How to do cold outreach using https://apollo.io from what I understand. Note I am using 5 dummy domain emails here, and you need the Apollo pro plan to connect 5 mailboxes. Each one is sending ~10 emails a day (will ramp to 50/day each once the emails are seasoned). ## Basic flow: 1. Register new dummy domain (I recommend cloudflare) 2. Add domain to Gsuite 3. Create Gsuite email for new domain, and add a profile pic to the new email user 4. Add DMARC, Tracking Alias, and Redirect to DNS (Cloudflare) 5. Import the new emails into Apollo and start your outreach with a low amount of sends per day (10/day to be safe for brand new emails from what I've read) ## Buying alias emails Basically, when you buy a domain and first setup an email, your emails will probably end up in spam. That's why you want alternative emails. For example, if my domain is [Pandem.dev](https://pandem.dev) - I don't want to use [email protected] to automatically send things. If I get unlucky, or enough people mark the cold outreach emails as spam, it'll hurt the entire domain authority of pandem.dev and blacklist our real domain's email going forward. So instead I bought 5 domains (via cloudflare, makes the setup super simple): trypandem.dev usepandem.dev pandemout.dev pandemoutreach.dev pandemfor.dev and I created a gsuite account, and setup an email for each domain with a profile pic. ![[Pasted image 20240506160312.png]] ## Warmup Most people say you should warm your email up for 4-12 weeks. There are a lot of free email warmup tools out there, but I went ahead and set things up with Apollo anyways, and just set a super low sending limit for each email. Personally idk if this'll hurt or not, but I didn't want to wait 3 months to start outreaching. I might buy 5 more domains and start the warmup process for them so if this fails, in 3 months I'll atleast have 5 emails to fall back on. ![[Pasted image 20240506160449.png]] ## DNS setup I used cloudflare to manage my domain, so Google was automatically able to add the proper MX and TXT records needed in order to connect it to Gmail. Additionally, you'll want to setup DMARC and a tracking CNAME for Apollo. #### Dmarc ![[Pasted image 20240506160627.png]] Record type: TXT Name: `_dmarc` TTL: `Auto` Name: `v=DMARC1;p=none;sp=none;pct=100;rua=mailto:[email protected];ruf=mailto:[email protected];ri=86400;aspf=s;adkim=s;fo=1` replace `[email protected]` with the name you'll have in gmail. i.e [email protected] #### Email tracking alias Apollo gives you the option to add a subdomain on your domain to track open rates, spam rates, etc. You need a CNAME pointing something like `emails.pandemout.dev` to `aplolinks.com`. ![[Pasted image 20240506161221.png]] Then when setting up the email on Apollo, you just put that in the tracking field. #### Alias to your main site You'll probably also want to setup redirects for the 5 dummy domains to your main domain. It's pretty simple to do that, just follow this cloudflare guide if using cloudflare: https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/setup/manage-domains/redirect-domain/ Basically you add 2 "A" (alias) records, then create a Redirect Rule in the Rules tab. ![[Pasted image 20240506160811.png]] ## Sequence & Emails From there you can use Apollo to research potential customers, and create an email sequence. I'd recommend A/B testing a bunch of headlines and email texts. For more tips on email best practices, checkout [[5. Launch MVP (how to find your first 10 customers)]].