Create a cold email campaign, step by step

The three workstreams, and which one to start first

A cold email campaign rests on three independent things, which you can prepare in parallel:

• Sending mailboxes able to land in the inbox. This is the longest workstream, and the one that sets your launch date: you need to buy a domain, set up authentication and warm the addresses up for two to three weeks. Start there the day you decide to go.
• A contact list that is fresh and well targeted. A few hours of work, and it can be fixed right up to the last minute.
• A message sequence that makes people want to reply. You can write it while the mailboxes warm up.

Step 1: create the campaign

In the left-hand menu, open Campaigns, then click New campaign at the top right.

12

• 1Open Campaigns in the left-hand menu.
• 2Click New campaign.

Step 2: start from scratch or from a template

A window opens. Give the campaign a name: it is how you find it in the list, your prospects never see it, and you can change it later. Then pick your starting point.

From scratch gives you an empty canvas that you fill step by step. Templates offers five ready-made sequences. A template sets the structure and the delays, never the copy: every step comes in empty, and you write each message yourself. Afterwards you can change anything, add or remove steps, adjust the delays.

Here is what each of the five templates contains, as it is built in Emelia:

123456

• 1The Campaign Name, which you can change later.
• 2From scratch: an empty canvas.
• 3Templates: five ready-made sequences.
• 4Pure Cold Email: five emails, about 43 days.
• 5The LinkedIn and multichannel templates follow further down the list.
• 6Create opens the campaign builder.

Step 3: switch the panel to Email mode

The builder opens: the sequence canvas on the left, the Campaign Settings panel on the right. At the top of that panel are three tabs: Advanced, Email and Linkedin.

There is only one campaign builder in Emelia, but if you are doing pure cold email, click Email. The LinkedIn settings disappear from the panel, and the add-step menu only offers email steps: everything becomes easier to work through.

1

• 1Click Email to show only the email settings.

Step 4: choose your sending mailboxes

Under Connected accounts, click Select a provider and tick the mailboxes that will send the campaign. You can pick several: each contact is assigned a mailbox at the start, then all their follow-ups go out from the same address, in the same thread.

If you have not connected a mailbox, set up your signature or configured your tracking domain yet, now is the time. These settings are done once and serve every campaign.

1

• 1Select a provider: tick one or more sending mailboxes.

Step 5: select your contact list

Under Lead list, two cases. Either you have already imported a list, and you just select it. Or you do not have one yet, and you click Create a new list: CSV file, Sales Navigator, HubSpot or Pipedrive.

You can select several lists in the same campaign. A contact who appears in two of them only receives the sequence once: the campaign recognizes them by their email address, or by their LinkedIn URL when they have no email.

1

• 1Select a leads list, or create a new one.

Step 6: exclude lists

Just below, Lead exclusion lets you point to lists that must not be contacted: existing customers, prospects already worked in another campaign, a colleague's contacts. Any contact from your lists who also appears in an excluded list, by email or by LinkedIn URL, is removed from the campaign.

This becomes essential as soon as you run a second campaign: nothing is deduplicated automatically from one campaign to the next, by design, since you may want to get back in touch with someone.

Not to be confused with the blacklist, which lives in your account settings and applies to every campaign: that is where you block a domain or an address once and for all.

1

• 1Select lists to exclude.

Step 7: sending days and hours

Open the Time block. This is where you set the Time zone, the Active days, and the Start time and End time of your sends. By default: Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Emelia spreads the day's sends across the whole window, nothing ever goes out in bulk. A short window does not lose you any volume, it squeezes your sends together, which is worse for deliverability: prefer a wide window, 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. for example.

Pick your prospects' time zone, not yours. There is only one per campaign: if your target spans several countries, choose a middle time zone and a wide window.

1

• 1Time: time zone, active days, start and end times.

Step 8: sending limits

In Sending cadence, two settings concern email, and mixing them up is the number one cause of a badly calibrated campaign. New contacts / day (email) counts the people the campaign writes to for the first time. Maximum emails per day counts every email that goes out, first messages and follow-ups together. Both apply per mailbox.

Once your mailboxes are warmed up, our recommendations are 35 new contacts per day and 100 emails per day in total, per mailbox. These are also the default values.

Why two numbers so far apart? Because a sequence stacks its steps. On day one, the campaign sends 35 first messages, and that is all. A few days later, it sends the second messages to those 35 contacts while starting 35 new ones: you are at 70 emails in the day. Then 105 when the third step kicks in, and so on.

That is why you should not be greedy with new contacts. If the running total goes above the daily limit, Emelia has no choice but to delay steps, and your follow-ups lose the rhythm you planned. The panel warns you, by the way, if your new contacts equal or exceed your maximum emails.

The third line, New contacts / day (Linkedin), only concerns LinkedIn steps: it disappears in Email mode.

123

• 1Maximum emails per day, follow-ups included, per mailbox.
• 2New contacts / day (email), per mailbox.
• 3The LinkedIn setting, hidden in Email mode.

You will read far lower recommendations elsewhere. That is not absurd, but it cannot be judged in isolation: the volume you can hold depends on your personalization, the quality of your list and how varied it is. If you would rather stay at fifteen or twenty emails per mailbox, go ahead, it will cause no problem at all.

Step 9: when the sequence stops for a contact

Scroll down the panel to Condition to stop. This block decides which event takes a contact out of the sequence. By default, Replied email and Replied linkedin are on: as soon as a prospect replies, they receive nothing more from this campaign, whatever their reply says. That is the behavior you want in almost every case.

Opened email and Clicked link are off, and that is for the best: as the tooltip says, these signals are not 100% reliable, since a firewall or a security filter can open the email or click a link instead of the recipient.

12

• 1Replied email and Replied linkedin: on by default, keep them.
• 2Opened email and Clicked link: off by default.

Step 10: open and click tracking

The Tracking block holds two switches: Track opens and Track link clicks. They are off by default on a new campaign.

As long as they stay off, two yellow alerts tell you that conditions based on opens and on clicks won't work: an “If prospect opens Email” condition would then send everyone down the No branch. For a straight sequence with no conditions, these alerts do not concern you.

If you turn tracking on, set up your own tracking domain: it carries the links and the measurement pixel of your emails.

12

• 1Track opens and Track link clicks.
• 2The alerts: without tracking, open and click conditions do not work.

Step 11: the other settings

The last block, More settings, groups options that are useful in specific cases:

• BCC (optional): an address in blind copy of every email sent, often your CRM's so it keeps a record. Be aware, as the tooltip says, that it skews the open rate.
• Add to the blacklist if the prospect clicks the unsubscribe link: unticked by default. When ticked, the unsubscribed address joins your account's blacklist, and no campaign will write to it again. Without it, the person still leaves the current campaign.
• Don't send messages to prospects the account has already had a conversation with (LinkedIn): only concerns LinkedIn messages. It disappears in Email mode.
• Never-ending campaign: for a campaign that is fed continuously (automation, API, synced list). It never switches to “finished” on its own.
• Don't count automatic replies (out-of-office) as replies: unticked by default. When ticked, an out-of-office message no longer stops the sequence, and the follow-ups carry on. Emelia recognizes these replies by their technical headers and their subject line, never by their content: a “stop” typed by hand is still a real reply.

12345

• 1BCC (optional): blind copy, to your CRM for example.
• 2Automatic blacklist when the unsubscribe link is clicked.
• 3A LinkedIn-only option, hidden in Email mode.
• 4Never-ending campaign, for lists that keep growing.
• 5Out-of-office replies are not counted as replies.

Step 12: build the sequence

On to the canvas on the left. At first it only holds the Start block: click the + below it to place your first step. The Add a step menu opens, with two tabs: Steps, which carry out an action, and Conditions, which route the prospect according to what they did or to their data.

Pick Send an email. Do it again with the + below that step to add the next follow-up, and so on. Each new step comes with a one-day delay, which you change by clicking on it. The first email goes out as soon as you launch.

In Email mode, the menu only shows what concerns you: Send an email, Manual task (an action you will do yourself, a call for example) and End of campaign. In Advanced mode, as in the screenshot, you also see all the LinkedIn steps.

And here is the advice that will save you the most time: for plain cold email, do not tie yourself in knots over conditions. Four or five email steps one after the other, well-set delays, and you are done.

123

• 1Click the + below the last block.
• 2Steps tab: the actions.
• 3Send an email: the basic step of an email campaign.

Step 13: write the message inside a step

Click a step to open it. Two areas are waiting: the Email subject, then the body of the message.

In the subject line, you can insert variables, meaning the columns of your list, and some spintax to vary the wording from one send to the next. The first email must have a subject. The follow-ups go out in the same thread.

In the body, type your message. To insert a variable, click Add variable or type a forward slash: the suggestions appear under the cursor, along with the signature, your templates and attachments.

Do not forget the signature at the end. It is the one you set up for your mailbox, with your name, your company and your job title.

The Add version button creates a variant of the same email, to compare two wordings on one step.

A word about attachments, which you will see in the suggestions. People asked us for this feature for years, so we built it. But offering it does not mean recommending it: in cold outreach, an attachment is one of the most expensive mistakes you can make for your deliverability. If you have a document to share, put in a link.

Step 14: test, then launch

Five minutes that catch the mistakes you stop seeing after too many rereads: a misspelled variable, a dead link, a missing signature, a stray “Hi ,”. In every email step, Send a test email sends it to you with the data of a real contact from the list. Run it from the last step to see the whole thread.

When everything is ready, click Launch the campaign, at the top left of the builder. The ⋮ menu right next to it offers Schedule launch, to pick the date and time of the first send.

If something is missing, the launch is refused with a message saying what to fix: no mailbox selected, no contacts, an empty email, a first email with no subject, or no contact with an email address in the list.

12

• 1Launch the campaign.
• 2The ⋮ menu: Schedule launch.

Once it is running

To change a running campaign, pause it first: while it runs, its settings and steps are locked. You can then fix the copy, the delays and the settings, and add steps at the end of the sequence. When you resume, Emelia reschedules everything, taking into account what each contact has already received.

Two situations then keep coming back. The campaign sends nothing, and there are a handful of possible causes, nearly always configuration. Or it finishes, and all those contacts who never replied are still sitting there: going back to them always costs less than building a new list.

How long before the first meeting

You work the numbers backwards. Count roughly a hundred delivered emails for one meeting. At thirty-five new contacts per day per mailbox, a single mailbox reaches a hundred people in three sending days; the full sequence, follow-ups included, then takes several weeks to play out.

Add the two to three weeks of warm-up beforehand, and you have the honest answer: between the day you buy the domain and the first meeting, count on six weeks or so. Anyone promising you better is not counting the warm-up.