sort of interaction with sending the emails, little things, right?

Like the ability to change the time of the day that you want your emails to start sending based on the step of the campaign sequence. So your prospects, if they’re not getting back to you after the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd email, it’s not Oh, great. Here’s this Ryan. Do it again. He emails me every Wednesday at noon.

This is, obviously not it’s not him. So we try to simulate, this 1 to 1, very personalized communication. So having features and functionality built in to make sure that it is hyper-personalized that we are in boxing you at a high rate. That you can make these little tweaks that might not seem like a big deal on the front end, but to your recipient.

And to your recipient’s mail server, it’s signaling that, hey, this isn’t just, some random bot behind the scenes, robo blasting these emails out.

Yeah, sure. So When we talk about, like these systems, like looking at Google and we’ll just focus on Google, like Microsoft has similar kind of expectations and information that they share. But let’s focus on Google for a second. So Google has this big black box.

And there are certain rules that you need to operate within, right? And they will give senders, right? So whether it’s third-party platforms like me or whether it’s a sender like you, for example, they will give you and your organization kind of guidance on what you should be doing to operate.

within their rules, right? And within their confines. And, so from a personalization perspective, I don’t have a hard fast percentage 30 percent of your email needs to be. Different on a contact-by-contact basis meaning from one to the other I’ve seen that backfire, especially when you try to use a GPT service or add some sort of generative AI where all of these systems are now with the rise of AI just in the last year or so these systems are also looking at how do we detect Generative AI.

And if we can detect that a sender is using AI, that just discounts any of the good things that they would have already been doing. Had they not tried to hyper-personalize it or get too cute with it. Here’s what I’ve seen work well. Okay. And It depends on what your workflow and your use cases.

Okay, so going to the numbers, if you need to, let’s say if you need to generate five meetings per week, okay, let’s say it takes you 500 emails to generate five meetings. Okay. So you have your number every week. You need to send 500 emails to get five meetings. Let’s and we’ll call that business.

A needs to follow that. Let’s say business B doesn’t have the same metrics, different offerings, or different, prospect segments. They’re selling into a different industry, higher sales. So they need, they might need 5,000 emails to get five meetings. Okay. So when you’re talking about personalization, there are things that you can do that are going to work for some businesses because their unit economics in terms of how many people they need to reach out to might be a lot less than somebody who might need to send a lot higher volume.

So what we’ve seen work well is when you’re setting up a campaign on replyify, we have two different types of emails. We have a manual email and an automated email, and they can be interchanged throughout the campaign sequence. So if you’re looking at email one, if you’re sending out emails to let’s say, a smaller audience, but you want to make sure that you’re putting your best foot forward, you can use a manual email as email number one.

So basically, what happens is that when you set your campaign live, let’s say you upload 100 contacts. You’ll have 100 to-do items inside of replyify that you’ll be able to go in. You’ll have, sentences 2, 3, 4, and 5 will be preloaded and pre-filled and we’ll say it’s going to be the same for basically everyone, but the manual email allows you to go in and add a custom connection statement.

Okay, if you want to go check out that person’s Twitter feed or look at their LinkedIn or reference a recent earnings call, right? So you can physically type it into the replyify UI once you push send. Then the rest of your campaign takes over, right? So five days later, follow-up number one will go out.

That can be automated. Seven days after that follow-up two goes out that can be automated. Let’s say two weeks after that, you want to have a manual email. You want one more chance to put your best foot forward. Like that’s all. So you can go between this full automation, this, or the semi-automation depending on your business practice.

Outside of using these manual emails, you can also use you can fill out your connection statement or interesting kind of thing to reference in your contact list before you upload your leads, you just create a new column type of sentence or put, a phrase or something, and then you can use our variables to automatically insert that text directly into your email Content customized links, right?

If you’re the type of company who have clients who we have an insurance agent that, that comes to mind who they create a customized video for every person they reach out to, they use some AI and kind of automation on the backend to customize all these different videos.

But what they end up with is like a hundred different unique links. For each of their hundred contacts, and you can when you upload that data file into replyify, we’ve got a way to add a custom link for each contact and then you can personalize the words that are hyperlinked there.

We’re not hosting the videos. Typically if you’re doing something like this, these videos are getting hosted, on AWS or Dropbox, or if you’re using a third-party company, they’ll just kick out the links we provide as a way, to add this personalization.

So what I try to stay away from and by default, like what we are experimenting with right now and have been for the last year, but haven’t found something that’s had more upside than potential risk has been using spin taxing and putting in these different ways of saying different things.

We’re seeing that some of these AIs that might have worked like 2 years ago before chat GPT was on folks’ radars are really like, not helping right now. They’re getting caught in just a very rudimentary decision process that we can only assume Google Microsoft or running your email content through some sort of AI detection.

And we’re seeing that using spin taxing is actually getting emails flagged, or at least by way of their deliverability going down, looking at their opens and clicks compared to sending very much the same content to your prospects, just customizing their first name.

I believe that if you just solely rely on generative AI content, Getting auto-populated on the backend and automatically inserted without your review causes more harm than it does good. So what I would rather see is creating, so replyify, if I, you can create. A, B, C, D, E, F, and G versions of your different campaigns.

And you can start that from the onset. So if you have, let’s say, an A, a B, and a C version of your campaign I would rather see our clients go in, and rather than rely on a, GPT system to, spin tax your first version, I’d rather just see you use your industry knowledge and your personality.

And like you do the rewrite. And now you have three different versions of email one three different versions of email two and three different versions of email three. If you want with some slight differences, but you’re not risking saying something to the effect of being too long-winded being overly like AI and you know how AI is when you use it, like you can’t, it just, it sounds cheesy.

It sounds corny. It’s too easy to pick up on. So I’d rather see people just put their best foot forward. I think In customizing, either using a manual email or having a couple of different versions of each template for each step. And that’s one of the services that we offer at replyify. So all of our new clients we’re selective about who we work with, right?

And then we offer all of them before they go live with the campaign, like we’re happy to review them, and your campaigns are not getting reviewed and blind by software. They’re also not getting reviewed by, a recent college grad who’s on their 2nd or 3rd job out of school and hasn’t been in the space.

You’re getting the people who’ve built the platform who are involved in everything. And, that adds to that both helps. Personalization from a business standpoint, helps us to look at your content and make sure that you’re not, sending spam or sending something that ultimately could, back or hurt the rest of our senders because you’re not following, the spam rules and regulations and the best practices that, that like Google gives you, for example.

Yeah.

Yeah. So don’t give up too early. Don’t prematurely, shoot yourself in the foot by bowing out and saying, Hey, it looks like you’re busy and I’m just going to leave you alone because it’s hard to come back from that and then start back up with another five emails.

So one of the things that, that we build in a reply, if I like out of the beginning, like right from the gates was the ability to edit live campaigns. Okay. What does that do? And nobody allows that, like editing live campaigns. If you, look at other platforms out there, once you set up a campaign and set it live, it is like it’s locked up.

So trying to add additional email steps to a a five-step campaign. Most of the time you’re creating a new campaign and then you’re moving contacts over and now you’ve got to look at data in between two campaigns. So right out of the gates. We made it so that replyify could edit live campaigns and add additional steps.

How does that help? At the onset for new clients, you don’t have to worry about going through this like paralysis by analysis, right? I’ve still got a guy it’s been 18 months and he keeps telling me that he needs another month, to send me a link to a Google doc, which has his email templates in it.

This dude just won’t write his emails. He just keeps kicking the can down the road because he doesn’t have them he doesn’t have this like perfect approach, so what we advise our clients is look, you don’t need the perfect, like 10-step email sequence, right? You just need three emails to start with.

Just write me three emails and make sure your third email isn’t saying, sounds like you’re busy. I’m going to leave you alone at this point. Write three emails. Here’s how I like to approach it. Okay, I like to in my first email, right? I’m going for three to five sentences. No more, no less.

I like short and sweet. If you have to explain something like link out to a blog post you wrote on it or attach a PDF document to it, don’t attach Word docs, Excel docs, or PowerPoints, Those are all susceptible to hacking. They’re vulnerable and Google, Microsoft, that’s like auto spam folder.

If you send out those open file extensions, like PDFs are fine links are okay. The way I like to do my emails, I do a quick hi, first name, Ryan here from replyify. We help companies like X, Y, and Z automate their sales and marketing. And then I’ll ask a question.

I won’t even ask for the meeting on the first one. I’ll just say who are you using to send out your cold emails? I’ll just ask them a question. I’ll get a lot of people to reply and they’ll be like, Oh, we’re sending them out with this company, maybe a competitor or we’re using MailChimp.

But I don’t say in my first email, I’m not saying, Hey, how’s your calendar? Look for five minutes for, a 15 15-minute call and demo later this week, I asked them a simple question sometimes in that first email, I will just ask a question, Hey, Harsh, who are who are you using for cold email?

Thanks, Ryan. That’s email one email to we have a feature called the bump, a bump option. So you turn the bump on for email to when you turn the bump on, that’s going to automatically keep email on the same thread as email one, right? So you don’t have to fake a reply. It’s just like going into your sent folder, finding an email that you sent to someone, and then hitting reply on that does the same thing.

We automatically keep your previous message. And the headers and timestamps, and then we keep that follow-up email on the same thread. So email 2 can have a little self-deprecation, You can see some of the effect of Hey Harsh, Ryan again from, and then you can be a little bit longer.

When did give a little bit more background you only asked one question in that first email, so I might follow up on that bumped email, maybe 3 to 5 days later? I’m going to keep them tight together. Okay. My 3rd email. If I’m not going to. So my 3rd email, I can start a new threat. I would just leave the bump off.

So like a new subject line, you want to make sure that you don’t have eight emails at the end of the day. They’re that are all in the same subject line in a big thread, right? That screams desperation at the same time. You want to balance that by showing people that, Hey, I’ve emailed you before. This is not the first time.

And you’ve ghosted me, right? So if I’m going to have, let’s say six steps in my email sequence. I’m going to have two to three threads in that sequence, right? And each thread is going to have its own, let’s call it, theme. Thread one, which is my initial kind of, you want to break the ice, right? I want to ask a simple question and a simple ask of them.

Thread number two, which is follow up three and follow up for, I might be giving out some more information. I might be letting them know that we work with people who are similar to them and that we handle deliverability better than any other cold email platform based on how we. We only work with certain clients, for example, email five and six on that separate thread might be like My last money shot, maybe I give them an offer.

Hey wanted to throw this out there. One month free, in exchange for that love 15 minutes to show you how it works or can, who else on your team can I send a trial invite to? So there’s different psychological motivators that you can play in and you can see with all this, how like

The paralysis by analysis can kick in. So people keep thinking like, gosh, I don’t know what my offer is going to be. I don’t know how to do this. So we say, great, just get to three emails. Just go live with something, and send real emails to someone. And you want to make sure that like the spacing between the emails,, there’s no hard, fast rule for it.

Just make sure it fits with the content of what you’re sending these people, make sure that you’re not putting this like hard press on where you’re sending them like six emails in 14 days, right? I like to go like tight together one and two, a little bit tighter together.

Then I like to give them a little break. And then come back with three and four, maybe a little tighter together. Just make sure that whatever you’re sending has a cadence to it. And if you notice that you’re starting to annoy people, because your emails are too close together, or they’re not right, you can always make those edits and increase or decrease the time between the emails, and just, like I said, this is like a this is a living experiment and that’s how you should be approaching cold email. But you got to get started somewhere and you got to get started with something. We’ve got more on our blog. We’re happy anyone listening.

We want you to come to our site and ask questions in the chat. We’ll get back to you, but everyone’s different. I would just think about it in terms of the emails that you get as a recipient. And looking at the way cold people email you and then thinking about who your recipient is and just being natural with it and not overly aggressive.

Yeah. So it starts with the list-building phase for me, even one step before the list-building. You got to figure out like What type of person are you?

What kind of sales executive are you or account executive, or even for the OG entrepreneurs out there who are like doing your kind of self hustling, like you got to figure out like what kind of organization are you going to be? Are you going to keep doing this?

Dogmatic process that has been like either handed down or something that you contrived as like your first version of what is our target market, right? I would rather see you fine if you got to stick in that lane, do that. But I also want to see you experimenting. And looking for different ways of creating different personas. So all too often I see people coming in and they’re like, yeah, like our target customer is, very broad, right? It’s a VP at a technology company, right? And, they don’t have industries defined, right?

They don’t have company sizes split off. So I like to build my lists and build my prospect segments in a very granular way, right? So I like to come up with what these segments are first. I like to build the list for these micro-segments. I like to have one campaign for each micro-segment.

Okay, and that campaign can be duplicated off of your master campaign. You can easily duplicate and then make these tweaks. But I like to have a targeted message for a very granular segment of prospects, right? Based on industry, company size, location, And then once you have, that list building knocked out, then you’re writing kind of very specific campaigns for these people.

So that’s on like the qualitative side, right? And just making sure that you’ve got. You know that you are experimenting that you are thinking outside the box that you’re running a search on LinkedIn for these prospects, and then you’re adding a search criteria for maybe the group that they’re in, right?

Maybe you guys are in the same group, and maybe you want to reference that, or maybe you want to, maybe you build a list for the college university you went to, right? And maybe you want to reference that in the campaign. So there are a lot of different ways of getting your prospecting campaign.

Dialed in and then your content kind of aligned up. That’s the qualitative side, the quantitative component to this, like these are things, or the technical component to this, like these are things that Google. And Microsoft tells you to do it, it’s like having your SPF in a place like two years ago, I would say 20 percent of people had an SPF record today.

I’d say that 80 percent of the people that I come into contact with have an SPF record set up. That’s the sender policy framework, right? It’s a, it’s a text record you add to your DNS or wherever your email is hosted. It tells Google and Microsoft. If both if they’re your email provider, or if they’re the provider for your recipient, it tells them that you are who you say you are, right?

It’s like going through customs at border control without a passport, not having one. It’s immediate. It’s an immediate fail. If you don’t have an SPF record associated with your email domain, that’s an immediate fail. And you need to change that. Now, right? Google just came out with some guidance over the summer and you’re going to see this in the next couple of months, starting in February 2024, Google has changed its approach and its requirements for senders, right?

And they are upping the bar and increasing the scrutiny of cold outbound emails. So for the senders of cold emails, you now need to have DKIM and domain key identifiers. So you have to have DKIM and SPF in place and we’ll help you if you have any questions. But Bimi is like this new verification method, which verifies that like verifies your logo and that like you’re sending from the company and you have permission.

It’s just an extra verification. So Google on there, we should probably link to this in the show notes. I know you already have this because we talked about this last week, but we’ll make sure that we link in the show notes with basically Google telling you what they expect of you and what they want you to do.

And I would say, it’s a great exercise coming into the start of the year to work through. Just like Google tells SEO experts here, we just made a big update. Here’s what we’re looking at. They’re now giving a lot better guidance than they have historically for email senders.

So the bar is going up in terms of the requirements, but they’re also being a lot more transparent in terms of what they’re looking for.

So I advise both right? And here’s one workflow, that works well for us. So if you’re thinking about it, let’s break this up. Let’s at least talk like cold prospects right now, people you’ve never engaged with, okay, number one goal with someone that you’ve never engaged with before.

Your number one goal is getting into their inbox, right? Not getting caught in the spam folder. Ideally not get routed to the promotions folder or the other inbox. But that’s an improvement from being in the spam folder. So ideally you want to land in the inbox. So for me and from my experience and personally, what I do, at least when the scale allows it, there are times when I just can’t send a manual email and personalize it. Just I’m too busy, right? Sending out a manual email that has no links, no pictures, no images, just a very simple manual email from your Gmail or Outlook. That is the easiest way to land in the inbox 90 percent of the time.

If you send an email manually from your Gmail, you will land in the other person’s inbox at an incredibly high rate. Okay, so if you’re deploying that tactic we have a feature built in that works with that type of a tactic. So if you’re sending out a manual email from your Gmail, let’s say on replyify, we call it a follow-up campaign.

On replyify, you’re going to have a campaign of emails. Let’s say it’s five emails. Okay, the first email is going to have the bump turned on because we’re going to, we’re following up on our manual email sent. Outside of reply. If the way that we add that contact to the campaign is with the campaign’s BCC email address.

So every campaign is going to have a unique BCC email address. I like to save that email address as a contact in Gmail. Then when I manually email someone from my, Google Workspace account, or Gmail, I go to BC and the BCC field. I’m going to add that campaign’s BCC email address so when I push send.

Email’s going to go out, it’s going to get delivered to the primary inbox. I’m there, right? That’s the recipient’s mail server, let me in, right? I’m now there. And unless that person marks me as spam or moves me, my automated follow-ups or follow-ups that are coming are now grandfathered in, right?

I’ve already been in the inbox. So the chances of me getting back to the inbox are at a much higher rate. And if I just started with an automated email for email one, that’s got a ton of links and images and trying to overfluff it I’d rather go simple and just dead straight, get in the inbox and that’s like your wedge, right?

That’s your way in. And then from there you can expand and let the automation take over. Like that works well. It does have a manual component. The next step would be using our manual email to like inside of replyify to add some more personalization and have a semi-automated campaign.

And then the easiest to do and probably what most people just start with is going to be full on, everything’s automated. It’s customized for that person with their name and maybe some variables referencing their company or their job title or whatnot. And on that spectrum, you got to find like, what works best for you, but certainly manual is going to be.

That wedge to getting it into the inbox better than anything else. That’s great.

Yeah. So reporting comes in two different flavors. And I’m trying to do I love kind of sharing experience here. And just for folks, if you’re still with us and listening, thank you. I’m doing my best to like, not make this a big commercial about reply. If I like do your research.

There are different options out there, I can speak to these different workflows and from replyify perspective. When we’re looking at reporting, we see two different. Two different reporting needs, right? The first is going to be from the team reporting, right?

So let’s say it’s the VP of sales or it’s the head of sales operations or let’s say you’re an agency, right? And you’re a Facebook AD agency, or you’re an SEO agency or you’re an outbound B2B agency, whatever, and you have clients. So replyify has a ridiculous team functionality.

So we make it simple for you to manage a team. Or multiple teams of people, right? You can pay for their licenses or you can require them to pay for their own. So a ton of customization and flexibility there, but we make it so that you don’t have to log log ind login to every person’s account to get access to it.

So with one click, You can jump in and out of all of your team members’ accounts if they’ve granted you permissions maybe someone’s on holiday and you need to start a campaign or run a report or add contacts or something. So we make it easy for, executives to have visibility across their entire team to see what kind of activities taking place.

Make it easy for that team to be managed and, more, looking for some of those KPIs, like what’s my open rate? What’s my click rate? How many contacts are in the queue and haven’t been activated? Are there none in the queue? That means I have to go back in and find more contacts.

So the team management component to replyify is awesome. We’ve built it for a couple of different agencies. One of our agencies, sold recently for seven figures. It’s just like the team functionality is awesome on a day-to-day basis, right? So you, as an individual operator, as an account exec, as a business owner, who’s doing your outreach, I go back and forth on my recommendation here.

Okay. So part of me wants to say, replyify is a passive platform or you cold email platform. The whole point of it. For most people, it’s an efficiency tool, right? You need a cold email platform because you sitting in front of your Gmail or Outlook and sending these emails one by one, and then going back in a week later and looking to see in your sent folder, who you emailed and who replied.

And who do you need to follow up with? All that stuff’s crazy. It’s a huge waste of time. Mail merges don’t give it to you. You need something that’s going to have a cumulative open rate, and click rate. Daily volume as well as a kind of broken down on a step-by-step basis to see what’s my open rate for step one, what’s my open rate for step two, step three, step four, we’re looking at open rates and we’re saying, okay, if this is higher than this, or this is lower than that maybe my subject line needs changed.

And that’s a great indicator to go back in. Duplicate that campaign that campaign variant, create a B a C, or a D version, tweak the subject line, and let that run. And then, if you want to get in and you want to get into your analytics, now you’re comparing which one wins, right?

So maybe you kill the one that doesn’t win. You keep the one that wins. Maybe you do a test down the road. I don’t suggest getting, I don’t suggest spending too much time trying to rack your brain as to why your open rates are here and why your click rates are there. Granted, if you see big drops in what you’re used to seeing or over time if you’re seeing your open rate go down, that could be a signal that something’s up.

That could be a signal that there’s a domain reputation issue, right? It could just be, that you’re sending out too many links in your emails. Like you’ve changed your email content. It could be that, that people. Let’s say in a given period over the last two weeks have not interacted or engaged with your emails.

Positively, meaning they opened or clicked or forwarded or replied that they haven’t done these positive actions as much as a cohort of people who’ve interacted with your emails a month ago have, right? So there are so many things at play, like part of it is don’t look at the data, don’t focus on the opens and clicks because a lot of those are bots.

[It’s security software, a lot of the opens and clicks that you’re getting, they’re false positives or false negatives, right? It’s the recipient’s kind of security software going through and making sure that your click redirects to a page that’s SSL, right? And not going to like a malware site.

So there, there are so many things that play. Like part of me is just saying look. Focus on just topping off your campaigns with new contacts. And as long as you’re continuing to send your emails and your account isn’t getting shut down daily. Like you’re not hitting your limits.

Google’s not saying, Whoa, you’ve hit your daily limit. You’re done sending emails. Part of me is in the camp of just saying forget the stats, just keep finding more contacts, and keep emailing people because it’s working, your email is still working. It’s still getting delivered.

Yeah. Your open rate might be down a bit, but like you can’t control that. You don’t always have control over it. And if you spend your time trying to needle in and figure out every single component you’re wasting time that you could have potentially been. running an experiment, right?

Running a different version of your campaign with fewer links or no images, right? And you might find that by doing that, you see a 30 percent increase in your open rating click rate. That’s going to tell you that, hey, my click rate is not down because of my sender reputation. It’s down because perhaps Google or Microsoft are putting more weight.

On too many links or too many images in your email. So if you just scale them back and make them more text-based. That’s your long-term play. Just like with SEO, right? All these, a search engine will push a change. You’ll have a bunch of pages whose traffic will drop because of certain things, and they’ll need to go back in, make some changes, read the documentation, follow the best practices, and just have your eye on the ball, which is like your KPI or what you’re focused on is different for everyone.

But for a lot of folks in cold email, it’s like getting the meeting booked. So you need to get more meetings booked, and if you’re open rates dropping, and you’re not getting as many meetings booked, the quickest way to fix that, as long as you’re still getting inbox, the quickest way to fix that is to find more contacts and get more contacts into your campaign.

Our default daily, and the training wheels are on with replyify to start. And I’ll tell you why we do this default daily is two 50 max to start, especially if you’re new to this in the show notes, we are going to link you out

To Google’s help documents on this. This is like new stuff that they just published. There are some interesting things in there that they will not give you specific numbers, except for saying anyone who sends more than five or any organization that sends more than 5, 000 emails is considered a bulk email sender, look, none of you on this call right now, no one’s sending out 5, 000 emails, right?

Like it’s not going to happen. Don’t even get that number in your head. 500 a day. I like it if you can get to 500, 750 is great. If you can have if you can build up to that number, and what Google explicitly says in their most recent guidance for email senders, is that

A) If you are a new sender, meaning you don’t have experience sending emails, you need to work up your volume. You need to ease into it. So if you’re thinking you’re going to come out of the gates with a brand new email domain for just for cold email or using your primary email, but you’ve never called email before, and you’re going to start sending out high volume with any sort of efficacy, that’s a fail right out of the gates.

You’re going to burn your email account because you’re going to fly too hard. So with replyify, we have a warmup feature, right? That does, that plays exactly along with Google script, which is going to warm up your email and it’s going to warm you up and increase your volume steadily over time until we get to that, like 350 to 450 to 550.

And then we’re going to let the higher you go, the longer you want to let that play out. As you ease into the next level, right? But Google explicitly calls out in their most recent guidance, how important it is for both new senders with new email accounts and for folks who haven’t done cold email at scale, how important it is to ramp up their volume and they also have to read between the lines because they also tell you that if you make a mistake, if you go too hard or too fast.

They tell you they’re going to penalize you for it. They don’t tell you to what degree or how, but you certainly don’t want to get on the bad side or in somebody’s you don’t want to go too hard, too fast. So having a patient approach to ramping up your email, it’s just part of the game.

And if you I’ll pause there in case you want to go and dig more or move on. No, that’s

This gets invited to share some knowledge and expertise with folks like you who might have an audience that we might not be engaging with daily.

We get a lot of referrals. We dog food, our tech. So we do participate in outbound. So we send cold emails. So reply is not like we don’t focus on the enterprise and, in the course of doing your research and finding, the perfect cold email platform for you, there are platforms out there that focus on the enterprise, right?

That’s just who they are, right? So they have big sales teams and big integrations and there are conference calls that are happening at your organization. Once it’s deployed, it’s a very long process. With us we run a much tighter organization here, right? So replyify was built initially for us, right?

For me, I was client number one. I’m still a daily customer, but we have functionalities based on our needs, right? and we have a very flexible and very experimental mindset. So when college football season comes around it’s here. But when playoff season comes around those 4. Colleges get into the final four of college football.

Like I’ll target my cold email outreach to the four schools that are there. My subject line will say something like Go Bucks or Roll Tide. And that gets engaged with, so like we do a lot more like bespoke stuff. We build courses, right? We have a seven-day cold email crash course.

It’s delivered by replyify. So we have a campaign that sends out one email a day. To folks who hit it, we have a landing page for it. We drive ads to it. It’s linked in all of our inbound, but we manage our client base very tightly. The biggest reason for that is we want to make sure that when you send a cold email with replyify, our fingerprint is on that email any cold email platform, their fingerprint is on your email.

Okay. So to a very small degree, but it’s still like the email providers can tell. And if you’re the type of platform. That works with everyone and doesn’t care, right? Just drops your, it drops your prices and you’ll take anything you can get to send from spammy Gmail accounts that are selling things in the cold email.

Those platforms inbox you at a much lower rate. Then a platform like replyify if we don’t work with everyone, if you’re not, if you’re sending spammy emails, or if you’re not following the guidelines, we do not renew your account. We do not allow you to send with us. The benefit there is it creates a safer environment for our clients to send in and it frees up more time for us to spend some of that extra time.

At no additional cost at the front end with our new clients to make sure that we’re helping them, take their four-paragraph cold email and turn that into four subsequent emails and help them with the copywriting and, we are invested in our client success and, we prefer working with folks who have a similar mindset to us and want to try new things and have a very simple, easy to use platform and that’s our main value prop.

Thank you so much. Cool. Thanks, everyone.

Thanks Harshit.