Daniel Shnaider is the co-founder and CEO of Warmy.io and AnyBiz.io — two companies focusing on AI-driven marketing initiatives and improving the overall email marketing experience for businesses across different verticals. An entrepreneur by heart, Shnaider is a former military officer with three academic degrees, and he is in love with emails. His email journey started when he developed a solution for his business needs.
He joined MailCon on Aug. 4 to discuss how to deliver conversion-driven cold emails and share his top tricks on how to be good at doing so through MailCon’s webinar series.
Shnaider covered four areas of cold emailing:
- The rules of cold email deliverability
- Writing and executing cold emails
- Creating a successful cold email sequence
- How to find the right prospects for cold emails
The following is a breakdown of our key takeaways from Shnaider’s webinar.
Email Remains One of the Top Marketing Channels for Businesses
When it comes to emails, we all know the return on investment is tremendous — about $42 for every $1 spent. But what most forget is that email is also the most cost-effective channel to obtain customers.
So why not leverage it to gain better conversions and outreach?
Well, according to Shnaider, it’s because many businesses lack the capacity, knowledge, and expertise in cold emailing to get results. And as mentioned during the webinar, “Cold emailing is an art and science that requires expertise to get results.”
Where do you gain that expertise?
Shnaider’s first rule is to never send cold emails from your primary domain. Instead, he suggests buying a new domain, forwarding it to your website, then connecting your mailboxes to the new domain to ensure thorough connectivity.
Then you get into setting up the nitty and gritty (but very important) details that help prevent your emails from being marked as spam:
- Sender Policy Framework (SPF) defines the servers and domains that are authorized to send an email on behalf of an organization
- DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) signature adds a digital signature to every outgoing message, allowing receiving servers to verify that the message came from a verified organization.
- Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance or DMARC allows you to tell receiving servers what to do with your organization’s outgoing messages that do not pass SPF or DKIM.
- Profile photos and signatures. For help, check out this handy guide on how to set up an email signature.
After setup, it’s go-time!
Prospecting, Finding Emails, Verifying Them
After a successful setup, it’s time to gather your target email list and send them personalized emails. To do that, think about the following questions:
- Who are your clients?
- Where are they from?
- Who are the decision-makers at these organizations?
Find these contacts and verify them. This is how:
- Check the email syntax
- Ping the server
- Send them an email from a different account
- Conduct a DNS lookup
- IP address lookup
- Use email verification tools
Remember that a verified email will not bounce. You want to ensure that cold emails are as seamless as possible, so verifying your emails will help you avoid negative marks on your domain reputation.
Building a Cold Email Sequence & Crafting a Message
Shnaider suggests that cold emailers conduct one introductory email and have five follow-ups with the prospect. Experience has shown that with every follow-up, response rates become more consistent after several follow-up emails.
But what do you include in a six-part cold email chain?
Shnaider recommends that you craft a personalized email with no marketing jargon, links, attachments, or bolded text. Instead, he says that the best tactic is to write these emails as you would to your friends or colleagues, all while asking yourself, “if I received this message, would I respond to it?
General best practices:
- Avoid including pixels to measure open rates
- Measure reply rates or engagement rates instead of open rates*
- Make sure that follow-ups are short and to the point
- Always A/B test your emails
*As a general rule of thumb, a 25% or higher reply rate is considered successful.
Follow this Q&A to learn more about Shnaider and what has shaped his innovative thinking and expertise around emails.
Getting to Know Daniel Shnaider
What is Warmy.io? What’s the mission behind this innovation?
My company sent a few thousand emails daily and had no tool that could help us fix the deliverability with the number of emails we sent. We also sent emails in languages other than English for different industries, so we needed to find a tool to help us do that. So we designed one that targeted all of our pain points.
We know that you’re also the co-founder of AnyBiz.io; how does that business model connect to Warmy? How do they support each other?
Yes, Warmy.io and AnyBiz.io were one product in the beginning. A few of our users asked for one feature or the other, and we decided to split the product into two. In the background, both tools work together to achieve great results for email marketers.
Why did you choose “cold emails” as the focal point for your webinar with MailCon? Tell us a little about the industry need that prompted your coverage of this topic.
Cold emails gave me everything I have today in terms of business. Actually, in any business I ever started, I used cold emails to acquire a customer because it is the most affordable and cost-effective way to do so.
So I started learning how it works and the tools and solutions I needed. It was challenging because cold emailing is an area and science you need a lot of knowledge to succeed.
Many companies have started disengaging the thought of cold calling. How does cold emailing differ in this case?
The answer is simple; everything depends on your target audiences and what you are trying to sell to them. These are two different channels that fit different products and companies.
What is cold emailing, and what are its foundational pillars of success?
A cold email is an initial email sent to a receiver (usually not expecting to receive these emails) to gain a benefit in terms of sales opportunities or other mutually-beneficial agreements.
The two most important things with cold outreach are all the technical configurations and the messages we send to these prospects.
Are cold emails underrated? Why or why not?
Cold emailing is difficult, but whoever is good at it will generate a lot of clients and revenue for their business. Not everyone is ready to learn how to do it, so it becomes unattainable, and people prefer to move to other areas. Remember, cold emails are the most cost-effective form of customer acquisition.
How does Warmy.io help companies increase deliverability?
With Warmy, users can simply just set and forget with full automation. They can connect their mailbox and let “Adeline,” Warmy’s artificial intelligence engine, warm up the mailbox at an optimal pace. The system analyzes hundreds of parameters daily, interacts with real people on the user’s behalf, and ensures every email hits the inbox.
How do automation and personalization work together with cold emails?
The answer to this is simple! Every single email should be personalized and backed by automated processes to ensure a faster and better outcome.
What makes an email campaign successful? What are the most underrated KPIs?
The one fundamental metric that we always have to work to improve is the reply or engagement rate. All the others are important, but this metric will give us real value and outcome for our marketing efforts.
What should an email marketer always remember when writing a cold email?
Always remember personalization, follow-ups, and A/B testing.
Bonus: Tell us a fun fact that none of your colleagues know about yourself.
My dream is to climb Mount Everest and send an email from the highest place in the world.
Do you like what you see? Stay tuned and connected with MailCon to get to know more industry rockstars covering the ins and outs of email and omnichannel marketing.
