The Best Practices for Successful Cold Emailing with Mailreef

Artem Daniliants:
During a project I was doing for a client, I met Mike. We had a meeting and after this meeting I was like, I want to talk to him. More like, that was the whole idea for this podcast. I talked to Mike, you know, related to one of the projects, and I thought, I need to talk to him, and I thought podcast would be a good excuse. So here we have Mike. Thank you very much for doing this. And Mike works with email infrastructure. A very, very technical person had a lot of insights. And during the call that we had. So I thought that a lot of people would benefit from the knowledge that you have. So welcome, Mike.

Michael Benson:
Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks for the great introduction.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. So could you tell us a little bit about yourself and, about the company that you work for, for Mel Reif.

Michael Benson:
Sure. Yeah. so to kind of give a background. So I've, I've been a bootstrapped entrepreneur for the last almost ten years now, started out, really just in, like the virtual assistant space, Base, kind of just doing oddball tasks for different companies.

Michael Benson:
And then, I would say almost about eight years ago, we actually ended up creating a lead generation agency. So all we were doing was sending cold emails, booking meetings and, and really just, reselling those meetings back to the client. And so sometimes they were retainers, sometimes they were like pay per lead, or pay per meeting. And so we we really learned a ton, just about cold email, but it was kind of like really learning on the fly. So, you know, different clients needed different leads and that required different templating and stuff like that. And so basically while we were building this agency, we we spent a ton of money on warming up mailboxes. Basically, there was like one other company in the world that was doing this, you know, our bill was like $10,000 a month, just warming up mailboxes. And we were like, this, this is absolutely crazy. Why are we spending so much money on this? And so, literally in four days, we, we created this company called Warm Up Inbox.

Michael Benson:
It basically was built over a weekend, and we had so many clients on the agency side that we basically had enough mailboxes to kind of create our own seed list. and really, we, we undercut the market by ten, ten times. So kind of that $10,000 a month bill for us internally, you know, brought it down to only a couple hundred dollars a month. And so we decided to put a paywall on that and basically build warm up inbox. And so we were the first, email warm up company in the United States. And then, from there, it ended up being the largest warm up network in the world by far. I mean, we were about 10 to 20 times bigger than any other warm up pool in the world. You know, this was before the smart lead in the Instant Lives of the world. still to this day, it's basically the third biggest warm up network in the world. we ended up selling it to private equity, almost three years ago. it was bought out by the team behind email lists.

Michael Benson:
Verify. So they've been in the email validation space for a while, and so they're they're still growing. That company and warm up inbox is still one of the essentially purest warm up networks in the world, which is great. And so we we learned a ton at warm up inbox. basically we we had, tens of thousands, almost hundreds of thousands of mailboxes connected. They were all almost all Google and Microsoft. And so we were seeing disconnections every day. We were seeing every kind of bounce, error or blocking that you've ever seen in your life. And essentially we were learning on the fly. We were googling, trying to figure out what was happening. And then, basically that kind of led us down this rabbit hole of going, oh my gosh, like, we're building a pretty large company, a warm up inbox, but it's solely relying on Google and Microsoft. And so we kind of just sat there and said, wow, like what happens if Google or Microsoft just shuts us down one day? or they just decide that it wasn't even necessarily our system.

Michael Benson:
It was more, hey, if they're going to shut down cold email one day. And that kind of led us down this rabbit hole of saying, hey, could we build our own email infrastructure? That's just not Google, not Microsoft? And could it actually deliver somewhat closely to like a Google or Microsoft? And so we actually had some really good use cases within our own warm up network pool. We were seeing some extremely sophisticated companies, basically companies with multi-billion dollars now building their own email infrastructures. And we said, hey, we think we can build something very similar to that. And so three, three and a half years ago, we literally created this company called at the time it was actually called dyno. We, we started building a network, scaling that out, it started to get a little popular. And a couple of years ago it basically just imploded. We were like, oh, wow, like this. This system can't work. It doesn't work. And so we said, hey, well, there's so much demand.

Michael Benson:
Let's, let's rebuild it. And so, we, we rebuilt it into, Mail Reef. And so we, we've been stable for about two and a half years. we're literally sending over 100 million cold emails a month from our infrastructure now. And so, you know, the the cold email infrastructure space is still the wild, wild West, but I like to lean into that story a bit just because, there's there's a lot to it. and there's kind of a lot of unknowns in the industry. I'm sure we'll kind of drill into it a bit, but, you know, even on our side, we're still learning. But luckily now we have, you know, enough kind of use cases and an up data points actually, like fully drill in to kind of what's going on between, you know, Google and Microsoft receiving mailboxes and everything like that.

Artem Daniliants:
That's awesome. Thank you. Yeah. So by the way, the first thing that I noticed when I visited your website is that you don't allow people to just sign up and pay and get started, which was really weird because as a marketer, I always think, like, hey, I need to make signup and registration as easy as possible, but you guys are like, no, no, no, you need a meeting with us.

Artem Daniliants:
First we need to vet you. So why did you decide to do this? Yeah.

Michael Benson:
Yeah, definitely. So one, we we really wanted to just control the process. It was actually like learning. So is it the best way that we look at like our onboarding calls is one we want to learn more about you. So in that kind of gives us a sense of saying, okay, like can we help you? Yes or no? So like a great example is sometimes people come in and they say, hey, we have this like extremely great targeted list. You know, we bought it from like an extremely reputable provider. Everything's validated, but they're all at Gmail and all at Yahoo and MSN. And so like a great example is like we actually don't allow for emailing to personal email addresses because one, it really does kind of borderline around like the canned spam and everything like that, where it's it's not like business to business. It's not as hyper relevant as like you would think in a business setting.

Michael Benson:
So those are kind of ways for us to kind of weed out just random use cases, although we could probably still help in some form. You know, we kind of push it off that way. But, it allows us to kind of control the ecosystem. And so for us, we, we own our entire infrastructures. so, you know, we, we have bare metal servers, we buy our own subnets, but we also work with partner companies where you, you essentially couldn't, like, build it yourself. where we literally will, will like almost persuade cloud companies where they don't allow for email. And we say, hey, here is our very specific process on how we do this. Please give us your IPS. We know that they're actually going to deliver quite well. and here's like our expertise. Right? We've been in the cold email space ten years. You know, if people go above certain bounce thresholds, we're monitoring that trying to tweak. And so we're honestly really only trying to work with like the best cold emailers in the world.

Michael Benson:
Of course, there's random people who are going to be better than others. And so over time, we've kind of widen that pool a bit. And so, but but, like, basically what we're really trying to do is put more bumpers in place. So, we have somewhat of specific ways to use our servers. Great example is just like, hey, don't send more than X number of emails per month. It's just kind of one of those things where we kind of tailor that based off of, your industry and things like that. So never say never. We are thinking about opening it up to the greater masses over time. But, for us, we we really value the relationships with our IP providers because ultimately we are not a churn and burn through systems like when we give you a server. you know, it's essentially for the long term, we have some clients that have been on servers for two and a half, three years. and everything looks great. And so that's what we work with, with the cloud providers.

Michael Benson:
We say, hey, you give us an IP address like it's ours forever, even though in theory we're renting it from you. And so we have balances that we buy our own IPS as well. So that's kind of when we when we start to, we're starting to build more of our infrastructure. But early on we wanted diversification just to to do some more learning on that front, too.

Artem Daniliants:
Okay. Very good, very good. Makes sense. But let's get back to call the emails. And you mentioned the warm up. And many people don't know what probably warm up is and why do you have to do it. And I think the main theme for today's conversation could be, you know, is called email dead basically, right? Sure. second, if it's not that, how do you do it properly? And some of the best practices and common mistakes. I think this would be the most valuable for everybody listening to me as well. You mentioned warmup. So if you think about it, let's just talk maybe about the basics.

Artem Daniliants:
So everybody and their grandmother is saying that call the email. Is that more or less right? Sure. There are sophisticated systems in place in Gmail and in Google Workspace and Microsoft and so forth that detect, more or less called emails and they block them, right? Right. Is that true? Or.

Michael Benson:
Yeah, I think like definitely a lot of engagement, like farming at the moment is saying kind of in the first line of a LinkedIn post or on, on Twitter saying, hey, cold emails, dead comma. Except you got to do this like long list of of things. And so yeah, one, one thing that we've been noticing, just like in the industry as a whole, are there are kind of a lot of like blanket statements when and then you actually kind of like live under the hood and you're like, okay, well, you know, where where is this data coming from? Right? Somebody might say, hey, warm up is dead. But, you know, you actually look at their campaign metrics and it's like they send a thousand emails and they actually don't even know what caused it to be dead.

Michael Benson:
And so you go, okay, well, let's talk about it more. And so, you know, smart, smart leads becoming, you know, probably one of the biggest, like, cold email senders in the world. You know, I sat down with V and we kind of talked about it and we're like, well, yeah, if if like for example, warm up specifically was dead, you wouldn't hear kind of rumblings, you would hear, oh my God, everything's imploded. And so, you know, we as cold emailers, I think we like to think that like we're kind of the center of the universe, but, you know, in reality, we're probably 0.0001 of all outbound volume in the world. And so, yes, it's funny because a lot of people think that Google and Microsoft are going to proactively block kind of the warming networks, but it's actually the opposite. You actually want to be worried about, blacklist specifically pinpointing these warm up networks. And that's actually what's going to bring down warming, if anything.

Michael Benson:
But in turn, I mean, really the way warmup works is, you know, you're you're basically getting volume out of your email to the world. And that's those that volume out is just not being marked as spam. And so, really like when, when blacklists and email service providers look at, hey, to determine if email is going to go in the inbox or the spam box, they're really looking at ratios. I mean, it's it's wild if you actually peel back the curtains on these blacklists provider and actually look at some of the raw data behind the blacklist, it's amazing. Like they have your number immediately, like they know exactly what's going on. So, you know, you start sending on day one and, you know, you just only send 20 or 30 emails in a single day. That blacklist has your your email and knows what's going out and knows what's being marked as spam. And so, it isn't as much of a black box as most of the world thinks, but, yeah, I mean, as a whole.

Michael Benson:
Like, for example, Mail Reef does not work without warming. you know, we tell our clients to use any kind of warm up pool that you want. Typically, you want to work with the biggest warm up pools in the world. You know, that's actually why warm up inbox is one of the best ones. Because basically they have such a large number of Google and Microsoft mailboxes. Same thing with like smart lead. And instantly we really actually only suggest our clients mainly using those three as a whole. just because it's so large. And so yeah, we've seen, you know, zero like, the 100 million cold emails we send a month, like we tell people to pair it with warming emails. You know, we would see an overnight implosion, you know, if warm up was dead. If anything, we think warming is is stronger than ever. so, yeah, it's it's just kind of funny because, like, there's nobody there's no somebody like, I saw a comment the other day, they were like, I think it's the warming pools that are causing these like issues for Google.

Michael Benson:
And you're like, okay, like, you know why? Like how are you looking at like domain data, server data, mailbox data. You can never really know, you know.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. So if, you know, going back to the basics, so cold email as I see it, is that if you're trying to just spam everybody, just do mass emails send the same email to, you know, 4 million people hoping for the best, right? That is that obviously right in my opinion, especially if you are just targeting normal individuals at gmail.com at, you know, live.com and so forth. So that is not effective and hasn't been effective for very long time. Right?

Michael Benson:
Yeah, exactly. I would say, you know, maybe like 2018, 2019 or earlier, you know, we call them like the glory days essentially where, you know, basically Google mailboxes, you can send 500 to 1000, you know, emails out per day and not get blocked. And so I think people are kind of saying cold email is dead just because, you know, the if you almost look at a graph of like volume that you can get off on a Google or Microsoft mailbox, you know, you know, it was a thousand, then 500, then 200, then 150, then a hundred to 50 to 20.

Michael Benson:
And like now people are literally saying only send five cold emails a day from a Google or Microsoft mailbox. And at that point you go, wow, like, this is kind of getting so crazy. And honestly, it's really just around, like AI is getting a little bit better. And and basically Google and Microsoft's pointing those AI systems to retrain these, these spam algorithms even better. so, you know, and and people what a lot of people don't realize is ultimately like part of the reason why Google and Microsoft mailboxes get blocked is the AI is getting better at just random system checks and going, hey, well, why do you email five people at the same company you know, and only sent 20 emails that day and didn't do anything else? And so they just they'll just kind of proactively kind of slap on the wrist. And so that's why like, you know, mail reefs growing so quickly as people are just kind of really getting tired of the Google and Microsoft mailboxes. But email's been around for for an extremely long time.

Michael Benson:
And so some of these core fundamentals are, are still there. for sending cold email. You just kind of have to pivot. But ultimately, if you have a good product, a good website, which a lot of people don't talk about, and it's actually targeting the right people. cold email works extremely well. I mean, we, we literally see campaigns still that are between 2 and 6% positive reply rates. we then if you can even get more hyper targeted, it's even better. So really like the biggest update we've seen in the last year is really using like Claycomb. you know, Claycomb really started out as this pretty broad tool to kind of filter down data. And then I think a lot of people kind of looked at Clay and said, wow, we can use this for our outbound campaigns. And I think the voice was so strong, the clay that they literally pivoted to just outbound email engines. And so a lot of those kind of tactics I talked about of like finding the right person and, and having a good like value prop and kind of personalizing the email just even super slightly.

Michael Benson:
Clay's kind of doing that all in one. And so a lot of people are kind of saying, hey, you know, Clay is great for kind of personalizing one liners and stuff like that. And, and that is true. But honestly, like, we look at clay these days is basically a deliverability tool. It's it just makes deliverability that much better. So that's kind of one of those things where over the last couple of months we've just seen, like if you kind of do the first name, company name, maybe a location and kind of only change up 3 or 4 variables in an email, that template gets blocked in in a couple of weeks. So you'll see open rates 50, 60%. And then they kind of just slowly go down to like 8%, 5%. And people are like, okay, it's my mailbox. And then they they what they don't realize is it's actually, they're they're getting better at fingerprinting, templates. Just because AI is getting better. It's just improving the system.

Artem Daniliants:
So yeah. So in my opinion, called email is pretty good for B2B, right. And for highly targeted lists and, you know, just with everything else, if you do a good job, you have a good list, you have good value proposition. You have, you know, good website, you know, yada, yada, yada. You can get some really good results. But in order to get started with called, called emails and, you know, email outreach, you mentioned Clay and we will come back to it soon because I think it's an incredible tool. Right. You can basically upload a list of contacts and then you can enrich it, and then you can use built in AI to create basically personalized emails where every single email will be unique and it will not follow a specific template, which usually means that you will probably not be blocked or you will not be flagged as a as a mass email or and so forth. But if I want to get started with cold email, can't I just, you know, put in BCC field in Gmail 1000 emails and just hit send? Why do I need to invest into this infrastructure? And obviously you provide that infrastructure, right? Then you have been doing this for quite some time.

Artem Daniliants:
why? Traditional tools are not good. why do I need to go for smart lead mail, Rafe, and so forth? You know, like, what's the benefit?

Michael Benson:
Yeah. So, I mean, the the best way to kind of back into it is really you, you want to mimic. If you were to say, find one person, you know, say, say it was like a wannabe mentor of yours or something like that where you're like, man, like, if I can get a reply from this person, that would be amazing. And so, you, you know, it isn't like you're going to be CC that single person or you're going to really like spend the time, you're going to like, make sure the emails formatted perfectly. If you put a link in an email, you're going to make sure that link actually opens. So you kind of don't look like a fool to to that like potential, like mentor that you want to reach out to. And so that's a 1 to 1 email.

Michael Benson:
And so you know, especially using Google and Microsoft and even mail ref like you want that email to look as real as possible. And it's obviously to the prospect. Right. The prospect wanna feels like like you actually handwrote that email. but really like from a deliverability standpoint and that's generally like everything I kind of talk about, you know, you like Google and Microsoft, like Google and Microsoft mailboxes, that that's basically what's receiving 80 or 90% of all global email. Right? So kind of when I talk about that, all we're really trying to focus on is, hey, if we send an email, can we improve for Google and Microsoft and get it in the mailbox? And so what we've noticed is Google and Microsoft is, hey, when you send an email, like, you got to make sure you at least have the person's first name. I mean, even like silly things that you got to think about is like, if you were to search that person's inbox, would the word human resources be in that person's inbox because, you know, your email better be relevant to that person's industry, right? So, for example, you know, I obsess over email deliverability.

Michael Benson:
If somebody sent me an email, about, you know, human resources, like it's just not a match and it's very likely going to to go in the spam system. And so, kind of having that one on one personalization is really good for deliverability. And it's it's really just what gets a good positive reply. from the prospect. And so, you know, nowadays really, you know, part of kind of this algorithm is more Google and Microsoft are looking at how many emails have kind of come off the mailbox as a whole that day, and how many times has that been marked as spam. But kind of the idea is that if somebody replies back positively to your email and you actually engage in a conversation, you know, it might not kind of wipe the slate clean back to zero, but that positive engagement actually helps quite a bit. So, you know, if a lot of people are replying back negatively or extremely negatively, almost with like really harsh sentiment back that basically starts to alert Google and Microsoft and saying, okay, one, we're definitely going to absorb putting it to the spam box, but to like, you're on the edge of us just totally blocking your mailbox.

Michael Benson:
So I mean, a lot of kind of cold email when you really sit down and think about it. It is like a lot of common sense. So one, you just have to really like make sure your ratios are correct. So, I mean, like honestly we, we have some clients that send two times more than our, our allotted volume. And it's just because they have such a good value prop. Their website is extremely professional and they are so hyper targeted on the right people at the right time. And so, you know, we have some people that, you know, send a lot lower volume and it's because they're just like they're not personalizing. They're kind of sending like they're almost like super lazy and just kind of, yeah, might change up like the city name in an email. But kind of keeping it super broad is just not great for deliverability over time. So it's more of like a sustainability thing to, to kind of personalize. But that's why like a smart lead, and instantly are great because they kind of allow you to upload a list, kind of put those variables into an email and kind of parse it out.

Michael Benson:
But they're even getting like smarter now and almost looking at kind of deliverability as a whole and saying, hey, like, you know, based off the data that we're getting, you might actually want to kind of slow down volume or even pause this specific mailbox because, you know, this mailbox or domain got flagged versus like, hey, let's put some more volume on your other mailboxes. just to kind of try to give you the best chance of getting a positive reply. But at this point, Cold Email is definitely a numbers game. you know, people always ask me, you know, what is a good, positive, reply rate or open rate? And the the, the range is all over the place, but in general it is trending down, just as a whole, because the spam filters are getting better and also cold email is just becoming more blatantly obvious, right? So eight years ago, people might have actually felt like a standard blanket cold email was actually personalized to them and people are just almost like immune to it now.

Michael Benson:
And so that's kind of part of it. Is the B2B world somewhat used to it. But, you know, if if your product is good enough and the value prop is actually hitting the right, like note, I mean, all those kind of rules go out the window because, you know, if people want what you're selling, basically.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. That's why some people still fall for, you know, Nigerian prints and so forth.

Michael Benson:
Yeah, exactly.

Artem Daniliants:
Because they want to believe that somebody is, you know, giving out free money.

Michael Benson:
Yeah. So that that also kind of brings up another interesting point around like industries, right. So there are just some industries that have basically been trained to go to spam. So for example IT services or SEO services. Right. Prince of Nigeria. You know, like basically certain words like that, like everybody kind of talks about, hey, don't use like spam, like bad words in your email, kind of like money or profit or ROI or dollar sign.

Michael Benson:
Those are some of the basic ones. But sometimes, just like straight up industries just don't work well. and the reason being is basically there's been so much volume in the world for that specific industry, and it's extremely good at doing it. so it's kind of the same thing about, you know, categorizing images or things like that has just gotten massively, like worse for those types of industries. But if you're kind of in this kind of blue ocean industry where it's kind of new, for example, like email infrastructure, like we were the first cold email infrastructure company to exist for a couple of years when we send cold emails that say cold email infrastructure spam filters have no idea what it is because there's only so many emails going out and they're mostly from us, for example.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah, yeah. All right. So going back to basics, if I want to do cold email and, you know, I get a list of people I want to contact. And for those there are many different services. Right? I could, manually, get, you know, contact information off the internet.

Artem Daniliants:
Right. I could utilize services like Apollo and some others. Right. LinkedIn, maybe Sales Navigator and I could utilize also, you know, there are companies that specialize in mining data like contact data and stuff like that, right. And as long as I play by the certain rules, depending on the country, then everything is hunky dory. So I have the list. You know, if we talk about best practices, probably I would upload that list to Claycomb. Right. And I would start enriching that list with additional data. So Claycomb has a lot of integrations with, you know, tools like SEMrush and scrapers and so forth. So I could add additional columns such as, you know, maybe there are latest, you know, LinkedIn posts or the content of their website or something like that. So I enrich it to the point that I'm, you know, happy. I have basically for every single contact, I have additional information that I can then feed into something like ChatGPT that Claycomb provides as well, and create a personalized email.

Artem Daniliants:
Right? I probably in the beginning want to keep it very short. So if I create an email sequence, the first email could be that it doesn't contain any links and it's like straight to the point addresses the, you know, pain point. And then, you know, tell us how we can help solve it, for example, and then solicits a reply, right. Because you don't want to tell them, like, hey, here's my calendly link, you know, book a meeting or something. You just basically want them to reply and say like, hey, tell me more, right? And then maybe you have in that sequence you have a second email. But beyond that it's kind of lost game already. Third, fourth. I've seen some people have, you know, like 20 emails in their sequence and it just doesn't work. It's just. Yeah, yeah, it doesn't make any sense. So I use a tool, something like smart lead and from Clay I can then bring it over to smart lead.

Artem Daniliants:
Right. Exactly. But I probably wouldn't want to use my own email address because I don't want to risk it. So I will probably create, auxiliary domains. Right? Yeah. And then I would bring those domains to you to mail riff. I can either purchase them from you or purchase them myself and then bring it to mail riff. And then I set them up so that basically I put those email, domains on your infrastructure so that they physically point to your servers and so forth. And then I create mailboxes. I could create mailbox under my own name. Right. If I want to use that to reach out to people. But before I send any email through smart lead using those email boxes. I need to do the warm up that you mentioned already multiple times. And basically that warm up is a process to kind of if we're completely honest, the idea is to fool spam. Spam filters into.

Michael Benson:
Thinking that looking.

Artem Daniliants:
At it.

Michael Benson:
Yeah, I kind of say it's like you retrain Google and Microsoft's algorithms to like your mailbox, basically.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah, yeah. So basically, you know, it's, you know, dressing really well before your date and, you know.

Michael Benson:
Exactly putting your best foot forward, right?

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Kind of. Yeah. So basically warmup is and I think smartly has unlimited, warm ups or something like that. I think it's really cost effective when there are other providers, as you mentioned. And basically you connect your email box and they start to simulate normal email traffic. So basically they send out emails, receive replies and stuff like that. Right. So basically they create this fake traffic that looks so realistic that emails, email providers such as Google and Microsoft, they'll be like, oh, that's just, you know, another email in another mailbox. And then at some point when you're when you have done your warm up and I think like 14 to 30 days is kind of like best practice. Yeah, yeah. Then you start your campaign and you probably start your campaign with you don't push high volumes right away.

Artem Daniliants:
You start slow and maybe you start to reach, you know, once you start reaching, maybe, you know, one reply per 300 emails to, you know, or whatever. Once you see some traction, then you keep optimizing and increasing volume, right? And you keep looking at deliverability. If you see any issues, you kind of, you know, slow down and then kind of regroup, make changes and try again. But the point is always to get a reply. And then in smart late I think there is unified mailbox. So you can see all of the replies. And then you kind of, you know put both. Yeah.

Michael Benson:
That's a.

Artem Daniliants:
Female.

Michael Benson:
101 course right there.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just wanted to I just wanted to I just wanted to bring it up because I know, of course, you know, way more and you're at very like high level when it comes to especially technical details. But some people don't know how cold email works. Right. For sure.

Artem Daniliants:
Some people might be, watching this video and thinking like, what the hell is warm up? Well, what are these guys talking about?

Michael Benson:
There's a lot to it. And like, part of the reason kind of going back to your question of like, hey, when we don't let, like, people in, well, we actually try not to let kind of beginners into our system only just because, like, we're really designed for people who kind of have those initial templates or initial systems where they've kind of actually experimented on Google or Microsoft and said, hey, okay, like I'm getting some replies here. How do I how do I recreate this? And so, yes, you can go back and create a bunch of Google and Microsoft mailboxes, just like you did in the very beginning. but that's kind of where we come in. It's like in a few clicks we can create hundreds, thousands of mailboxes if you need. And that's actually where you can get the volume out. But yeah, kind of going back to basics when people are like, hey, how do I get started? I mean, you could literally, you know, like, yes, you mentioned like Claycomb is an extremely good tool.

Michael Benson:
I would say that's almost like cold email 102. I mean, even on the one on one side, especially because like when you get into claycomb like I, I'm a somewhat I consider myself like an intermediate engineer. I'm great at cold email deliverability, but from a code perspective, you know, I'm not the best. But when you like, I go into clay. I look at it and I'm like, oh my gosh, it's a little bit more overwhelming. So there are instances where you can start with just 100 mailbox or 100 emails as a whole. And and yes, not doing all the personalization of clay that I kind of talked about. But yeah, just doing first name, company name, maybe doing, location. And if it's only 100, maybe you can even hand type out just a couple of, like, personal notes to each one of those hundred. There's actually virtual assistants like on Upwork that can even help with that. It's essentially called like one liners to kind of help with there's even some tools out there.

Michael Benson:
But in short, you can kind of even like dumb it down and say, all right, you know, get one Google mailbox, get a smart lead account, do exactly what you described, and just send 100 emails and just look and see, like, did anybody reply? there's, you know, ideas around bounces. Like, if you're cold, email is bad enough. You know, even if it's a valid email, bounces still come back. So you can kind of like you can kind of take steppingstones where it's like, you know, we see it all the time. People come in and they're like, Mike, I want to send a million cold emails a month. My, my market is huge. What do I do? And I say, okay, well, how many mailboxes do you currently have? And they're like 1 or 2. And it's just like it's not, you know, depending on kind of how that like, campaign goes. Yes, you can kind of scale up to that volume, but you really need to start super small with, you know, maybe a couple of hundred and then you and then once you get a good benchmark on a couple of hundred, move that system in the clay with maybe 10 or 20 mailboxes, kind of get a little bit more volume out, see if anything breaks pretty quickly.

Michael Benson:
And then you can maybe upgrade to like a male riff where it's like, hey, and a couple of clicks. Like we can really kind of scale this out. But the cool part is, is you already have templates and models that already work. So we always say, you know, whatever, whatever works well, and Google or Microsoft, whether it's like there's all these tactics out there of, you know, do five mailboxes for one domain, or are you supposed to do one mailbox per one domain? Kind of. The idea is that a lot of that doesn't necessarily matter. It's all around kind of who you're emailing in the copy and are those being marked as spam. And so if you have something that works extremely well on one side, you can basically pipe it right in the mail reef. And it's actually, if anything, it's going to work better. I mean, you know, this this is almost an October 2024. there's actually a really big public LinkedIn case study right now, with a guy named Taylor where we're actually getting, over over a half a percent better reply rate than Google mailboxes.

Michael Benson:
And so, you know, so there are some nuances to like sometimes the mailboxes that you use aren't actually, like, it might not even be your fault. so there are a lot of little nuances. But the great part is just like if you start really small, at least get some benchmarking data. you can kind of go from there. but yeah, it's, it's really a lot of tweaking and improving and then kind of want something works well is when you can really like kind of put some gas on it. And that's kind of where we come in.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. Yeah. So you mentioned that you purchase or you rent I guess IP addresses. Right. And you hold them for a very long time. So what happens if you get a new client, right. And, everything is great, but then at some point they burn the IP. Sure. Right. So that could happen, right? They send 14, you know, million emails soliciting, you know, whatever or pitching, you know, or trying to sell Viagra or whatever else goes on every single black list.

Artem Daniliants:
What happens then?

Michael Benson:
Sure. Yeah. So one, one that was kind of when we first started the company, we were pretty like terrified of that because we were like, hey, we're the best way to look at us is we're a standalone infrastructure in the middle of the internet. Nobody knows who we are. You know, we're not Google, we're not Microsoft. We have no reputation behind us. And if anything, it's yes, IP addresses are always like old, right? We either if we rent them or buy or own their you know, they have history. If you go back to them they'll be like from the early 2000 or whatever. So basically the way that we get it to work is we connect our servers to like the warm up networks, like clients do it themselves and everything like that. They can pick whatever tool they want. And that's kind of what brings that standalone server into almost the realm of like, hey, this is recognized almost like a Google or Microsoft mailbox. And so, yes, blacklists, can happen from time to time.

Michael Benson:
We actually, we haven't been on a server level blacklist in a couple of years at this point. one thing that we have noticed is actually, sir, basically the way the structure works is you have a server, domains connect to the server, and then you got mailboxes. So it's kind of this three level thing. One thing we've really noticed is domains just burn out. And it's that's basically what you see on Google and Microsoft as you normally would. Servers are actually extremely resilient. I mean, it really takes a lot to get on a server level blacklist. And so like we we literally had a client, you know, we give benchmark data and we say hey, like just follow within these bumpers. We had a client send a million cold emails in seven days without warm up. and we we ultimately said, hey, you can't do this anymore. Like we were getting bounce backs and seeing that, but the server still didn't get on a blacklist, so it's a great example of that. But in turn, if if that were to happen, say, like either the server kind of loses its oomph and like you can kind of clearly see that no matter what domain you add to the server, the domains don't do well.

Michael Benson:
we do have the ability to pivot, but kind of going back to the earlier point is like we really even if we're renting them, we're like basically cleaning up, claiming ownership on them. If, if that IP is like bad, like we want to know why. And so that's kind of part of the reason why we also still do calls is like, we get to know you for, you know, maybe 15, 30 minutes. We, we at least have kind of a clear understanding of what you were trying to do in the beginning. And then we actually will review everything. We review the servers where you get the domains, who's replying back, what's a like the positive negative reply sentiment, all of that. We're basically doing an analysis and going, hey, do you deserve to get another server or not? And so, we have only replaced like five servers in the last two years. It's extremely rare. but it can happen. And sometimes, if you like, most of the time what we noticed, it's actually industry related.

Michael Benson:
So, you know, if you do like a lot of SEO outreach or something like that, where basically and especially to enterprise level. So like it's a lot easier to deliver to small, medium sized businesses than it is to email pharmaceutical companies or banks or something like that. And so that's kind of where, we kind of really do analysis and say, hey, like, do we swap this out? And then part of the reason is we we keep on to it, we hold it. We actually will use that server later for internal use after we repair it. So basically with our cloud providers, they give us IPS, but we actually in turn make them better. Like in some cases we actually get burned IPS from providers and we we recover them over a year's time. And so we actually absorb a lot of those costs to get them to, basically get cloud providers to work with us in a unique way. And so we're we're looking at spam complaints and everything like that too. So there's a lot behind the scenes outside of just kind of clicking a button and saying, hey, here it is.

Michael Benson:
But yeah, we have a really awesome team. So currently we're a team of eight, five people are actually on our infrastructure team. one of them actually built a 50 million mailbox network for a telecom company. So we have this kind of cool, scalable system. but really, what we've kind of achieved is this concept of, like, isolation. So if I give you one infrastructure and I give another client another infrastructure and say you meet up and reverse engineer it and look through it like nothing's the same. And so that's actually what allows us to kind of isolate and actually pinpoint issues if there ever are any. And then in turn, you know, your reputation is your, your own. So, you know, when you're emailing to a Google or Microsoft mailbox, it's not really the the waters aren't muddy for your specific server is kind of the concept. And so, that's ultimately like what we, we try our best to do is just saying every little thing that we do is just like, can we help you get into the inbox? And then part of kind of those onboarding calls we do is actually like an email deliverability course, like a 101.

Michael Benson:
So we have our first, our first sales rep started about a month ago, and the training wasn't like, hey, here's how you close a person. The training was, hey, I want you to be a top 1%, a 1% cold email deliverability expert, and everything else kind of goes from there. And so that's kind of how we approach it.

Artem Daniliants:
From a perspective of bad things will happen. You know, you know, you're my your server might encounter issues and so forth. It's how you deal with them. Right? So you want to work with providers that will help you, that will support you and so forth. So there are no perfect providers ever. Every single infrastructure is yeah, susceptible to issues and, you know, whatnot. You know, it's such. Yeah.

Michael Benson:
That's that that was one thing we noticed when we started male rep. So in the early days, it was just us. I mean, honestly, this cold email deliverability spaces is starting to be pretty popular, but we were literally by ourselves for like two and a half years just selling against Google and Microsoft.

Michael Benson:
And in the early days we were basically going, don't use Google or Microsoft like only use us. And over time, what we've noticed is really the cold email industry is saying diversification is the best. And so, we, we honestly work with like the biggest lead gen companies in the world. you know, some of them are listed on our website. The, the idea is that we're only typically a 50% or a 33% kind of cog in a bigger system. So when you get to the point of delivering, you know, millions of cold emails a month, you know, typically it's like Google and us or Google, Microsoft and us, and even in some cases, you know, depending on the other cold email infrastructure companies out there. I mean, we even see other like layers on that as well. And kind of the nice part is, is when you layer in multiple different providers on a campaign, if one mailbox kind of collapses, you kind of look at the other pool and say, okay, are they collapsing with it? And if so, if every if all the mailboxes are going down, it's actually saying that it's a copy or contact issue.

Michael Benson:
But, you know, say if just Microsoft's struggling in all three other providers are doing great, you know, you can you can say, hey, either that domain's dead or, you know, the pool that I'm on within Microsoft isn't great. And so that's that's kind of something that to kind of like remember too is just like domains burn. they kind of live its own natural life. So say you have the best infrastructure in the world, whether it's us or somebody else. you're really, you know, it's it's a domain could like, last three weeks or three years. And it all depends on, like, the number of spam clicks you have. So, so we see it all the time. We give you a great server, you put 30 domains on a server, five or dead, and people write in there like, hey, this one client's doing horribly, but these other clients are doing awesome. Like what? What's the issue? And we don't even have to look at anything and we just say, hey, those domains are likely dead or it's the client.

Michael Benson:
And so there are ways of testing that and doing some deliverability checks and stuff like that. You know, there's a great tool called like mail reach. I think actually some of the cold email tools in the world are going to start to kind of incorporate this a little bit more around the idea of like domains burning. So, basically your cold email infrastructure, it's this living, breathing thing that you always kind of have to work into. So, you know, the, the best experts in the world, you know, on the first of the month or the first of the week, they're buying new domains, whether they need it or not, in case a bunch kind of die out. And so, you know, as you're building, you know, as you're building systems and budgets. You have to kind of like remember that.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think what it comes to called email, if you are trying to reach people in the US, it's a lot hotter. But I noticed when you're trying to reach people in smaller countries like Finland, Estonia, countries, you know, where I have clients, it's a lot easier.

Artem Daniliants:
So. Right. You know, sometimes I've seen, you know, reply rates of, you know, 30%.

Michael Benson:
Right. Yeah. And I think I think part of that has to do with, people in the US are just so used to getting bombarded by cold email, I think, I think that's part of it. Right. Like even at my when we have the lead gen agency those years ago, you know, we never really did a targeted Europe campaign because like cold email is very popular in the United States. and it's definitely starting to become more popular around the world. But those niches are actually where we see a lot of like great success for like general agencies. so, you know, if you're just targeting, you know, in your native language in, in a, in a specific country, you know, for a product that's actually like good and looks like I always say that the website really needs to look good otherwise. Like you can really have skewed metrics across the board. But that's where we're actually seeing some like really good success too, because again, it's it's hyper personalized and it's hyper focused.

Michael Benson:
It's not like I'm just blanket emailing the world my product.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah yeah yeah I agree I agree. It's just that it was so funny when we saw some really good results, for example from Denmark, from Sweden, and we never seen anything like that in us. Never. So that was so I thought about it like, oh, maybe, you know, maybe this is good, maybe this is good, that like because of the GDPR and stuff like that, I think there is a lot of, a lot of additional barriers, right? Yeah.

Michael Benson:
Yeah, you definitely have to be careful. And, and in that case, you really have to kind of consult, you know, especially at anywhere in Europe. Like it's always good to kind of just like double check with a lawyer, but ultimately Obviously you really just want to be hyper, hyper focused and have an extremely clear like opt out link like and that. And that's something that that is extremely important. and like that landscape's always changing too.

Michael Benson:
People get harsher and that's, that's something that I always kind of be cautious about. And that's kind of why in the US it's a little bit more lax. You still need opt out mechanisms. We always suggest an unsubscribe link. and really like, like holding true to that because that's, that's really what, what keeps this industry intact is really like not spamming and actually being focused and actually reaching out to very specific people. And that's when we onboard people. That's ultimately what we're always looking for in monitoring too. And the great part is, is the feedback loop on that is actually a great system. So you're getting crazy bounce backs, or your mailboxes are getting burned in like two weeks or three weeks, like, luckily these algorithms are are great for kind of course correcting and saying, hey, like, you really shouldn't be sending these emails. And so like, you know, that's that's ultimately what we always look forward to. But yeah, like, like in Europe just kind of being hyper focused and, and and not doing a lot of volume, and having good opt out mechanisms that are really like, stable and compliant is really important.

Artem Daniliants:
Yeah. And just, you know, consulting maybe a lawyer, as you mentioned, or somebody who can.

Michael Benson
Tell you, yeah, this is not legal.

Artem Daniliants:
Advice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Who can tell you what you can do and what you cannot do. Of course. But I thought about it like we have a small SaaS product that we're launching. And I thought about it like, how can I utilize, you know, called outreach in this case. And I thought, I'm going to probably send handwritten emails from my own inbox to maybe like 10 to 20 people that I think would really benefit from our product. You know, no smart lead, no nothing. Just my as if I would reach out to any person. Right. And then see what resonates and then start building on top of that and not just going in and starting with, you know, like moderate volumes, but just kind of seeing that value prop. I think that's like what people forget many times that if it's not interesting, if you don't have the hook, no memory for Google, nobody will save you.

Michael Benson:
Yeah. No, no, I agree. I mean, even in the early days of Mail Reef, we we literally just like went to LinkedIn and we just said who's the most active people? And like, let's just email them and like see, see if we can get any reply. That's actually something that's like really interesting is a lot of people are focused on positive replies, which is obviously like the the end goal. But of course, like I, I actually say when I'm consulting on like copy, I say you gotta invoke some sort of reply like, you know, that is in some way not going to like return back like an extremely harsh negative reply. But like sometimes a negative reply is great because if you can kind of get a negative.