DO THIS to Your Cold Emails In 2025

What Happened To Cold Email In 2024?

In 2023 and 2024, significant policy changes by major email service providers (ESPs) have introduced stricter regulations, making cold email outreach more challenging. So to start off, cold email has followed an awfully common change pattern in the past years specifically related to:

1. Stricter Spam Filter Policies: ESPs have refined their spam filters to detect and penalize emails containing spam-triggering words, emails lacking personalization, and really any copy that doesn’t look humanized (AKA, sending the same email to thousands of people)

2. Enhanced Unsubscribe Mechanisms: ESP’s have made it easier for users to mark emails as spam. ESP’s will even auto suggest you to mark an email as spam, being spam reports have gone through the roof.

3. Sending Volume Limitations: ESP’s are throttling domains for sending too much volume, particularly on newer domains/inboxes. While you used to get away with sending 80 emails per domain per day, that is not the case anymore.

4. Increased Monitoring of Sender Reputation: ESP’s are paying closer attention to domain health, sender reputation, IP’s, and backend setups more than ever. The more you can do to look like you’re not just an email marketer, the better.

How has this affected cold email marketing as a whole?

-Barrier to entry for cold email is 5x harder than it used to be. You can’t just learn cold email in a weekend and expect to get good results.

-Email deliverability is proving to be more challenging then every. Domains/Inbox longevity is shorter than it’s ever been. Domains and Inboxes are shutting down like never before

-Costs to manage cold email has 3-4x’d from just a year ago

-More time and effort needs to go into list building

3 Steps You Need To Take To Succeed With Cold Email in 2025

1. Cold Email Infrastructure Setup: Picking the right domain/inbox setup and having more accounts on hand than you think you need

• You need to have systems in place for domain and inbox infrastructure allocation BEFOREHAND. We’re purchasing 1.5-2x more domains and email accounts in advance, keeping them warmed up at all times, so we can plug these accounts in as soon as we notice any slowdown in account performance. We have our first batch of accounts actively in campaigns, and then we have backup accounts warming up that we can plug in whenever we want.

• Your target market will impact the infrastructure setup you use. For example, if you’re reaching out to all small local businesses who typically use gmail accounts, no need to overcomplicate your setup. Set the majority of your accounts up under google, and have some outlook inboxes in place as well incase google releases any new spam policy updates. If you’re reaching out to enterprise companies who typically have more spam filters in place, you may need a more technical setup. More on this below this section where I recommend our domain/inbox setup based on who we’re targeting

• Aged domains will always perform better than brand new ones. Again, having extra domains and inboxes warming up

🎯Refer to this guide to see the infrastructure setups we’re using based on who we’re targeting for our clients - Cold Email Deliverability 2025 - Understanding Email Service Provers 🎯

2. Qualify Your Lead List BEFORE Sending Emails

You need to take extra steps to make sure the list you’re reaching out to is qualified and actually a good fit for your service. The quickest way to get marked spam and ruin your sending reputation is to bother people who have no business hearing from you. Lucky for you, AI makes it easy to score and qualify leads for your service. I personally like to use Clay.com for this because of their feature Claygent that allows you to prompt AI to perform actions on your behalf, removing the need to manual tasks with your list building process.

I personally like to qualify my company list BEFORE find contacts from those companies. This way I know that 100% of the accounts I plan on targeting are a good fit for my service. Here is a prompt you can plug into clay.com to qualify your company lists:

💡CLAYGENT PROMPT BELOW💡

3. Use Shorter Sequences: 2-3 steps MAX

• We send over 300k emails per month for us and our clients, and over 80% of the positive replies we receive come from emails 1 & 2

• Nearly all spam reports come from emails 3 & 4. What does that tell us? Having campaigns longer than 2 steps actually hurts you more than it helps.

• Keep your sequences 2, 3 steps MAX, and just recycle leads using a different offer. No point in trying to sell people who expressed no interest in the first place. There are other leads you can contact.

• By sending shorter sequences, your reaching 2x the amount of contacts while MINIMIZING spam complaints, and ALSO increasing the longevity of your accounts. People typically won’t mark you as spam if they’re a relevant prospect and you’ve only contacted them twice. Emails 3 & 4 is where people start getting pissed off and more spam trigger happy.

  

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Back to the hive…🍯🐝