How to Prep Your Gmail Account for Cold Email

Cold email is a difficult nut to crack because there is so much that can go wrong. Fortunately, that means there is also a ton that can go right.

I’m sure you’ve heard people talk about closing millions of dollars via cold email but what they haven’t shared is the time it took for them to get there. All the testing, failed campaigns, and ultimately tough learning experience they had to get passed.

The number one problem we see is that emails are not landing in the inbox and instead, landing in the spam folder. This is easily avoidable so we’re going to share three tactics that we use here at LeadLoft to warm up our team’s emails and increase our deliverability. When done right, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get 80%+ open rates.

Let’s get into it!

Method #1) Use an Email Warming Tool

Email warming tools are a relatively new product but they’ve been popping up all over the place. With a quick google search you’ll have no problem finding 10 great email warming products but what are they and how do they work?

How do email warming tools work?

Email warming tools use a network of emails that communicate with each other automatically. You can think of this as robots talking to each other and when you sign up, your email joins the crowd and the fake email threads.

If any of your emails land in the spam folder, the service will flag this, and one of the emails in the network will mark your email “not spam” and even mark it as “important”. After enough emails have been marked “important” and “not spam”, you’ll begin to land in the primary inbox and this leads to infinitely better open and reply rates for your cold email campaigns.

Which email warming service do we recommend?

We’ve tested a ton of the email warming services on the market but the one we love the most is WarmBox. It’s well designed, easy to use, and extremely affordable.

If you’re looking to learn about all of the email warming services on the market, I recommend checking out our article on the best cold email warming services.

Method #2) Subscribed to Newsletters (New Emails)

If you’re creating new emails to send cold email campaigns, we recommend that you create a lot of activity in the inbox. Creating activity makes the email feel real and tells email services like Gmail and Outlook that the email is managed by a real person not a spammer.

How to do this?

It’s actually extremely easy. You can simply navigate to a few sites, subscribe to their newsletters and voila! Your email now seems more real and has more natural activity.

Here are some newsletters you can subscribe to:

Method #3) Start Slow & Scale Slow

The last on the list and arguably one of the most important methods is to start slow and scale slow. Email services know what is normal and abnormal email activity and if you jump from sending 0 emails per day to sending 200, you’re going to be flagged.

How should I scale my cold email campaigns?

There’s no standard method to scaling cold email campaigns but a good rule of thumb is the slower the better.

If you’re looking for a framework to replicate, start by sending out 5 emails per day for the first two weeks and scale by 5 additional emails for each week following until you reach 30-40 per day. This is a relatively slow process but again, safer is better. Especially, when you realize how valuable cold email can be if you get it right.

Optimize Email Copy While you Scale

While you’re scaling your cold email campaign, we recommend taking this time to optimize your email copy. Set up a few campaigns with different subject lines and email copy then test which performs best. If you need some help with this, we went in depth on how to write cold emails here.

If you are diligent about optimizing your email copy, you’ll have a finely tuned cold email campaign by the time you begin sending volume.

Wrapping Up

Cold email is wildly valuable but 90% of companies fail to properly prepare their emails. If you follow the above step, I guarantee you that you’ll have more successful cold emails than you could have ever imagined.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for more articles like this one, I recommend checking out our cold email deliverability checklist and if you're looking for an amazing cold email platform, checkout LeadLoft, we’d love to help out where we can.