Our Outreach Setup That Grew an E-Commerce Store to 2.5M ARR [How We Did It]

This article is a step-by-step guide on how to get quality data, set up your email accounts, and follow up at a scale of 100k emails per day with a 95% inbox rate.

Here is what we are going to cover:

1. Actions to take and tools to use to warm up your IPs for sending
2. How to prepare your tests and accounts
3. How to outsource follow-ups
4. Where to get the most accurate data from

3 Months before sending emails

This is a process to keep you out of the SPAM folder and get to a scale of 100 000 emails per day.

Create as many GSuite accounts as you need.

Ok, so we started with the goal of sending 100 000 emails per day. That is a big deal. To calculate the number of emails that we’d need to send this amount of emails out, we created 150 GSuite accounts from our domain. A simple formula that we used is this:

Number of accounts * 700 = Daily Email Limit

We knew we wanted to get to 100k, so we created 150 Gsuite accounts. According to our formula, we were able to send ~105000 emails per day. Of course, not right away, though…

Set up DKIM, SPF, and DMARC

To put simply, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are ways to authenticate your mail server and to prove to ISPs, mail services and other receiving mail servers that senders are truly authorized to send an email. When properly set up, all three prove that the sender is legitimate, that their identity has not been compromised and that they’re not sending an email on behalf of someone else.

I won’t go into detail on how to set this up. There are a lot of articles out there on how to do this.

Email Warm-Up

Here is a simple and yet fantastic guide on how to set up your email warm-up strategy.

Start by sending 2–3 emails from the newly created accounts to people that will have to reply. It’s hard doing all of this with 150 accounts, so hire a VA.Follow the warm-up schedule listed below.

Manual warm-up schedule:
Week 1: between 10 to 20 emails per day
Week 2: between 20 to 40 emails per day
Week 3: between 40 to 80 emails per day
Week 4: between 80 to 100 emails per day
Week 5: 200 emails per day
Week 6: 400 emails per day
Week 7: 550 emails per day
Week 8: 700 emails per day

3. If you have the money, invest in a lemlist subscription for two months. They have a feature called “Auto email warm-up.”

They send emails from other users that use this option, and they all mark your emails as “Important” and reply to them. Fantastic for newly created accounts.

Keep in mind that this is going to cost you $29 *150 accounts *2 months = $8700. Now, that is a significant investment, so if you don’t have the money initially, feel free to skip this step and use the free version of GMass to send the warmup emails.

Phase 2: Start Sending Emails

Woohoo! 🎉 You made it to month two! Now it’s getting exciting.

The primary tool for scheduling: GMass

The best and cheapest tool that has everything you need to send massive email campaigns is GMass. For 150 users, you’ll pay $1591 / month. If you reach out, you might get a deal that’s lower than this.

These guys have everything you need, so you won’t be compromising even though the price is low.

Keep an eye on your inbox rate

If you don’t want to pay for Glockapps, that’s fine. You can calculate your inbox rate through GMass. If you’re going to go fancy, visit these guys: https://glockapps.com/

Schedule

After a lot of tests, this is what worked for me:

If I target Businesses I go for 5AM — 8AM ET

If I target Consumers I go for 6PM-9PM ET

Please test this step. I’ve seen A LOT of differences between industries, countries, and niches. What worked for me will probably not work for you.

Sequence

I won’t explain a lot of things in this step. Every business has different needs. We are doing 3 step sequence with replies only to people that have not replied. Email #2 and #3 go out as replies to the initial email.

I purposely did not include the first email that I am sending out here because that’s up to you and your business. Here is a piece of advice, though, think about whether you want to get replies or clicks.

Measure, measure, measure.

If your website converts excellent and you can get people to click, aim for clicks. If not, aim for replies. There is no way to know this to start with, so please test it out.

Please keep this in mind, though: DO NOT send links in the initial warm-up emails.

Outsourcing Follow-ups

We knew from our previous efforts that cold email marketing works for us. So that’s why we were able to spend money on hiring people and training them so we can get that scale of 100k emails per day. If you are starting, do this yourself for ten emails so you can know exactly how to educate your VAs to handle the work needed.

Here is a simple checklist if you want to hire people to reply to the emails you send out.

1. Have a script — Detailed, with all responses they might encounter. Spend a lot of time in the beginning because it’s going to be worth it, and you won’t lose time when sales start ramping up.

2. Hire 1 VA per 10 accounts — The best workload that worked for us

3. Pay hourly at first and then on commission — One word here, incentives work wonders! VAs got up early morning to reply to emails!

4. Reward your best employees — you really, really want to keep your best VAs and fire the ones that you don’t need. We even went on to let our best VA hire other VAs that he trains now.

The most crucial step: The Data

This is what makes the difference. Being able to get targeted data from your niche in vast quantities is a must-have.

That’s why we built https://instagraminfluencers.club/ Here is our thinking behind it:

Instagram has your exact targeted niche -> Ads are working find but are expensive -> Email Campaigns cost next to nothing -> Find Emails -> $$$

The major benefits of using our platforms are:

Tell us your audience — Specify what type of audience you want us to target. Whether that’s followers of a certain Instagram influencer, people that posted on a given location, or hashtag, we can get them all.

We get their data — We used advanced crawling techniques and a couple of APIs to get emails, phone numbers, website links, and ten other data points for one given account.

Email Address Verification & GDPR Compliance — Every email that we provide is GDPR compliant, verified, and working with 99.7% accuracy. No hard bounces or catch-all emails, ever.

Being able to do a lot of filtering to really narrow down what our client wanted from us was the key to our success. We don’t just send you random data. We have a strategy call, discuss your targeting, and then implement filters so you can get only the emails you are interested in.

For example, some of the filters we had for this particular e-commerce website were:

1. We used an API to identify the gender of a profile
2. We removed all emails that belonged to providers outside of EU, Australia, and the US
3. We removed ghost followers
4. We removed email addresses like info@, contact@, etc
5. We removed people that contained certain words in their bio

+10 more filters that I will not get into. As for numbers, here is the traction we achieved after only a month of working together:

And that’s all, folks! I hope I made everything clear as to how you can set up your cold outreach campaign to reach the same results as we did working with this e-commerce bran.

Please remember to test. What worked for someone else might not work for you, but something eventually will!

P.S. Do you need targeted emails from Instagram? Reach out to us now!