This blog post will give you all the information you need to run cold email marketing campaigns for your startup. We recommend specific software for domains, email accounts, mailwarming, sales intelligence tools, and sequencing providers
Follow the steps in this article and you'll be able to launch an effective email marketing strategy.
Hacked BD is a B2B lead generation agency. We run cold email marketing campaigns for clients across a range of different industries. Our clients are using the same tools and tactics that we outline in this post.
This article contains technical information. You'll need to set up several accounts along the way.
You can choose from many different B2B lead generation tactics for your product or service. B2B marketers need to be smart and choose the methods that will get them the best return on investment.
Hacked BD has a lot of experience running cold email. We know which types of companies it works well for, and which types of companies should focus on another channel.
The best clients that we work with fit the following criteria:
Hacked BD tends to avoid running cold email for agencies or services businesses. Many companies in this space have great long term customers, but it's still hard for them to stand out in a crowded market. Most agencies that offer design or PPC marketing are running a cold email strategy.
It isn't impossible to have success with cold email if you are in either of those categories. You should probably run the campaigns yourself instead of outsourcing. You will have more room to generate an ROI.
Outsourced B2B lead generation is alive and well in 2025. Companies like Hacked BD can grow your sales funnel for you so you can focus on advancing deals.
Consider outsourcing your business development to an agency if you can only manage sales leads
Setting up and running a cold email marketing strategy takes a lot of time. You will have to learn a number of best practices and new technologies.
The initial setup can be cumbersome (this guide will make it easier, though). List building and personalization requires time and energy.
AI can be a great tool to personalize messages but it still requires human review. The Hacked BD team manually reviews every single message before sending it. AI BDRs are improving, but aren't good enough to trust completely yet. They will sometimes produce strange or obviously non-human messaging.
If deliverability problems pop up, fixing them gets tough without expertise.
Hacked BD has been doing cold email marketing b2b lead generation for 5 years. We've partnered with clients across many industries. Our team has analyzed data from millions of emails, so we know what works and what doesn't. Request a consultation to see if we can help you grow your business.
The best way to start with cold email marketing for your startup is to start small and validate that it will work for you. You need to test your message with enough contacts to get a large enough sample size.
It doesn't make sense to send tens of thousands of emails right away. You could ruin your reputation and burn potential opportunities.
Hacked BD clients start with 4 domains and 12 email accounts (3 per domain). This allows us to target 2000 contacts per month sending 3 emails per contact. We would recommend starting with a similar volume.
You'll get a large enough sample size to determine if email marketing works without spending too much on software.
Once you see a positive ROI, you can work backward from your sales goals and build just the infrastructure you need.
The best way to determine how much volume you want to send at scale is to reverse engineer from your sales goals. Start wth the number of customers you want to reach and work backwards with your conversion rates.
Never run automated cold email campaigns from your primary domain. Any cold email campaign comes with a risk of getting emails marked as spam. You can't let important emails go to recipients' spam folders.
You need to set up additional domains that you will use only for cold emailing. We wrote about how to choose cold email domain variations, check out the article if you'd like more information.
You can use your own domains if you have any that are unused. They must be .com domains, and can't have any spam issues. You can use this domain blacklist checker from MX Toolbox to see if your domains have any issues.
Get rid of blacklisted domains and create new ones instead. Trying to remove domains from blacklists requires too much effort. New domains are easy to set up and cheap to purchase.
Jump to the 'Transferring Domains to Infraforge' section if your domains check all the boxes.
Step 1: Set up an account with Infraforge.
Infraforge is going to be your domain registrar as well as your email account provider.
You may have heard that you need to add SPF, DKIM, and DMARC policies to the DNS settings for your domains. These policies will help your emails get to the inbox and avoid spam filters.
Infraforge will automatically set up these policies for you. This is one of the reasons that Hacked BD uses their service for our clients. This is a time consuming step that we get to skip.
Step 2: Create new dedicated cold email sending domains
Click on the create button from your main dashboard.
Enter your primary domain name and Infraforge will give you suggestions for new domain name variations. They will always recommend .com TLD's because they will have better email deliverability.
Pick four options that you like and then click next.
Next, you'll need to enter a domain for forwarding these new domains. Always forward your new sending domains to your primary domain.
DMARC Email is not something that you need to fill in. This email address will receive all DMARC reports. Services like Easy DMARC have tools that help you analyze and make sense of these reports.
We recommend leaving this section blank. Having a DMARC policy will keep you out of spam folders even if you don't read or understand the DMARC reports.
(Optional) Step 3: Check the DNS settings of your new domains to make sure you have the required records set up
Go back to your home page and you will see your newly acquired domains. You can see the DNS settings for each domain by clicking on the globe icon under "DNS".
Infraforge has automatically created and added SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for your domains.
Skip this section if you have purchased new domains from Infraforge. Follow these instructions if you are bringing domains that you already own.
Step 1: Click on transfer domains to initiate the transfer
Step 2: Add the new nameservers to your existing domains you have hosted elsewhere
Many guides on the internet explain how to transfer nameservers. Check out the linked article or just Google how to change nameservers for your hosting provider. You will find an article explaining how to do this.
Step 3: Set up domain forwarding
Your domain settings from your current hosting provider will not change over to Infraforge. You will have to set everything up again.
Make sure your cold email domain variation forwards to your primary domain. Your customers should land on the right website when they click your domain from a cold email you've sent them.
Step 4: Initiate the transfer and wait for confirmation
Once you see that your domains are working in Infraforge, move on to setting up your email addresses.
Step 1: Create new email addresses
Go to your dashboard and click "mailboxes" on the left hand navigation panel. You will arrive at this page. Click create mailbxoes in the top right hand corner.
You will have the option to auto-generate email addresses, or you can manually create them. Using the auto-generate mailboxes feature will start creating mailboxes for fake people. We do not recommend doing this.
You will have the most success with cold email if you reach out to prospects from a real person. Prospects don't like speaking to AI or robots - they want to know that a human is on the other end of the communication.
Step 2: Create email signatures for the new mailboxes and set up forwarding.
Click on "signature and forwarding" and you will have the options you see in the image below.
We don't like using dynamic variables like "sender name" in a signature. It creates the opportunity for something to go wrong. Name each mailbox after a real person and use their information to create a signature.
Make sure your email signatures only use text, and don't contain any phone numbers. Email service providers don't like it when you include images, videos, links, or other content in your messages. These things can trigger spam filters.
You need to have a physical address in your email signature according to CAN-SPAM legislation. City and state or city and country are both sufficient.
Your emails must also include a method of unsubscribing, but we will set that up from Smartlead later on.
Set a forwarding address for each email account. This ensures that leads go to your primary email address so you don't miss them. You can send all sales leads to one person or distribute them to different team members.
When our clients get a response we have them respond to the forwarded email. You don't have to log into each account and respond directly.
The market offers many good mailwarming and sequencing tools right now. For this guide, we'll use Smartlead. At Hacked BD we like their warming tool the best, and email deliverability is extremely important.
Smartlead's mailwarming tool allows us to set reply rates, and also if we want to send warming messages on weekends or not. Other providers we've used don't offer these features. They help make our email marketing behaviours look human-like.
Sign up for a Smartlead account. The basic plan will be perfect to start with. It allows you to have 2000 active leads, which is the exact number we can send monthly with our infrastructure.
Log back into your Infraforge account. Click on Mailboxes on the left hand menu. Select the email addresses that you would like to export for warming to Smartlead and then click export.
Log back into your Infraforge account. Click on Mailboxes on the left hand menu. Select the email addresses that you would like to export for warming to Smartlead and then click export.
Log back into your Infraforge account. Click on Mailboxes on the left hand menu. Select the email addresses that you would like to export for warming to Smartlead and then click export.
Select export to Smartlead when prompted. Infraforge recommends warming up your email addresses for two weeks. Hacked BD likes to warm up mailboxes for three weeks as we've seen improved deliverability with that protocol.
Email reputation is hard to build and extremely easy to ruin. We recommend an overly cautious approach to email marketing. When your emails land in spam folders, you lose all chance of generating leads.
The final step before you can export your mailboxes is to set up a custom tracking domain. We won't cover this in detail but this is a crucial step in making sure you have strong email deliverability.
You don't have to do anything else on this page. Keep the generic setting that Infraforge has provided and export your mailboxes.
You will get a .csv file with the settings you need to import your mailboxes to Smartlead.
Log in to your Smartlead account and click on email accounts.
Click on "add accounts" in the top right of your dashboard.
Select "connect your email account". We are going to be using a custom SMTP (Infraforge) and the settings we need are in our .csv file.
Upload your .csv file and you will see the screen below. Click "upload now" to continue. A green check appears next to each account after successful connection.
Infraforge doesn't automatically add the best mailwarming settings to the .csv file they give us when we export our email addresses. We will have to add them ourselves in Smartlead.
Go to the email accounts section again and select the email addresses you want to set up mailwarming for. Then click the bulk update button.
You can see the settings that Hacked BD recommends for our clients below.
You need to set up email filtering rules in your primary mailbox. This will prevent warming emails from flooding your inbox. These filters should mark the emails as read and archive them automatically.
Mailwarming is how we get an email address ready for email marketing campaigns. This process builds up sending history and reputation, preventing email service providers from putting our emails in spam folders.
Email providers look at new domains and fresh email addresses with suspicion. Spammers typically use new domains and email addresses with no sending history.
Your email account will exchange emails with other email accounts when you enter a mailwarming pool (like Smartlead). Recipients will open your emails, respond to them, mark them as important, and remove them from the spam folder if they land there.
This process tells the email service providers what to do with our emails when one of their clients receive them.
Cold email marketers need to warm up their domains and email accounts because they are new and don't have any sending history. You can't spin up new domains and start emailing prospects on day one.
Email providers will flag your messages as suspicious and send them to spam folders.
Yes! You always need to be mailwarming when you are sending cold email.
Warming emails bump up your messages' overall engagement rate. They help show email service providers that the messages coming from your domain get engagement.
Here is a quick example without mailwarming:
You send 100 cold emails daily. You get 5 new leads, which is pretty good. The email service providers see that 1/20 people respond to your emails. They don't think that this is good, so they reduce your deliverability.
Normal business people receive responses to most of their emails. They are normally emailing colleagues, customers, partners, etc. These people almost always respond. It looks strange when only 5% of people respond to your emails.
Here is a quick example with mailwarming:
You send 100 cold emails daily. You get 5 sales leads.
You also send 100 warming emails daily. You have set a response rate of 45%, so you get 45 responses.
The email service providers see that 50/200, or 25% of people respond to your emails. They think that this is pretty good, so they keep your deliverability strong.
This example simplifies how email deliverability works, but shows why you should always warm your mailboxes.
People used to build sales lead lists through expensive manual work. These days it's extremely easy.
Lots of companies sell monthly access to a lead database that you can use for your email campaigns.
In this guide we will use Apollo.io as our list tool. Their database has 220.6 million contacts as of writing, so it will cover most industries.
Do not use Apollo if your prospects prospects don't have LinkedIn profiles or websites. Finding contact information for people who don't advertise their work proves difficult. Examples include some commercial property owners or Amazon FBA sellers.
You'll probably need to purchase a specialty database tailored to your target market with your decision makers.
If you don't fall into the above category then sign up for a pro account and continue to the next step.
This guide will give you a few tips on how to build high quality lead lists with Apollo. We will share some of the best practices we use at Hacked BD to generate leads for our clients.
Log into your Apollo.io account and click on the "people" icon to start searching for leads. Apollo also has a "company" search that you can run, but we like to use the people search. You can still apply company filters, but you end up with a list of individuals you can target.
Click on "more filters" and you'll see many different ways you can try to find your ICP. This post won't cover all the filters in detail, you can likely figure them out yourself. The filters are fairly self simple to understand.
We recommend always using the "email status" filter when building your lists. Apollo has confirmed that these are valid email addresses. They won't expose you to as much risk as unverified, or update required email addresses.
You can still send emails to unverified email accounts, but you run the risk of email bounces or sending to spam traps. Anyone running automated cold email marketing campaigns should familiarize themselves with both of those things.
Select the leads you want to export and click export to download your contact list. You will get a .csv file that you can upload to Smartlead (or any other automation platform) for sequencing.
Apollo has recently released an extremely powerful feature that combines web scraping with AI. This is a gamechanger for their platform, and makes them more competitive with leading GTM tools like Clay.com.
Hacked BD uses this feature in two different ways - to build better lists, and to personalize messaging.
This feature is completely open ended. You can ask the scraper/AI to research anything you want about a company and it will help you find that information.
Apollo has some templates that you can start with to get an idea of what is possible.
Here is an example of a prompt that you might run for a contact. We're asking it to scrape a website, analyze information, and create formatted content for our email copy.
The response is high quality. We would run a prompt like this for a list of leads, and then run a sequence with this information in the copy. The prospect will be able to tell that we took time to understand their business.
We wrote before about using AI to create better cold email copy, and this tool makes that process easier.
Go to the home page and click on "email campaign", then "create my first campaign".
Upload the .csv file with your leads to the campaign.
Create your cold email copy. Hacked BD will typically send email cadences with three messages. We will have the second and third email send as replies to the prior message.
We recommend previewing what your emails will look like for a lead before moving on. Mistyped variables are visible in your outbound emails and ruin your chances of generating leads.
Smartlead has great features under campaign settings that can keep your email deliverability strong. Select the settings that make sense for you, and you can kick off your sequence. We will write in more depth about the ideal settings in the future.
Good cold email copy will make or break your campaigns. Your copy heavily impacts whether prospects open emails, reply, and agree to sales conversations.
Decision makers are overwhelmed with cold email, and you need to make sure you stand out. The best way to do this is to develop messaging that speaks to problems they are having right now. Work to improve your product and your value proposition. This will affect your conversion rates more than anything else in your copy.
Make sure you are building good lists with the right companies. Your copy won't matter if you are only filtering by job titles, industry, and then uploading your leads.
Your subject lines (and preview text) will drive email opens. Most b2b cold email marketers want to put a hook in their subject line. We advise against doing that, it comes across as salesy.
We recommend using short subject lines with all lowercase letters. Executives and team members don't put a tonne of effort into crafting perfect subject lines. Your emails will look like they came from someone familiar if you follow this approach.
We wrote an article that covers how to create good cold email subject lines in more detail if you'd like to learn more.
The best cold emails are topical. They show a deep understanding of the prospect and their business. Email marketers that send these messages will always generate more leads than their counterparts.
So how can you make your message more relevant to your prospects?
Include KPI's that your prospects track and are responsible for in your email copy.
Every company tracks key performance indicators they want to boost. Most companies meet regularly to discuss improving them.
Including these KPI's in your cold email messaging can be enough to get your prospects to respond.
What you are asking for in your cold emails goes a long way to determining if you will get replies and leads. The simplest and most common ask is for a meeting.
Some email marketers will use soft asks to increase interested rates. They will ask the prospect if they want an audit, case study, or free resource. This lets the prospect say yes without having to dedicate time to a sales pitch.
Hacked BD generally likes to ask for a meeting. Prospects know you've emailed them because you want something from them. We think it's better to be upfront about this.
Prospects like buying things that will help their business. If you've crafted a high quality quality offer they will be willing to give you time to listen to it.
All B2B marketers are targeting the same decision makers. You're not the only person that wants to get in touch with CEO's of 50-200 person companies. They only have so much time to read through sales emails.
Figure out how to get your message across in as few words as possible.
Stick to one value proposition per email. You can use a different one in a follow up if they don't respond. Including everything your product or service does in one email will make it too long. Your prospect won't read the message.
The best writing advice I ever received came from an article on The Dilbert Blog. Check it out if you'd like to learn how to improve your business writing skills.
We've taught you about 80% of what you need to know to set up a cold email marketing campaigns for your startup. Hopefully you found this guide helpful, and were able to follow some of our advice.
The last thing you need to do once you've launched is establish an A/B testing process. Smartlead has an article about how to A/B test in more detail.
The one piece of advice we'll give you on A/B testing is to only test one variable at a time. You can't A/B test to improve open rates, reply rates, and interested rates all at once.
Pick one thing in your email such as the subject line. Test two subject lines against each other and see which gets the better open rate. Go with the better performing version and move on to the next KPI you want to improve.
Rinse and repeat.
Cold email marketing can be a great way to generate sales leads, but it requires the right setup. We hope that this article was valuable for you. It should have given you everything you need to kick off a email marketing campaigns for your startup.
Hacked BD writes about everything to do with email marketing or B2B lead gen. Come back to our blog for additional knowledge in the future. We're putting together more articles and case studies about how to build a bigger sales funnel.
