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Navigating Cold Email Strategies for B2B Lead Generation | Clay

01 Welcome and Intros

01 Welcome and Intros

Navigating Cold Email Strategies for B2B Lead Generation

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Hello everyone! Defintely count me in the newbies and ultra beginners not only on clay but on modern B2B online lead generation. I stumbled upon clay when watching a video of someone using clay. I''m making my way slowly through the 101 course... I'm at lesson 13. My needs are simple: I'm a coach of company leadership teams (I coach whole teams not individuals) for SMBs (10 to 250 employees) preferably in the Greater Montreal area. I'm confident I can use clay to generate an enriched table of relevant contacts, I understand using AI to personalize snippets to be used in cold emails, etc.. What I'm missing are some super basic surrounding pieces which are probably obvious to everyone here (sorry this may be in a future 101 lesson that I haven't done yet):

How will I be able to avoid my email domain being flagged and penalized as Spam?!
Are there tutorials available not on how to use clay per se but the do's and dont's of cold emails, i.e. what has a higher likelhood to obtain responses when writing to SMB owners, founders and CEO/COOs?

Btw up to a few days ago when I found out about clay, I was planning to only network in person to generate leads and close clients. I can the the appeal of using clay though to obtain more leads more quickly! Have a great day all! -Patrick https://strativa.ca/

7 comments

Etienne G.
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Salut Patrick ! You’ll need to send your emails from another tool (Apollo, Lemlist, Outreach, etc). To make sure you’re not getting flagged as spam, it’s good to use another domain (one you can lose if things go badly), warm up that domain (send emails from it to train Gmail, etc), set up DKIM, DMARC, etc, etc. How big is your list? LinkedIn could be easier for this.
Sourabh
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Etienne G. great advise for Pat, you also need to be careful about bounce rates and using a highly targeted list. Good that you are investing your time into this. Usually agencies are hired to get this done...
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Patrick C.
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Thanks Etienne G. and Sourabh. I just learned this morning - just now - how to set up DNS records for DKIM, SPF and DMARC, even BIMI... So much to learn 😅 I opened an account with MailerLite to have two newsletters - one for people interested in my journey wrirting a book (about 80 people registered with people in my network being 1:1 interested) and another one ready to be used but I haven't started with it yet (still learning). Etienne --> is there any resource you can point to so I can educate myself on this workflow - tools to send emails / using other warmed-up domains / etc... I also plan to use LinkedIN a lot
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Etienne G.
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Hi Patrick, My pleasure. I’ll send you some info on LinkedIn tomorrow. :-)
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Piotr M.
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Patrick C., multiple things, and most of them are not as simple as they sound. Domain
Make sure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are properly set up
Always warm up your email accounts, choose a good warm-up tool carefully (some warm-up pools are already burned)
Buy aged domains (2+ years old)
Warm up for at least 31 days, spammers usually do 2 weeks, which is not a good strategy
Avoid sudden increases in sending volume, don’t send more than 150 emails per day per domain
It’s better to have 20 domains with 3–4 mailboxes each than one domain with 200 mailboxes
(There are advanced ways to send thousands of emails from one domain using expensive SMTP infrastructure, but don’t go down that path unless you really know what you’re doing)
Recommended volume per mailbox: 15–30 emails/day
Have sets of infra that you’re using smtps, google, hypertide
Warm-up
Warm-up should be continuous, keep warming up the mailboxes on the days you’re sending from them
Data Validation
Use Debounce and BounceBan for catch-alls
A bounce rate below 1% is achievable, I’m getting less than 0.5%
Copy
Write emails that you would actually reply to
Use lead magnets
Use spintax or AI to keep content varied
Include low-friction CTAs
Limit campaigns to a maximum of 2 messages
Sending
Always pause a campaign if real response rates drop below 2%
Your sending platform matters
Rotate domains every 2 weeks to keep a clean reputation
Be consistent, if you’re sending 100 emails per day per domain, stick to that every day, whats even better is starting from 50, next going to 75, next 100 🙂.
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Patrick C.
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Piotr M. very generous answer thank you so much!!
Piotr M.
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This is 5% of what you need to know hahah
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