Mastering Cold Email: Ultimate 2025 Guide for Business Success

What if I told you that all my success in business actually comes from a single skill that I learned more than 10 years

ago? By mastering this skill, I was able to print money in any business I started, including my Inc. 5000 PR

agency with over 60 employees. Now, unlike learning AI or paid ads, which let's be honest, are going to be

worthless in about 2 years anyways, learning this skill will keep you rich forever, or at least until we're all

plugged into machines. Now, the skill I'm talking about is cold email. the single highest value skill that you can

learn in business. See, with paid ads or social media or SEO, you've got to spend thousands of dollars and you have to

rely on platforms like Google and Facebook not to screw you over, and they always do. But with cold email, you're

in control and you can reach millions of future clients for pennies. Now, in 2024, I made a cold email master class

on YouTube that went insanely viral. Over 150,000 people watched hours of video and thousands of them scaled their

businesses to 50K per month and beyond. And I've loved hearing about their wins inside of our free community. But a lot

changes in a year. And some of the tactics that we're using now make me feel like I'm living in 2050. We're

currently generating over 4,500 leads every day for our companies and for our clients. So for those of you that think

cold email is dead, grandma's about to turn over in her grave. Because in this master class, I'm going to be taking you

from total beginner to setting up your own cold email system that actually works and generates leads for you on

autopilot, all for under $100. And for those of you that think you're advanced, don't get cocky and skip chapters

because I guarantee the basics were not the same as they were in 2024. But also, don't worry because I'm going to be

showing you some absolute ninja craziness that would even make Tony Stark a little bit turned off. Okay,

strap in. This is going to be a long one. I encourage you to take notes, bookmark this video, skip around using

the chapters as needed, and come back to this video anytime you hit a roadblock. This video is my gift to the online

marketing community. Everything that I've learned in over a decade of cold email for free, no holding back. All

right, let's get this party started. So, why listen to me in the first place? Well, if you don't already know who I

am, my name is Lee Jen J and I actually launched my first marketing agency while I was in medical school. And I was able

to scale that marketing agency to $600,000 per month using nothing but cold email. I then left my medical

training 4 years ago to go into business full-time. And since then, I've been building marketing agencies using cold

email. Now, two years ago, I decided I wanted to start teaching. So, I launched this YouTube channel and I've been

helping other companies implement these same systems and I've built over 250 custom cold outreach systems for a ton

of different types of businesses. I'm talking about companies that sell cows to farmers, lots of marketing agencies,

obviously, consulting companies, B2B service companies, SAS companies. I'm even helping a guy in Africa right now

sell gold from miners directly to consumers. Reason I tell you that is because this stuff works. And if you're

watching this and you don't have an offer yet, this could be the offer that you're looking for. I'm also the owner

of the cold email secrets community on school. We've got around 18,000 members at the time of recording. And according

to Instantly AI, I'm the number one cold email expert on YouTube. And I've got an award back here from them somewhere. So,

what are you going to learn if you make the conscious decision right now, today, to sit here and master this skill? And I

promise it'll be the best investment you've ever made into yourself, into your business, and into your future.

Here are some of the comments from people who sat and watched this video in 2024. Now, that one took me weeks to

record and even more weeks to script out and put together for you guys. So, if you want to get results like that, then

make sure to take this seriously. You're going to learn how to build highly profitable cold email machines for under

$100. You're going to learn step-by-step technical setup, the domains, the mailboxes, what software is needed. I'm

going to tell you exactly which tools to use and why. And no, this video is not sponsored. I'm going to show you how to

make cold email work for your boring offer and how to automate the entire process, including replies. And here's

just a little preview of what this looks like when it's fully deployed. You just have a system of qualified leads

responding to you, booking calls, and purchasing without you having to lift a finger or do any manual prospecting.

You're going to learn really advanced tools and tactics like here with this clay table. And guys, there's going to

be a lot of information here, probably way too much for you to sit down and memorize all in one sitting, unless

you've got some insane photographic memory. But for those of you that are normal humans like myself, I've put

together some really nice reference material for you. The complete presentation, a PDF Spark notes of this

entire video, some helpful links and resources, copy and paste templates, and a few additional perks in there like

some setup services, some copywriting services, all that I'm offering you guys for free just for giving me your time

and attention. to grab those resources. All you have to do is go inside of that free school community. It's going to be

linked down in the description and it'll be one of the first things pinned. All right, so what is the outline? What are

we going to be learning today? Drum roll. Kind of a big outline, so brace yourself, but I want it to excite you

cuz this is what's coming up next. There's going to be zero gaps for you to fill from beginner to advanced. You're

going to learn everything, including a lot of really well-kept industry secrets that I will be telling you all about in

this video. Starting with why cold email and common misconceptions. What's the difference between warm and cold email?

Some of the different tools and costs associated with running these systems. And is cold email dead? We're going to

be talking about the fundamentals and the basics. Now, even advanced people don't skip this. This is going to be the

three pillars of cold email. The most important lesson by far. Then we'll go into technical setup for beginners. How

to buy domains, set up mailboxes. We're going to be talking about Google vers Microsoft versus SMTP and other mailbox

solutions. We're going to walk through the software setup and I'm going to make it really easy even for beginners. What

software to use, how to configure that software, the warm-up settings, everything that you need to know. We're

going to be talking a lot about deliverability. So, some of the technical requirements, email warm-up,

and how that works, and how to diagnose it and fix emails going to spam. And this isn't just going to help you for

cold email. This is going to help you for email in general, which is the best marketing platform, whether they know

who you are or not. And if you're in spam, you're going to be wasting tons of money. We're going to talk about list

building, finding your ideal avatar or ICP. We're going to talk about B2B databases versus scraping leads versus

some advanced stuff known as signals. We're going to chat about list verification and qualification, some of

the tools and workflows that I use, how to do catchall verification, and how to do AI qualification, which is something

brand new that we're doing a lot of in 2025. We're going to chat about your offer and how to make it work for cold

email. So, creating offers for beginners, making your boring offer not boring, different baiting tactics that I

use to get people to reply to my cold emails, and then we're going to chat about some lead magnets, ones that work,

ones that don't, ways to do lead magnets right in 2025, and something I like to call reverse lead magnets. We're going

to spend a lot of time on copywriting. We're going to go through some of the secrets. We're going to talk about the

triple tap, the dos and don'ts, personalization, syntax, and how to write copy that gets through the spam

filters and into the inbox. I'll walk you through how to manage your cold email system once it's actually live.

How to add new leads, manage your replies, and then actually use a cold email CRM. Then we'll go into scaling

your cold email machine. I'm going to talk to you about what I like to call the equation, which I'll be giving you

and help you calculate some stuff, the team SOPs, and how to scale a system to 10,000 cold emails every single day.

Then we're going to get into the advanced stuff. Now, if you're an advanced user, don't skip through the

beginning stuff. Even if you know how to set up mailboxes, watch it anyway. Things change a lot in this space and

every marketing space from year to year. So, even if you think you've mastered this stuff, I promise you there's a lot

of new stuff to learn. All right, so the advanced stuff, we're going to talk about signal workflows, basic signals

versus advanced signals, and different signal automations that you can set up. And I'm even going to be giving you some

templates to those signal automations if you want to try them out. We're going to be talking about Clay and how we're

using it for AI personalization at scale, AI qualification, and really just speeding up the entire workflow and

making it all work. We're going to talk about reply automation, so speed to lead, and coming up with thoroughly

researched replies on autopilot. I'm going to show you the basic way to do it all the way to my replyji system that I

will show you how to build. Now, we're going to chat about omni channel outreach, also known as multiplatform or

multi-channel. So expanding your machine well beyond just cold email and adding in SMS, voicemail drops, direct mail,

and most importantly, retargeting ads. And finally, we're going to end off with the future of cold email, where I see

this going in 5 10 years, how autonomous BDRs are developing. And guys, I'm at the forefront of all of this stuff. If

somebody has an interesting tool, I'm one of the first people they contact to test it out. So, I'm going to be sharing

some of those findings with you and what to expect from them. I'm also going to be discussing some long-term risks,

fears, and how to protect yourself in the long run. I plan on using cold email as a cornerstone of my business for the

next 20 or 30 years. That's why I've invested so much time and energy really mastering this stuff because I think

it's one of the only marketing platforms that are going to be reliable in that time frame. So, does that all sound good

to you? If you're excited and ready to continue, let's go. And guys, reminder, this is not a sponsored video. So, if

you want to support this channel and thank me for putting the months of time and energy together that it took to

create this video, please like and subscribe to this channel and join our free lead generation community. I invest

a lot of time and energy into that as well. That's where the resources are. It's going to be linked down below. All

right, let's kick this off with why cold email. Some common myths and misconceptions. But first, we got to

define some things for you. I can't tell you how many conversations I have with people who are doing cold email for the

first time and don't even understand basic terminology. Now, if you're advanced, just bear with me for a

second. Cold email is emailing people that don't know you to tell them about your thing. Cold outreach in general is

to people that don't know you. Think about door knocking, cold calling. It's all the same thing, just a different

channel. And this has been around since the early '9s, since email's been a thing. It's been used by huge names like

Alex Herozi who talks about this in depth in his books and in his podcasts as well as the biggest SAS companies on

earth. Salesforce, HubSpot, all of these guys are using cold email as a cornerstone of their marketing strategy.

And there's a reason these big players invest so much time and energy and money into cold email. And that's because it's

where the most qualified leads come from. And the best part is it is completely legal. We'll talk about that

more in depth in just a second. cold email verse warm email. The question you have to ask yourself is at any point did

they opt in or agreed to receive emails from you or is it the first time that they've ever heard of you? Well, if they

ever agreed, maybe they signed up on a form on an iPad, they went on, they booked a meeting with you, if they opted

in, they gave you their info, then it's a warm email. Warm leads belong in your CRM, your main CRM, whether that's

Mailchimp or Active Campaign or HubSpot or Salesforce or go high level. Cold leads belong in a separate area

altogether. This is a cold email CRM or a cold email software like we're going to be talking about in this video. Once

they give you their info, they become a warm lead. Even if you already have their email, they don't become a warm

lead until they opt in. They fill out a form, they book a meeting, take some sort of action. Only then should they go

into your main CRM and should be considered a warm lead. We're going to be referring to warm leads as your email

list and your cold leads as a lead list or a cold email list. All right. Why is cold email so powerful? Why is it way

better than all of the other marketing strategies? There's a lot of reasons, but here's the five main ones. The first

is you get to reach your perfect ICP every time. On Facebook ads, you end up with a lot of really unqualified, not

business owner leads. With cold email, you get impressions and traffic for less than a penny a lead. You compare that to

any other ad platform and it's like a 100x cheaper. You're also not dependent on ad platforms. Google can't just shut

you down like Facebook can and take away your biggest source of leads. You are in control and nobody can do anything about

it. Next is it's scalable and predictable. If you've got a sales team of three people and they're trying to

take six calls a day, all you have to do is run the equation and decide how many emails you have to send to keep their

calendars booked. You can't really say that about any other ad platform at all. Lastly, you get immediate results. Yes,

I have a YouTube channel and a lot of leads come from my YouTube channel, but that took years to build. If you're

trying to win on social media or SEO, this is going to take you years to maybe get some results. With cold email, it's

almost instant. You turn on the machine and leads start coming in. So, who can benefit from cold email? Is it a good

fit for you? Are you wasting your time watching this? Well, if you have any sort of B2B or businessto business

product or offer, then cold email is perfect for you. And for those rookies who don't know the difference between

B2B or B TOC or how to tell if your offer is B2B versus B TOC, the question is if your offer is B2B, that means that

you sell to somebody who runs a business and you can find them because they're the owner, founder, CEO of a company in

an exindustry. And as we go into list building, this is going to start to make a lot more sense. But essentially B2B,

you're selling something to other businesses that they can use for business purposes. Marketing agencies,

consulting offers, SAS offers, these are all B2B. Now B TOC, business to consumer, this is more like ecom or

mobile apps on your phone that you can't really target by industry or job title. This is just everyday consumers that use

your stuff. Now, cold email does work for B TOC. I've built campaigns to sell high-end jewelry to collectors. I've

built campaigns to sell solar panels to homeowners. All of this stuff is possible if it's a higher ticket offer

and product. Some of the most common use cases, coaches, agencies, software companies, business services, but the

range is massive. This is not really for low ticket products that are sold directly to a person like this yerba

mate I'm drinking was about $4. And if you're trying to sell this directly to me, cold email is not the way to do it.

But if you're a BTOC company and you sell yerba mates and your goal is to establish partnerships and distributors

and you want to be in Publix and Walmart and Target, then you would use cold email to establish those relationships

with those distributors and retailers. God, I love this stuff. There's also one thing that people miss. There's a lot of

companies that are doing cold email without even knowing that they're doing cold email. My PR agency, for example,

we don't just use cold email to get clients for the agency. We're also using cold email to operate the agency. Our

service is getting in touch with journalists and reporters to write stories about our clients. How do you

think we get in touch with those journalists and reporters? If you guessed cold email, you're absolutely

right. So, any business that uses cold email to operate their offer should also pay extra close attention to this video

because it's going to help you overperform on delivering your offer as well. Now, I told you if you didn't

already have an offer, we're going to be chatting about that. This is it. If you master this stuff, you can use cold

email as an offer and it is one of the best offers on earth because of how versatile and results driven it is. With

cold email, you can produce direct ROI for clients and show them how much money you're making them. The goal for any

recurring offer is to create enormous pain if they decide to cancel that service or turn it off. If you can make

somebody money and show them that you're making them money, they're never going to want to turn it off. They're going to

be dependent on you to generate the leads. and we're going to talk about some of the different models that are

involved in launching cold email as an offer. You can do an agency model, you can do a one-time fee to build and then

you can do a pay per lead model. And like I already mentioned, there's a lot of different use cases for cold email

that's not just lead generation. So, if you learn this, you can launch a podcast booking agency, an influencer management

agency, you can launch a staffing company. All of these are different business models that use cold email as

their core offer. Now, I said you'd be learning how to set this whole thing up for under $100. So, here are the tools

that you're going to need and the costs associated with running a cold email system. First thing you're going to need

is a cold email management tool like Instantly or Smart Lead or Reach Inbox. And these start at around $37 per month.

And don't worry, we're going to be breaking down these tools in just a little bit. You're going to need access

to leads through either a lead database or a lead scraper. Using the recommended tools that we're going to chat about,

it's about $50 per 10,000 leads. So, now we're at about $87 per month to reach out to 10,000 leads. The last fee is

paying for the domains and the mailboxes. The domains don't really have a monthly cost, so I'm going to ignore

them and just talk about the mailboxes, which are $3 per month per mailbox on average. So, you can run this system for

well under $100 every single month. Now, as you scale this, obviously, you're going to need to buy more leads and add

more mailboxes and increase your subscription on these cold email management tools. So, I spend thousands

every single month managing my cold email system, but I spend tens of thousands every month on paid ads, and

cold email is still the top performing marketing channel I have by far. And I spend a fraction of the price that I

spend on other marketing channels on cold email. Therefore, it is the best value of any marketing channel by far.

Now, the tools that I'm going to recommend are not sponsoring this video or paying me, but if you do decide to

use any of them, please use my affiliate link. They're going to be down in the description. It helps support the

channel and will probably get you a nice discount. All right, common misconceptions. Cold email is easy. All

you got to do is upload some leads, start sending some emails, and then leads should start coming in, right?

Wrong. That's absolutely not true. This stuff is not easy. In fact, no marketing channel worth its salt is easy. There's

a lot of competition, and in order to make something work, you need to be an expert. You need to go through trial and

error. And there's 10,000 things that can go wrong. That's why I really want to focus on those three pillars that

we're going to be talking about in the next module. They're so important and if it's not working, you need to come back

to them. Lastly, you need to not take shortcuts unless I say so. Don't try and cut costs. Don't try and save money.

This stuff is hard enough as it is. If you use the wrong tool or take a wrong turn, none of it will work. Another

misconception, and this one's the opposite, cold email is dead. Not to age myself, but I've been doing cold email

for over 10 years. This stuff has changed a lot from when I started to where it is now. And I've talked to a

lot of people who were doing cold email successfully a decade ago, 5 years ago, and then it just all of a sudden stopped

working and they turned it off. Those people say cold email is dead. But I guarantee they have not been keeping up

with current trends, current tools, and the new practices that are working. We are getting more leads than ever using

cold email. And yes, deliverability is harder now, but the tools and the practices are better. and all of your

potential clients still use email and as far as I know always will. But with that being said, even though it's not dead,

the competition is getting fierce. And yes, I am partially to blame for that. So my bad. Another common misconception

that cold email requires technical skills. The answer is no. You can launch a cold email campaign in as little as 30

minutes. And I'm going to show you the easiest ways to do it. When I first started, you needed to understand DNS

records and how it all worked and how to set it up manually. Now you don't need to do it anymore. The new tools and

services that are available and I'm going to be showing you how to use make it laughably easy. That way you can

focus on the stuff that really matters, the hard stuff, which is the list building and the copywriting, which

we're going to talk about. Do you think cold email is expensive? Well, you're wrong. This is by far the most

affordable marketing channel, hands down. Can't even compare it to any other one. Lead data is nearly free and it's a

race to the bottom. It is getting easier and cheaper to access the data and the data is getting more and more accurate.

Mailboxes and infrastructure is getting cheaper and cheaper. You can launch tons of mailboxes in minutes for super low

prices and you can run your entire system for under $100 per month. And the best part is you can scale it up once

you actually prove that it works. All right, now we're going to talk about the fundamentals, the three pillars of cold

email. So imagine there are three pillars holding up your cold email castle. And if one of the pillars is

weak, the castle comes crashing down. Now, let me break something to you. Cold email does not work for six out of 10

people. Just like social media and ads, you can't just set it up and expect the money printer to go br. But with trial

and error, every single business can make it work within 60 days. I've personally built over 250 systems over

the past 10 years, and they all work. But you have to get these three things right. These are the three pillars of

cold email. If your system is not working, look at these pillars. And if it is working, but you want to improve,

you find the weakest pillar. Here are the three pillars of cold email marketing and how to make sure that they

are strong. Pillar number one is the technical infrastructure. This is the boring nerdy stuff that used to scare

people away from cold email and we're going to be talking about it in this video, but the technical infrastructure

essentially is the mailbox configuration that you need to hit the inbox and not get flagged as spam. Now the good news

with the technical infrastructure is all you have to do is follow a recipe. Do this then this then this and you'll end

up in the inbox. So some things that are involved in the technical infrastructure are the domain configuration. This is

the DNS records, the DKIM, the demark, the mailbox configuration where the mailbox is built and how it's set up.

The software setup, this is the software that's sending your cold emails and warming up your cold email mailboxes.

Now, pillar one is the easiest one to get right because all you have to do is follow a system or use a tool that does

this for you. And I'll be walking you through how to do it yourself and the best tools and ways to go about this.

But if you take shortcuts, your technical infrastructure is going to be broken and you're going to be stuck in

spam and it's not going to be working and you're going to be wondering why. This crap is hard enough as it is. Don't

take shortcuts. Don't cut costs. Follow what I say and this will work. Pillar number two is list building. This is

finding people who are actually a good fit for your offer. Making sure that their emails are actually valid,

qualifying your leads just to make extra sure. So remember, the worst thing that you can do is get marked as spam. Too

many people mark you as spam, it's not going to work. So to avoid getting marked as spam, your emails have to be

relevant, which means you're emailing relevant offers to relevant people. For example, I don't have babies. So if you

send me an email offering some service for child care or babies, you're getting marked as spam. But if you send me an

offer for a SAS tool that helps me set up mailboxes, that's relevant. That's something I'm going to open and be

interested in. So, we're going to talk a lot about list building. This is very, very important. In fact, each of these

pillars is very important. That's why there's only three pillars. And number three is probably the hardest, which is

probably why we'll spend the most time on it, which is offer and copy. This pillar is the hardest one to get right

because there's not a simple template or recipe that I can tell you to follow that's going to get you to the perfect

offer and copy. Everyone's offer is different. Your ICP is different. The problem that you're solving is

different. And the more different it is, the better cuz it means it's not a crowded space where everyone's trying to

sell the same thing and you become a commodity just competing on price. So, some things to think about to win on

pillar three is does your offer solve an actual problem? And is it interesting or is there anything about it that you can

make interesting? You need to think about how do you get that lead who doesn't know who I am to open my email,

trust me immediately, and then give me an interested reply. When you're writing copy, you need to think, will it even

reach the inbox? And then, what sequence of emails do I use? How many days in between? All of that stuff we are going

to cover inside of this master class. And I'm going to show you how to get this right. But keep in mind, it's not

easy. Now, I get a lot of people who watch my YouTube videos and they see some of the really advanced stuff that

we're doing and they're like, "Well, I want to do that." And they reach for the advanced stuff before they've understood

the fundamentals. And this actually ends up hurting their campaigns as opposed to helping. So, I thought it was worth

making a slide of its own on fundamentals versus fancy BS, aka, you know, AI. Usually, most of my most

successful campaigns don't have some fancy AI personalization. We're not doing custom AI generated videos in our

best performing campaigns. In fact, you should only consider using some of the advanced stuff after you master the

pillars, the fundamentals. Fundamentals beats AI fancy stuff every time. But once you get a grasp over the

fundamentals and you have an offer and a list that's working and receptive, you add a little fancy and now you've got

some actual magic. All right, time to jump in. We're going to knock out the nerdiest, hardest stuff first. This is

going to be the technical setup for dummies. Now, 99% of people take one look at the cold email setup

instructions and they run away crying like a little girl. But what if I told you that the hard technical stuff is

actually the easiest part as long as you follow a few simple rules. Now, I'm going to make technical infrastructure

so easy that you will never flinch when you see a demark record ever again. So, let's get nerdy, my cold email Jedi.

Let's go. Now, quick warning here. If you miss a step or take a detour, you're boned. If you use the wrong software,

you're boned. If you try to cut costs with an alternative, just follow my instructions and use my recommended

tools and you can't f this up even if you try. Now, I'm going to call somebody out here, one of my best friends, Jesse

Henry. He's actually just living with me in my penthouse for about a month and a half. And I was trying to help him with

his cold email, and he asked me for help to look at his cold email campaigns that just weren't working. Now, I figured

stupidly, this is my bad, that he had all of the technical stuff done right. After all, with what I'm about to teach

you, how can you not? So, we did a deliverability test and we learned that all his emails were going to spam. So, I

checked his technical setup and he had made all of the cardinal mistakes. He took detours. He tried to save money and

use the wrong software and everything was broken. I basically had to rebuild his entire machine from scratch. So,

don't be like Jesse. Focus. Do this right the first time and you're going to save yourself so much headache and so

much money. All right. Now, I'm going to go over to my whiteboard and I'm going to show you how this all works. And I

need you to promise me not to freak out. You don't need to memorize this, but it's important to understand how it

works. That way, if something's broken, you know where to look. Now, I'm going to walk you through exactly how to do

the technical setup yourself, cuz it's important to know how it all works. But it's important to know my team can just

do it all for you. And the technical setup is the easiest part to get right. There is no reason to f this up because

if you do, your whole system breaks. So, no excuse for getting this wrong. And side note, setup is 100% free for

members of my insiders program for you and for your clients. So if you're offering cold email as a service, we'll

also do it for your clients. So to access this, just go to leadjenj.com/inbox

and we can do the setup for you. All right, so first let's talk about the three pillars of cold email. I'm going

to draw it like a pyramid for a specific reason. Pyramids have a foundation. They have a center. They have a top. Now with

cold email, if the foundation isn't solid, you've got no chance. So, the foundation of this pyramid is the

technical setup. So, I'm going to write technical. If the emails aren't hitting the inbox

and the technical setup isn't sound, then you have no chance at making this work. Now, in order to make cold email

work, you need all three of these to be structurally sound. The technical setup, this is the domains, the DNS records,

the mailboxes, the technical configuration of your system. The next layer of this pyramid is your list. If

the technical setup isn't good, the rest of it has no chance of surviving. So, the list, who are you actually sending

cold emails to? If the people you're emailing are the right fit for your offer, if the data that you're working

with is correct, then you have a chance of making this work. If this is not correct, you're sending emails to people

who are not a good fit, maybe the wrong industry, the wrong job title, maybe they're retired, maybe you have the

wrong email, then whatever you do up here doesn't matter because your system is not going to have a chance of

actually working. You need to hit the inbox of the correct person. And then up top, we've got copy.

Now, say you've hit the inbox, you've hit the inbox of the correct person for your offer. Now, you need to be able to

get them to open, to read, and to respond to your cold email. So, this is your setup. If the base is not solid,

the technical foundation, which we're going to talk about in detail on this board in just a second, then the rest of

it doesn't matter. Because if you're not in the inbox, your targeting and your copy have no chance of actually getting

through and working. If the emails go to the wrong person, meaning the email is invalid, you're emailing people who are

clearly not a good fit for your offer, wrong industry, job title, company size, they don't actually have the problem

that you're trying to solve, then anything you do up here doesn't matter. So, it's really important to think about

this bottom up and as you're building your system and testing your system, making sure that your technical basis is

solid and then that your list is solid, everybody that you're emailing is a good fit and valid. And only then should you

worry about your copy. So, now that you understand this, I'm going to go ahead and break the technical aspect of cold

email down. The domains, the mailboxes, the DNS records, the servers, the IP addresses. I'm going to make it all make

sense right here just so you can understand what's going on and where things can go wrong. So, let's go ahead

and go to a new page. All right. Now, let's talk about the technical setup. There's a lot of moving pieces that

bring a cold email from your mailbox to their inbox and not getting it flagged as spam or not getting it lost. So,

let's break down some of those pieces and how they work. And if you understand this, you're gonna under you're gonna

have a lot easier of time figuring out why your technical setup is not working and actually solving it. So, let's break

this down into the simplest terms possible. To send an email from your mailbox to their mailbox, you need a

couple of things. The first thing you need is a server, like a computer, that actually sends the data from your system

to their system. This is an IP address. The IP address is linked to those servers to those computers. Now,

typically when you're using like Gmail or Microsoft 365, you're using their computers. You're using their IP

addresses and they're in charge of keeping those IP addresses and computers clean and valid and trustworthy. The

next thing that you need to send an email is a domain. So, a domain is like jotterpr.com.

The otterpr.com is the domain. So, we need a domain. Now, just like a website, a domain is

hosted with an IP address with a server. So, these these three items are all going to be linked together. The IP

address, the domain, and the mailbox. Once you have these three things, now you can actually start sending cold

emails. And I labeled them from top to bottom because of the importance. So the IP address, all of these items are items

that the email service providers, ESPs will look at and say that's trustworthy, that's trustworthy, that's trustworthy.

Each of these have a has a reputation score that will either go up or down over time depending on how people handle

those emails and depending on how those domains are configured. So from top to bottom of importance, the IP address,

the computer that that's coming from is unbelievably important. That's why we tend to recommend using Google or

Microsoft IP addresses, Google or Microsoft mailboxes. That's what that means. And then there's the domain.

You'll typically buy that domain on a site like GoDaddy or Spaceship or Pork Bun. Where you buy it is your domain

register. that that doesn't really matter so much because it's all kind of the same thing. Where that domain's

registered now and where that domain's hosted is a different thing. But wherever you buy this domain, you're

going to have to give it some instructions. Where is this domain going to be hosted? What email service

provider is this domain going to use to create mailboxes. All of those things are in the domain's DNS records. These

DNS records are instructions for that domain to to tell it how to operate. And the ESP, the email service provider,

will look at the DNS records to make sure that it's secure, to see where the domain is hosted, to see where that

domain resolves. For example, otterpr.com goes to a real website. If that autopr.com resolved at a dead link

or redirected somewhere else, the email service providers would know that as well. And then once you have these two

things set up, you've got your Google Workspace or your Microsoft Workspace, you've told the domain that's where

you're setting up email addresses, now you can start configuring mailboxes under that domain. And all three of

these things have reputation scores. They're all important, but the IP address is the most important, followed

by the domain's reputation score, followed by the mailbox, which has individual reputation scores as well.

Now, the reason this is so important to understand, so imagine a bunch of people report this single mailbox. Maybe we've

got a 100 mailboxes and everybody reports one mailbox as spam and the reputation score goes down and we lose

this mailbox. We can no longer send emails from this mailbox because they're all going to spam. Well, this domain is

still okay. This IP address is still okay. We can still make more mailboxes under this domain. We can still put more

domains under this IP address and it's all going to be just fine. But what if multiple mailboxes get flagged as spam?

Or what if you email a spam trap and your domain ends up on a blacklist? Well, if that domain ends up on a

blacklist or the domain's reputation score drops too low, then all of the mailboxes underneath

also get blacklisted and will start going to spam. That's why it's increasingly important to keep the

domain health, the domain reputation, domain score high. That's also the main reason that we don't like sending cold

emails from our primary domain. Our primary domain is sacred and it happens all the time. People will use their

primary domain to send cold emails and it actually works better for a period of time because you've already built trust

and reputation score for that primary domain, but then you make the wrong move. You send emails to the wrong list

and your primary domain ends up on a blacklist and now your whole company is affected because the domain is more

important than just the mailbox itself. All right, so what about these IP addresses, these servers? Now, in

general, if you're using Google or Microsoft, they're going to be responsible for keeping those IP

addresses, their servers healthy. So even if you do a blacklist check and you see that some of these IP addresses are

blacklisted, Google and Microsoft are typically changing those out, warming them, keeping their IP ranges healthy.

So you don't have to worry about this part at all. Now, as it currently stands, Google is still beating

Microsoft for cold email. The deliverability is higher even to Microsoft. That's why for cold email as

it is right now, we're still recommending Google servers, Google IP addresses. Now, what you're probably

going to be tempted to do, and I've fallen into this mistake as well, is to cheap out on the mailboxes, and there's

a lot of services now where you can spin up hundreds and hundreds of mailboxes for less than a dollar a piece. And if

you do decide to use one of those services like Infamail or Mailin, you'll be able to scale a huge infrastructure

of cold email mailboxes. The problem is you only get one IP address and there's nobody else in charge of keeping that IP

address clean except you. So if something bad happens to that IP address and too many people mark it as spam, you

email spam traps or for whatever reason that sometimes is out of our control and unpredictable, the ESPs

will block that IP address and say that we're no longer accepting emails from that IP address. So, you're going to see

your bounce rates go up and you're going to stop landing in the inbox. And what happens if your IP address goes down? If

the server reputation becomes too low, all of this stuff gets banned. All of the domains under that IP address, all

of the mailboxes, and your cold email system will tank overnight. All right. So, what do you do to give yourself the

best shot at hitting the inbox, not getting flagged as spam? Well, you want to do what you can to control your IP

range. So you'll use Google to set up your mailboxes. Problem solved on the IP address. For the domain, the biggest

factor that you can control is the DNS records, which means you do not want to send a cold email if you don't have a

demark record, a DKIM record, a valid SPF record. And you can just go and check that really quick using any free

free tool that's going to be linked down in the description and inside of my resources packet. And then the last

thing that's under your control is the reputation score. So, how do we build reputation of our domains, of our

mailboxes, of our IP addresses? We send good emails for a long period of time. So, age and reputation score is under

your control through time and through email warm-up. So, if you want to increase the score and give yourself the

best chance, the longer you wait, the better. Typical rule for domains, cuz domain age is so important, at least 30

days. Ideally, 60 to 90 days, but 30 days is the minimum before you should start sending cold emails from that

domain. And then the mailboxes, you want to be warming up from day one. Once you create these things, you should be

warming up progressively. And we're going to talk about recommended warm-up settings when we get to that section.

But those are the things within your control. That's what you need to do. Now, let's talk about on the recipient

side. So, this is your leads inbox. This is the person that you're emailing and they're receiving that email and you've

got an ESP on their end, an email service provider that they're using to actually control the flow of emails

coming in. That could be Microsoft, that could be Google, that could be Yahoo. And they all handle this a little bit

differently, but they all kind of look at the same key factors. Let's move that over here. So, here's that leads inbox

is coming in. They're looking at the DNS records of the domain. Is that domain secure? One of the things these DNS

records do is tell the recipient that the email is actually coming from that person. It's not being spoofed. That's

essentially the whole purpose of the DKIM record, the demark record, the SPF record. It's all there for

security. You need to have them and it's just saying that email is coming from that person and not being spoofed. The

other important thing that they're going to look at is the copy. So, they're also screening the emails coming in to say to

see what those emails say. Now, Google and Microsoft are obviously much more advanced when it comes to screening copy

and leveraging AI to do that. So, it's really important. It's a key factor in getting through to certain mailboxes is

what you say. If it's bouncing or you're ending up in spam, one of the first things that you should look at is what

are you saying in the copy and how can you change it? What spam words or phrases are you using that could be

triggering those spam detectors? We're going to talk about that a lot more in detail when we get to the copywriting

section. And now, the other thing that they're looking for is the reputation. and not just the reputation of the

domain, the reputation of the mailbox, the reputation of the IP address. So, if you're sending from Google or Microsoft,

chances are that's going to look good to Google or Microsoft. And as it stands right now, Microsoft accepts Google

actually just as much or better as it accepts Microsoft. But Google still delivers better to Google. That's why

we're still recommending Google for cold email infrastructure. But they're looking at the reputation of that domain

as well as the age of that domain and the reputation of the individual mailbox. But domain reputation, we

actually can monitor, especially how Google looks at your domain or Microsoft looks at your domain. We use a tool like

Google Postmaster to do that. We're going to talk about that more in detail in the deliverability section. And they

actually tell you IP reputation, domain reputation, so you can see if any of those things are affected. Now, if all

of this looks good, the email ends up in the inbox. So, let's talk about buying cold email domains. What service should

you use to buy them? Does it matter? How do you acquire them in scale? I'm going to be walking you through all of that

step by step. Now, there's a few different options where you can acquire domains. I like to purchase them through

a platform called Spaceship. There's also GoDaddy, Pork Bun, Cloudflare. A lot of people use different domain

purchasers and they think that it makes a difference. Now, the big difference for me is that Spaceship makes it really

easy to buy them in bulk, to find available domains. It's really affordable to acquire domains and to

renew domains. For example, on GoDaddy, you can get it for $12 for the first year, but on renewal, it doubles or

triples in price. So, let's actually go into Spaceship and buy a couple domains and set them up. Spaceship is

essentially designed so that you can buy cold email domains in bulk and manage them in bulk. So, what we're going to do

is we're going to go to all products, domain name search. Now, what's so cool about spaceship is this beast mode. It

is made for finding cold email domains at scale. So, TLDDLs are the end of a domain name. Right now, it's got all of

them activated. I'm going to X that out. I only want dotcoms. Couple reasons for it. They instill trust faster than

others and they're cheaper.io's are cool, but they're like three or four times the price of dotcoms. I'm gonna

enter in some keywords that I want my domain to contain. So let's say instead of Otter PR, my business name was Beaver

PR. So I want to enter Beaver. So I want some brand recognition there. And then I want to enter some other keywords that

can go along with it. Uh viral media, PR, public, public relations. Now spaceship

is going to start to create variations using these different keywords. And chances are viralmedia.com is not going

to be available, but viralbeaver.com is likely available. So, it's probably going to have most of them containing

Beaver. There's also other filters you can use, but I don't like to use them. I like to hide unavailables. And where

this gets really cool, I'm going to go ahead and apply this first and see what what's available without using any of

the domain hacks. And we're going to generate. All right. I don't think any of these are available, which is

typical. This is why we need to use the domain hacks. What we're going to do is we're going to use prefixes and

suffixes. It's going to automatically generate the most commonly used prefixes and suffixes. So, when I was giving you

the example myotterpr.com, getterpr.com, these are all ones that are used inside of these prefixes and you can add your

own. Once you add these, you can go ahead and apply. And now it's going to start giving you tons of options of

domains that you can acquire. So, as you can see, the domains are $8.88 to acquire and $10 per year to renew. This

is infinitely cheaper than using something like GoDaddy. And I can just add all to cart really quickly and

acquire domains in bulk. I'm going to go ahead and buy publichubs.com cuz that one's kind of cool and I feel like I

could use it for other stuff. And I'm going to go ahead and purchase this domain. Now, you don't need to activate

any of this stuff. It's registering for 1 year. Privacy is included. GoDaddy just jacks up the prices on all of these

things. They should not be that expensive. This is what you should pay. So, we're going to go ahead and pay now.

And just like that, I own the domainhubs.com. And now there's a lot of stuff that I

can do with this domain. So I need to manage it. Specifically the DNS records, the back end of this domain. I need to

tell this domain what to do. So to manage my domains, I'm going to come into Launchpad

Domain Manager. Now let's walk through a couple of the things that are available to me. Name servers and DNS records. So

name servers are where that domain is being hosted. I bought it on spaceship. So right now it's on spaceship. Usually

it defaults to wherever whatever registry you use to buy the domain. Wherever these name servers are pointing

is where I need to go to control the DNS records, which we'll talk about in just a second. Now, if I wanted to move this

domain to Cloudflare, for example, I would just have to update the name servers and then I could use Cloudflare

to control the DNS. The other option here is adding DNS records. So, these are things like the CNAME record, the MX

record, the A record, the DKIM, the DMARK. These are all MX records and you can do that just by simply adding

records here. This is how you do it manually one by one or you could do advanced DNS records where you can do

things like upload. Next, you'll see URL redirect. So, where do you want this domain to redirect to? Obviously, this

isn't a real website. Obviously, pubhubs.com is going to go to nothing. So, let's go ahead and just try it.

Obviously, the site cannot be reached because there is no website. There's nothing there. So, what I want to do is

do a permanent redirect to otterpr.com. So, I'm going to do www.otterpr.com. That way, anytime someone visits the

website.com, it'll automatically redirect to my actual website. Now, it's also important

to note here that any change you make to your DNS or your name servers or redirects don't happen immediately.

There's a little bit of a delay that we call propagation in the infrastructure world. So, if you make a change and it's

not perfect or reflecting right away, just be patient, hang in there. Usually, it's just a few minutes, but sometimes

it can be hours. All right, so that's how you acquire domains and control your name servers and DNS records and URL

redirects. Now, some people like to bring their name servers off of Spaceship and into Cloudflare for a

couple different reasons. One, it's a little bit more secure. You can manage your DNS records all in one place. And

if you're interested in learning how to do that, you can watch my full spaceship walkthrough linked down below. But 99%

of people don't need to do that. It's not super important. and it has not been proven to increase the results of your

cold email campaigns. So, for simplicity sake, you can just manage all of your DNS and keep your name servers on

spaceship. So, again, that bonus info on moving your domains to Cloudflare worth an honorable mention, but I'm not going

to be walking you through that in this video because honestly, I don't want to confuse you and add too much. You don't

need to do it. It has not been proven to really improve results. I've tried both and I've tried multiple domain

registers. Spaceship works great. All right. Now let's talk about configuring the domains. There are certain DNS

records also domain name system is what that stands for that tell the domain what to do where to point is it

authenticated uh is it secure and private and you need to have these DNS records done correctly if you want your

emails to go to the inbox not to spam the forwarding domain we just talked about and that's how that works. And

then lastly custom tracking domains which were a big thing back in 2024 2023 less important now but I'll show you how

to set them up. All right, so let's talk about some of these core DNS records. And just to close the loop, you saw me

change the forwarding domain to otterpr.com. It took about five minutes for that redirect to actually take

place. This is the propagation. Now, when I visit publicHubs.com, it redirects to otterpr.com as intended.

All right, so let's set the DNS records up for this pubhubs.com. What do I actually have to do to make this thing

work? I've got this domain. How do I create mailboxes? How do I get the DNS records on there? and what DNS records

do you need to use? Then we'll do the custom tracking domain. And if you don't know what a custom tracking domain is,

these are specific domains used by the email sending software to track certain actions like clicks and opens or for

unsubscribe links. Now, cold emailing in 2025, we never add tracking links to cold emails. They cause the emails to go

to spam. And the recommendation right now is that we do not use them. So, if we're not using links and we're not

tracking things, do we need the custom tracking domain? Not really. But standard practice is to set it up

anyways. And if you use our setup service or other setup services, they'll always set this up for you and add it to

the domain. Let me just show you what this looks like in practice. I'm going to go into one of my campaigns. Now, as

you can see, no links, nothing to click here. But if I wanted to add an unsubscribe link here, I just click more

rich. Insert that unsubscribe link. Say what it says. And now when you click on this

link, it's a link generated by Instantly AI that basically tells them that person unsubscribed. Now, if you don't have a

custom tracking domain in there, they use their link. And if it uses Instantly's link, that is the easiest

way on earth for Google or Microsoft to say, "Wow, I see Instantly AI's link. this is a cold email. Let's send that to

spam. That's why you need those custom tracking links if you use unsubscribe links or if you track opens. Another

honorable mention here is domain masking proxies. This is a cleaner way of doing domain forwarding. So, if you saw in my

example, it redirected me to otterpr.com. An alternative way to do it is to add a domain masking proxy. And

there's services you can use for this like email guard where instead of redirecting to otterpr.com it'll still

show that you're on publicHubs.com but it'll look like otterr's homepage. It's a masking proxy and I've tested it

against doing it the forwarding way and there is absolutely no difference. That's why we don't use them anymore.

It's just an additional step in the process. The original thought is that it would improve email deliverability and

that has not been true yet. I do have a free video on my channel about how to set up these domain masking proxies if

it's something you're interested in, but my advice is don't worry about it yet. There's no additional benefit. All

right, let's do a live DNS record setup. Uh, and just to be frank, I haven't done one of these in probably years because

my team does all of it now. The service does all of it now. So, if you want to leverage that service, all you have to

do is go to lead genenj.cominbox and our my team will be able to set up all of your mailboxes for you. But with

the service, you just tell us how many mailboxes you want. We can also purchase the domains for you, so you don't even

have to worry about that part. And it just walks you through the entire process really nicely. But with that

being said, let's go ahead and set up the DNS records in a mailbox forhubs.com.

Now, if you're doing this yourself and you want to use Google Workspace and you want to pay $8 per mailbox, you can go

ahead and click get started and then sign up for a Google Workspace account for your business. I of course already

have hundreds of workspaces, so I'm going to skip the setup process and skip right to setting up the domain. This is

what Google Workspace is going to look like once you're inside. Now, you're going to want to have to add your domain

first. You're going to come into accounts, domains, manage domains. And by the way, guys, you can pin this

stuff. So, it's already up top, but I wanted to show you where to find it. Look at all these domains that I already

have verified and activated inside of my admin panel. We're going to go ahead and add another domain. We're going to put

only the domain. I'm going to skip the stuff before and after. And we're going to set this up as a secondary domain.

We're going to add domain and start verification. Okay, it wants me to verify ownership.

So, select my domain host. I'm using a different host, so I'm going to go ahead and continue. And I'm going to have to

verify these manually. Now it wants me to verify by adding these records to my domain. So first is a txt record name

set to default value is this TTL set to the lowest value or default. So let's go ahead and do that. Now I've

copied the value. We're going to come in. I'm going to go into name servers and DNS. Add a record.

And now we're going to click txt. So when it says the default, that usually just means at. So I'm going to add that

at sign. I'm going to paste the value and TTL. This is like how long it takes to propagate. So you saw how long it

took for the forwarding to take place. If I make this 1 minute, it's going to propagate a lot faster. The other thing

that I'm going to do here, it wants me to use txt as the primary verification method, but it also gives me a secondary

method, which is the CNAME record. I'm actually going to do both just to make sure that this goes through without a

shadow of a doubt. So, I'm going to copy the name and we're going to add a CNAME record.

Now, this is the host. This is where they want me to put that information. And then let's come back to domain

setup. The value for that came record here. And again, TTL, we're going to do 1

minute. Okay, they've both been added. We're going to continue. The DNS is propagating. Hopefully, it goes pretty

quickly. And then let's verify that this is set up correctly. So, confirm. Getting my domain ready. Beautiful. It

was verified successfully. Now we have to activate Gmail. They're going to help me set it up. It's probably going to be

more DNS records. So now that my domain is verified, I'm actually going to click do this later. Now, as you can see, that

domain is here in manage domains. I'm going to go ahead and add a user here. So let's just add myself and create

user. Okay, I'm just going to grab this info so I can log in after the setup is complete and show you that it works. And

let's go ahead and click done. Now I want to verify that domain. So let's come into manage domains, public hubs.

We're going to activate Gmail. Now, we need to set up the MX records. This is telling that domain how to exchange

emails between other domains. So, we're going to go ahead and set up those MX records.

Continue. Proceed with activation. Different host. And now we have to put

in the MX records. So remember to copy the points to priority one. So MX records also have a

priority attached to them. So let's go ahead and come back into DNS settings and add some more records. And we're

going to have to add a few different MX records. So MX at value

priority 1. And now I can keep the TTL standard which is 30 minutes. Let's go ahead and

save all. Okay, confirmed. Just like that, I'm verified and ready to start using Google. I can now send

and receive emails from that mailbox. So, let's go ahead and log into it just to show you. Open up a private browser

and log into that mailbox that I have just created. All right. So, as you can see, it's now a functional mailbox that

I can do lots of stuff with. I can add this to different platforms. I can sync it to instantly. I can start sending and

receiving emails from this mailbox. I'm going to skip this password thing right now. And now I'm going to finish the

configuration, the DNS configuration. So the mailbox is created. Great. But is it going to hit the inbox? Probably not

because that domain doesn't have all of the m all of the DNS records that it needs yet. So let's actually scan this

thing. We're going to use a free tool called easydmark.com. I recommend that you use this as well.

It's free and does just about everything that you're going to need. So I'm going to come in and scan this domain. By the

way, I'm on easydmark.com. We're going to come into tools. And here's all of the mailbox and domain tools that you're

going to need. Domain scanner, DNS record checker, and it'll kind of tell you what you're missing, too. So, let's

go ahead and scan that domain, and see what's on there so that I can add the things that it needs. So, you can see

risk assessment is high. It doesn't have an SPF record, a demark record, a DKIM record. So, the ESPs, email service

providers, are going to see this and they're not going to allow that email through. So, now let's correct these one

by one. So, if you come into your Google Workspace and type in DKIM up top, you'll see DKIM authentication. Google

actually has a built-in tool to help you authenticate the emails. So, we're going to go ahead and select the correct

domain, publish.com. And we're going to generate a new record. You can go ahead and just

generate based on this. This looks fine. And now we're going to have a txt record and a value. So, let's go ahead and copy

this into our domain manager. I'm in the advanced DNS now just to show you the difference.

And we're just going to add a couple records. We're going to add a txt record. Here's that new one. This is the

value Google domain key. And then we're going to grab the record value.

And once we've got that new record in there, we're going to go ahead and add. And then we can start authentication.

And Google's going to check to make sure that demark record is actually correct. And it warns you. See, uh, it may take

48 hours for the DNS records to fully propagate. So now that the DKIM records in there, let's go ahead and do the

DMARK and the SPF records. So let's come back into easydmark.com. I'm going to leave this open. I'm going to open up an

additional tool. Let's go to SPF record generator and we're going to go ahead and use their kind of standard

recommendation. So I've got pubhub.com. Let's go ahead and generate that record. Okay, it's saying this record is valid.

Cool. So let's grab this value. And notice how the host is just the domain itself. So when you see that that you're

going to use just an at sign. So let's add an additional record. It is a txt record.

It's going to be at and then the SPF value will go here. And now we've got an SPF record. The