Can You Still Use Cold Email Marketing In 2025?
Can you still use cold email marketing to launch and promote your membership website at the beginning of 2025
Is cold email marketing still effective in 2025? Learn how to use this strategy to build your business and drive growth.
Are you considering cold email marketing to kickstart your membership website in 2025? In this video, we unpack the relevance and efficacy of cold emailing in the current digital landscape. Learn about innovative approaches, essential tools, and real-world examples that highlight how you can maximize your reach. Join us as we guide you through the process—watch now to unlock the secrets of successful email campaigns.
#1 – Introduction To What Is Cold Email Marketing?
#2 – Who Are The Gateway Providers?
Email Service Provider (ESP)
An ESP, or Email Service Provider, is a platform that allows businesses to send commercial and transactional emails, manage subscriber lists, and ensure email deliverability.
Secure Email Gateway Providers (SEGs)
Secure Email Gateways (SEGs) are cybersecurity solutions that protect organizations’ email systems from threats like spam, phishing, and malware by filtering emails as they enter or leave the server. Barracuda Networks notes that they act as a first line of defense, preventing malicious emails from reaching inboxes.
Spamhaus Blocklist (SBL) – https://www.spamhaus.org/blocklists/spamhaus-blocklist/
Email Sender & Provider Coalition (ESPC). – https://www.espcoalition.org/member-list
What Is DMARC?
DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance. It is an email authentication, policy, and reporting protocol to detect and prevent malicious email activity.
#3 – Setting Up Your Cold Email Outreach Strategy
Working out your ideal customer profile/persona.
Choosing the right email service provider.
Having an authentic email profile.
Adding an email signature.
#4 – Building or Buying Email Lists
Double Opt-inDIY Email List Building Tools
Apollo – https://www.apollo.io
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Data Brokers
CUFinder
Uplead
RocketReach
#5 – Cold Email Software Tool For 2025
Apollo.io – https://www.apollo.io
Instantly – https://instantly.ai
Woodpecker – https://woodpecker.co
Snovio.io. – https://snov.io
Key Features You Need
Email list verification to minimize invalid addresses
Domain warm-up
Deliverability monitor to catch email delivery issues
Bounce shield to avoid exceeding sending limits
This Week Show’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Convesio: Convesio
Omnisend: Omnisend
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:06.620] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 114. In this episode, we will be talking about cold email marketing. How can you build and launch a campaign through cold email marketing? Can it be successful in promoting your membership business on your membership website? In the beginning of 2025, I’ve got my fantastic co-host. She’s feeling a bit better this week. She’s been under the weather for the bars for a couple of weeks. Oh, she is, yeah. But she’s a trooper. So, Nicole, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners? For the years,
[00:01:00.790] – Nicole Ouellette
Sure, yeah. My name’s Nicole. I own a company called Technical Support. I have had my own marketing company for about 17 years now. This is my 17th year. And yeah, I mainly work with small businesses and many people, But mostly small businesses on their online marketing strategy and implementation.
[00:01:19.910] – Jonathan Denwood
Thanks, Nicole. And, like I said, we will discuss cold email marketing in this episode. Can it be effective? What are the key things that you’ve got to understand? This will be a 101 introduction to the subject. I’ve done a fair bit of research on this. I think we’ve got some great information to share with you. But before we go into the meat and potatoes of this great show, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. Coming back Before we go into this show, I also want to point out that we’ve got a fantastic list of resources for you if you’re looking to build your membership website on WordPress, and I think that’s a good idea to get all these goodies and also sign up for our weekly newsletter. You can get all these goodies by going over to w-tonic. Com/deals, W cp-tonic. Com/deals, and you find this free resource there. What more could you ask for?
[00:02:39.780] – Nicole Ouellette
I literally could not think of anything I wanted more than that.
[00:02:43.470] – Jonathan Denwood
Thank you for saying that, Niko. She doesn’t need it, but the No, it’s okay.
[00:02:48.580] – Nicole Ouellette
I want a million dollars, but it’s a good resource. You haven’t downloaded it yet.
[00:02:54.140] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s not bad. It’s got some special offers from some of the sponsors, as well as a lot of offers. What more could So there’s nothing better than offers, is there? So let’s go- I love a deal. Yes, I could tell you I like a deal. I don’t know what that means. Yeah, it’s just English, this. It’s just English dribble. So, so, introduction. So, what do you think? When I brought this subject up, you seemed enthusiastic about talking about it. What do you know about cold email marketing?
[00:03:33.750] – Nicole Ouellette
I know I’ve been the recipient of cold email marketing, and I think I was happy to talk about it today because I’m not sure if I’ve ever experienced it ethically. I feel like you’re the person who approaches things pretty ethically. So, that’s the reason I was excited to talk about this with you today.
[00:03:59.440] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think the introduction part is that it’s not illegal. Yes, there are some federal laws out there that if you’re a mast spammer, these people are usually outside the jurisdiction of the US, but there have been some that were based in the US, and these are people that are sending out tens, hundreds of emails per day. It’s tough for them to operate now. They usually are outside the jurisdiction of the European Union or America. But for the standard level that I will be talking about here, it’s a gray area, and it’s very similar to, and these are my opinions; this is a very similar situation as Black Hat, SEO or Gray Hat SEO, search engine optimization. People say, Black Hat, like you’re doing something illegal. No, you’re just doing something that Google doesn’t like. But you’re not breaking any law. If Google finds out, you will probably be highly penalized by Google. That means your online resources will probably not be found for the next 10 years or whatever arbitrary sanction they impose on you. And it’s very similar to email marketing. Yes, the ideal thing is for people to sign up for your newsletter or your lead magnet, what you’re offering, and get a double opt-in.
[00:05:59.720] – Jonathan Denwood
I Most systems, you have to send them an email and say, Do you really, really want to sign up for this lead, whatever? And that’s the perfect world, but we live in the real world. And if you’re trying to grow your membership website in a cost-effective way, cold email marketing is something that you probably should look at. And where a lot of people go wrong is where they get the list and who is their ideal persona, who really is the student, the customer for this course, and who would benefit the most. And if you understand that, you probably then stand a good chance of pitching an offer to that group that they will find interesting. So they probably won’t classify it as spam. What do you reckon? Am I delusional?
[00:07:07.290] – Nicole Ouellette
I don’t know. Jonathan, I’ll be honest with you, and this won’t shock anybody. I’m a rule-follower. Anything that I think would even… That Google wouldn’t like, I haven’t done. So today, I’m open to learning more about this cold email thing. I’ll be honest with you, but I’m a little… I think it It depends on the approach, but like I said, something that I like about you as a person is you seem to approach things ethically.
[00:07:36.370] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, it doesn’t bother me to get emails. What bothers me is it gets emails and I’m just not interested And most of them, if they’re not set up correctly, end up in my marketing or spam folder anyway. Once a day, I check. But let’s move forward. Yeah, yeah. So everything we’re going to discuss is in a way to get around, or get around is probably not the right term, but satisfy the guardians, the gods of email. And who are these gods? Who are these invisible gods that control our inbox? And what emails that get into our inbox, and which emails get into our marketing folder or junk folder, never to be seen again. And every email marketer wants to get into your inbox, not Not to end up, if you’re using Gmail, the web interface, their marketing folder, or if you’re using a email app like Outlook, like Apple Mail, there’s a number of them, which are apps, programs on your phone or on your desktop, on your laptop. I use an email app. I use No app, bless their hearts, because I’m an Apple person. So you want to get into their inbox. But who says that who goes into the junk folder and who goes into the inbox to be read straight away?
[00:09:35.010] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, it’s a couple of gateways, gateway providers, guardians of the inbox, as I call them. And that’s ESPs, email service providers, and SEGSs, that’s secure email gateway providers. So what is an ESP? Well, there’s two buckets here. There’s your true inbox providers. That’s Microsoft, Microsoft 365 Outlook, as I’m saying. It’s all mixed up. It’s Yahoo Mill, it’s Zolo Mail. It’s these top inbox providers. So Google is the biggest, Gmail, and their demand service. These are your inbox. And then there’s a second level, which like Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, a host of providers that provide platforms to send out marketing email and other types of marketing optimization. They all… All these providers are lumped together under the term email service providers. Email is a protocol. It’s an agreed communication methodology that if you set up a server and it communicates with another server through a number of of protocols that are called email. I’m not going to go into all the nitty gritties of it because you would find it extremely boring. But it is highly technical. It can get very… But like I say, it’s not one centrally commanded individual organization. It’s a group of organizations that agree to use this protocol.
[00:12:04.490] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s been around a number of years. It’s one of the oldest protocols that were the cornerstone of the Internet. And And these ESPs, they work together. They monitor email activity because they’re at war with what is called spammers. But What their real problem is that, and it comes around this second group, Secure Email Gateway providers. And these people provide services for larger companies around cyber security. The truth is the reason why the SPs and the other the SEGs are really interested in a monitor and try and control, is the major cyber security vector into companies by criminals and other state-sponsored, all the nasty people, as I say. The main vector to get into company systems is through email. It’s through people opening email, opening links in the email, or doing something So they’re at war with these people that are trying to get into companies or organizations, IT networks, and email is the main vector. They’re not so about people getting into people’s inboxes to sell them something, but the thing is, the techniques that these more Crinimal elements utilized by sending out a lot of email can seem very similar to the person that’s just trying to sell a product.
[00:14:11.560] – Jonathan Denwood
And that’s why they’re all bundled together. And there’s been a number of agreed security updates amongst all these gateway providers, as I call them, to make email more identifiable, because it used to be a morphology that was a normalness to a high degree, and you could spoof people’s email addresses, and it used to be reasoned if you had some basic skill, it wasn’t that difficult. Well, over the last few years, they’ve increased a number of… If you really want your email to get into people’s inboxes, you’ve got to provide a lot more setup that identifies this email came from this domain, and it’s recognizable. There’s no argument. I’m not going to go into all the protocols, the new protocols that determine that this email came from a real email. But I can assure you that you’ve got to set up your domain with your email server or provider that the emails, so it identifies that those emails came from that organization or that individual. Is this making sense, Nicole?
[00:15:51.900] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah. So is the difference between a secure email gateway provider and an email service provider? Is it just like the scale at which they’re providing services, or do some of these secure email gateways offer some of those services that you’re talking about? One of the only ones I’m familiar with is DMARC. As a protocol to… Basically in that, you set like, okay, the emails on this server, and I have other servers, obviously, that send email on my behalf, like Quickbooks or Mailchimp or whatever, and I have to specify what those are. So is that the difference between a secure and just a regular old email?
[00:16:36.450] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s the two. They mix records. You get some service that you’ve signed up to send email, and they send this email to you with these instructions that you don’t understand a word of what they say, and you got to go into your domain where it’s part, if you bought it from GoDaddy or something, and you got to go into the Mx records or some other record, and you got to set it up so it meets the requirement, otherwise, they’re going to take you out and shoot you.
[00:17:13.740] – Nicole Ouellette
Well, I was just curious if the secure email gateway thing was that they provided a extra level of service, or was it just that- They do. No, it’s fine. I just wanted to make sure that I understood that. The email service provider We’re familiar with, most of them are just regular. The secure email gateway providers are maybe services that are unlike Gmail and other more popular platforms that are- Well, there’s a bit of value for that, but these SEGs, these secure email gateway providers, they do a lot of the stuff that your…
[00:17:56.850] – Jonathan Denwood
My mind’s calling blank. You know your antivirus RIS providers, but they do it on enterprise.
[00:18:04.410] – Nicole Ouellette
That’s cool.
[00:18:05.280] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. It’s good to have the right to look up, so thanks for clarifying that. Because like I said, the reason why they’re into all this is like what I said, it’s the main vector for cyber baddies to get into secure networks. I just said, hopefully we haven’t lost most of the audience. No, I’m okay. But I needed to explain why- Yeah, exactly.
[00:18:26.600] – Nicole Ouellette
We’re leading groundwork here.
[00:18:28.940] – Jonathan Denwood
This is the reason why it will be more understandable as we go into this episode, why you need a specialized provider to send out a cold list. If you attempt to do this, you probably won’t. Because most of your hosting provider, they can send out email for you, but they’ve got limits of 50 to 100 email per day. If you’re attempted to utilize it, if you’re allowed to your website. Let’s say you decided to host with GoDaddy, not the greatest idea, in my opinion. I neither. They wouldn’t allow you to utilize your web the email functionality to send out more than 50 to maximum, maybe a 300 email a day, and then they wouldn’t be happy about it. And if you did that, almost got to the limit every day, you still probably banned or something will happen. They haven’t been set up to do that, and they probably end up in people’s spam folder, and they wouldn’t end up in people’s inbox anyway. When a hosting provider does provide an email, it’s for inbox It’s for inbox functionality. It’s not for sending out newsletters or something. You need something like another provider, Nightmill, Chimp, like Campaign Monitor or Sendgrid, or some provider that can send out larger email, and that’s what it’s designed for.
[00:20:29.850] – Jonathan Denwood
You need one of those providers. With WordPress, you need something like SendGrid. You need an email engine, an email provider that sends out the email. It’s basically, they’re one of these ESPs, basically. You need ESP to send out the email. Now, if you sign up for one of these companies, we’ve WP, tonic, we partner with Sendgrid, and you import a list, and you got a list, and you set it up, they’re going to ask you where you got the list from. We ask, when we’re helping people set up, Now, where did you get the list? And we don’t have to be too fussy because if your domain hasn’t got any history, and hasn’t got a history of sending out a certain volume that gradually grows, you’re going to be flagged almost instantaneously, and then you’re going to be put into a sandbox. And you’re then going to get emails. We’re going to get emails from Sendgrid, and then we’re going to start asking you some questions. And if you don’t answer them, your email account will be suspended because they don’t want their email to be utilized for spamming, basically. And what happens is if you use companies or services that are not that fussy, in the end, the server’s IP address goes on to a blacklist, and that blacklist, the other ESPs won’t relay your emails through their servers, so your emails don’t go anywhere.
[00:22:38.100] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s Charlie Modited, but you’ve bought a list, so But your startup membership business, and you haven’t got a lot of people that signed up for your newsletter because you haven’t been around that long. And you want to tell the world a lot more people about your fantastic course that can solve their real problems. So you either go, there are some DIY ways of building up your list, and or you go and buy a list. And then there’s ways of sending the emails, so So you don’t get banned and you don’t have problems. But I want to cover… We’ve got some show notes here which I shared with Nicole. So before I go, because I like to deal with quickly with number three on our list before we go for a break.
[00:23:54.980] – Nicole Ouellette
Absolutely.
[00:23:55.640] – Jonathan Denwood
But what I’ve said so far, did it make any sense, Nicole?
[00:24:00.330] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, I mean, I guess what I’m curious about is, okay, if I’m hosting on WP Tonic and I have this email list that I bought and you asked me where I got it, I just want to give you the right answer. Is me saying that I bought it like an automatic red flag to you as a provider?
[00:24:17.870] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, well, if you suddenly you’re a small provider and suddenly we see we’re going to get a note, we’re going to get a note from Sendgrid that there’s a problem that this person And suddenly, they got a track record from that domain of sending out about 500 emails from whoever it is. And then suddenly, they come to WP tonic and we’re using Sendgrid, and suddenly they’re sending out 10,000 plus. That’s probably around the 10,000 isn’t going to be much of anything. But yeah, they’re going to ask questions. We’re going to ask questions because Because Simgrid doesn’t want its servers being marked as being used for spam.
[00:25:09.910] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, and you don’t want to send spammers into a service either. Makes sense.
[00:25:15.640] – Jonathan Denwood
Right? So if you’re going to buy a list, there’s some things that you got to understand. And I think you got to really understand who your students are, who your customer profile is, who your persona is, because you want to make an offer that’s attractive. So the more you know who your target audience is and who they really are, and what their problems are and their needs are, and you have a real clear, razor-sharp understanding who your target audience, the better your cold email marketing is going to be. So the more niche, the more focused, the more the offer, the language, the wording of the offer in the email campaign really resonates with a real niche, a real persona audience, the better this is going to go. And a lot of people miss out on that, and they don’t really think enough about it, because we’re going to go through what you got to do to to be successful in using this marketing tactic. But if you don’t get these right, I still think we’re going to fail. Choosing the right email service provider, where we’re going to cover that in the second half. Having an authentic email profile, well, that’s around your domain quality, history of your domain, which I’ll be covering in in the second half.
[00:27:01.370] – Jonathan Denwood
And adding an email signature, it’s been shown that having a signature, your name, having a picture of yourself in the signature, having some contact details, it actually helps with deliverability because the ESPs, they look at that and it gives a signal to them that you’re a real person, that it’s coming from a liquid company. And it also who gives more reassurance to the actual target of your campaign. And it makes sense, doesn’t it, Nicole? Yeah.
[00:27:39.490] – Nicole Ouellette
I didn’t know that about email signatures. It’s cool.
[00:27:44.560] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. So I think we’re going to go for our middle break. Nicole can go and have some coffee. Hopefully, I haven’t bored her to tears.
[00:27:55.730] – Nicole Ouellette
No. You know me, I love this stuff.
[00:27:59.320] – Jonathan Denwood
But we had to go through all this, our beloved audience. But in the second half, I will be going in how on the mechanics and some of the best companies and things you really know to buy a list or build a list so your cold email campaign can get the FAB results that you’re looking for. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Free So we’re coming back. We have had a gorge of information about email marketing, a plafond, of pseudo-ings and things you need to know. Hopefully, I haven’t bored you to death. But before we go into the second half, I’m going to throw it over to Nicole because she’s got a… She wants to tell you about her FAB service trend to send, the work it can do for you. So over to you, Nicole.
[00:29:05.630] – Nicole Ouellette
So yeah, if you need a little bit of complement to your email marketing that you’re going to be doing, you probably have thought of using social media, and you probably are using it if you’re listening to this to the show because you’re that person. And you might be annoyed that the algorithms are now requiring us to make these short videos and that some of these silly trends that you see go by get thousands and thousands of views. And here’s the thing, there’s no reason that you can’t make some of these videos to complement your marketing mix. So if you are looking for some trending video ideas that will get your content more viewed online, getting more interaction, and increasing the reach of your social media, you can check out trenddescend. Com. It’s twice weekly text message from me, where I send you doable ideas, no stupid dances, all middle-aged person content approved so that it’s content that you’ll make to help your business that you won’t feel embarrassed about. So check out trenddescend. Com. If you’re interested in learning more, there’s some great resources on this site that are completely free as well. And that’s it.
[00:30:12.110] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. Go and have a look at it. I recommend it. So you haven’t got a list. So there’s two methodologies. Either you build a list, and what I mean a cold email list, these are people that haven’t They haven’t signed up in the past. They don’t know you from Adam, basically. So they haven’t signed up for anything, but you have a good understanding of your target audience. You’ve built up this profile of the ideal persona. You’ve done some research and you’ve really understand the problems of this target audience. So your offering will resonate with them. If you want to do the DIY way, there’s a couple of morphologies. There are some platforms, one of them, there’s a number of these platforms, but there’s a platform called Apollo, apollo. Io. I have used this as a database of about 120 million people in it, and provides interface, and it can actually send out the email. It started off with LinkedIn. It can also do LinkedIn campaigns, but LinkedIn have really got a lot more looking for the right word. They reduce the ability to do cold outreach through LinkedIn, but it basically does… It’s a good research tool, and you can build lists of using Apollo, and there’s other similar services.
[00:32:05.630] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m going to be talking that there’s a bit of overlap between research tools for building lists and tools that can actually help you send out the email. This, Apollo does a bit of both, but I put it in the DIY email list building section of this show because it’s got in enormous database. Another mythology is to pay for LinkedIn sales navigator, which is to get the bit, you have to pay $99 a month if you’re paying month to month. The Apollo, it does have a free account, but I think that’s just seven days, and then it has a $30, but the one that you probably will use is also around $99 a month. I have used LinkedIn sales navigator to build up a target list because I’m probably going to… One of the reasons why I wanted to do this show, folks, is I’m thinking of doing this myself. And I built a list of about 3,000 prospects by using LinkedIn sales navigator. You only get people’s emails. You can connect requests, and I did a number of requests, and I got a number of people that accepted my request in my target audience, and I built up about 3,000 of these people.
[00:33:42.860] – Jonathan Denwood
And if they accept your request, you then have access to email details. So Apollo or using LinkedIn sales navigator, two excellent tools to build up your list.
[00:33:59.480] – Nicole Ouellette
Sorry, Is the LinkedIn… No, is the LinkedIn sales navigator part of LinkedIn premium, or is it a completely separate thing? Oh, it is part of LinkedIn premium. Okay.
[00:34:06.770] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, they got different levels. Oh, nice. I think it’s the second level. They used to do a plan around $30, but it got rid of that. I don’t have premium all the time. I just used it to build up the list, and then periodically, I’ll pay month to month again. Because it doesn’t really, in my opinion, It depends what you’re doing with it, basically. If you’re into B2B and it’s high-ticket sales, it’s probably well worth the money.
[00:34:39.580] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, for sure.
[00:34:41.900] – Jonathan Denwood
Another way of getting your cold list is to go to a data broker.
[00:34:47.260] – Nicole Ouellette
Oh, dear. I don’t know. That sounds a little sketchy, I’ll be honest with you.
[00:34:52.220] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, well, everybody’s doing it. So everybody knows your business, Nicole. Everybody does.
[00:34:58.890] – Nicole Ouellette
I’m sure they It doesn’t worry me because everybody does.
[00:35:03.500] – Jonathan Denwood
There’s a number of data brokers. Basically, they’re just glorified databases, and like a Although they have… You go in. If you do a search on a specific list provider for a particular industry, they will come up with pre pre-developed lists for you, and you want to look at, do they give a guarantee? Has it been checked over? Have they have checked their list themselves to make sure that all the email are still active. They don’t bounce. There’s quality checks. Do they give a money back guarantee, period. The better list will give you 14 days money back guarantee, so you can check the list yourself, blah, blah, blah.
[00:36:06.680] – Nicole Ouellette
Or- That’s good.
[00:36:07.560] – Jonathan Denwood
You can sign in for one of these data breaks month to month, or some of them do a token system that you pay for so many tokens, and you can get so many email or data based on your tokens that you’ve bought. And I’ve I’ve listed here, SeeU Finder, Uplead, Rocket Reacher, three of the more credible data brokers out there. But I’d say you can buy lists for specific industries, specific types of individuals. And like to say, you need to check what guarantees they provide, blah, blah, blah. That’s cool. Questions, Nicole?
[00:36:57.370] – Nicole Ouellette
No, I mean, that sounds great. Whenever I think about buying a list, I always wonder, when were these people added to this list? You know what I mean? If I would buy a list of… These are small business owners who are admins to Facebook pages or something. I’m like, okay, when were these people added? And I’m guessing that part of the data they give you, they give you the names and all that, is when they were added to the list or when their email was verified. I’m guessing that’s typically a field. Okay, that’s great. Makes sense. And it’s cool that they have guarantees, too, and it’s good to know to look at them.
[00:37:35.400] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, they’re going to be more expensive.
[00:37:37.520] – Nicole Ouellette
Sure. Well.
[00:37:38.940] – Jonathan Denwood
But you get what you normally get.
[00:37:40.350] – Nicole Ouellette
You get what you pay for.
[00:37:41.570] – Jonathan Denwood
Not always, but- In this case.
[00:37:44.930] – Nicole Ouellette
Sounds like you do.
[00:37:46.100] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes. All right. Now, in the first half of the show, I described who are the email gods, the gateway providers, why it’s become more complicated. Because 10, 12 years ago, you could just buy a list, and you could just sign up for Mailchimp, and you probably could just last to these people or something. It’s like Amazon Web Services do a really great email provider. It’s one of the most cost-effective platforms to send an email, it’s quite technical to set up. And unless your list is over 100,000, I wouldn’t bother. And because they’re going to sandbox you for at least three months. Now, they are a new breed of… Can provide you email addresses and also send out the email for you, but they are a new breed, and they are different to Mailchimp. They are different to Campaign Monitor. They’re different from active campaign. They have been developed for the purpose of sending out cold email. Now, I mentioned Apollo is one of these, but I put it in the first bucket of data research, and one that I’m probably going to be utilizing myself instantly. You’ll be able to get all these links in the show notes.
[00:39:52.170] – Jonathan Denwood
You’ll be listening to this next week, and all the show notes will be there with all the links on the WP iPhoneic website. Instantly, what does it do? Well, it’s got three sections, and you have to pay extra depending if you want all three sections. They have the email sending platform. They have the section that provides email lists, email people depending on your search criteria, and then they have their own CRM. And you can choose if you just want the email sending functionality. If you want the lead, they provide contact that you can put in to their email sending software. If you want the first two, it’s probably going to cost you between 100 and 140. That’s sending out. There are two lower priced ones, but that price, you’d be able to send about 10,000 email per month. It’s a lot. Well, this is the volume. You’ve got to write a good email, which I’m going to discuss. But this is the volume you’re talking about, to get this from 3-2% of people that raise their hands, I reply to your email and say, I’m interested. I like what you’re offering. Can we chat some more?
[00:41:41.710] – Jonathan Denwood
Or you’re taking them to a landing page or you got some special offer and they sign up for your course. I got free instantly Woodpecker, I have to name Woodpecker, and a name that I can’t pronounce. I was hoping Nicole might help me.
[00:42:06.450] – Nicole Ouellette
Was it- Snowvio?
[00:42:08.190] – Jonathan Denwood
Snowvia. I’m struggling with that one, Nicole. But What do they do? Well, it’s all around… So if you’re going to send out cold email, do not use your normal domain. So if I was doing a cold email campaign, I would not use my domain, w-tonic. Com. I would buy another domain. And then what instantly can do is that they can set up this domain for you, all the MX records, all the way this domain has to be set up. And then it allows you to set up a number of sub-email accounts in virtual inboxes, because depending on how many email that you want to send out each day, most gateway providers providers, if they see inbox sending more than 30 or 50 email per day, it starts… There’s nobody watching this. This It’s all done automatically, but they get a red flag. So what instantly does, if you were doing this manually, you would buy a domain, you have to warm up the domain. That takes about three months. You can’t just buy a domain, well, you can.
[00:44:13.090] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, you can, but it’s not going to… I was wondering how that would go.
[00:44:16.610] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. You got to buy a domain, and then the interface, and it’s a very slick interface, instantly has. They charge you. They They charge you to set up all these sub-email accounts with their own inbox, and then they gradually warm up the domain. They send out a few email and it gradually increases, and they’ve got their own internal network. So the email do go to somewhere, and it’s not not bouncing. So they gradually warm up the domain. And then Depending on how many email you want to send out each day, there’ll be a limit of 30 to 50 email per inbox that they have set up for you. We’ll determine how many of these accounts that you need to set up with them to reach if you’re looking to send out a thousand, 5,000, 10,000, 100,000 email. And by doing all this, it goes into people’s inbox. And instead of ending up in the junk folder or ending up in the marketing folder, it really does end up And they give you all the analytical data, and you can see how many are being opened, and they keep the bounce rate down. And they also mimic in the warm-up process that the email had been opened.
[00:46:07.550] – Jonathan Denwood
So it does a lot of stuff that you would have to hire a contractor to do and paying God the money to do all this. And there were people, I have subcontractors that are consultants for WP tonic, and they knew how to do all this, but we hired them because we had some large clients that had bought email lists, and they weren’t exactly cold. They had signed up for previous products, but they were a large list that hadn’t been actively warmed up for a period of time, and they were concerned that they were going to get flagged because it’s going to have a high bounce rate. So we We had to do email cleansing, and there’s a number of tools that we can send a certain number of email, a percentage, and see how many are still opened, and there’s a number of things we did with a number of large clients. It’s quite involved, but it’s well out the technical ability of the average person. But if you’re using something like instantly, they do all this for you. And if you don’t use one of these services, Nicole, you’re just going to be flagged up, and your email isn’t…
[00:47:44.560] – Jonathan Denwood
You’re going to end up on an IP black list, and your email just end up in people’s spam folders anyway. So if you’re going to buy a list or build a DIY list of cold email, but targeted to and give them a real good offer, I feel you’ve got to use one of these services that I’ve talked about, Nicole.
[00:48:08.750] – Nicole Ouellette
Well, that makes sense. Now, from a branding perspective, I know I have to use a different domain than my domain, but would you recommend, so for you, would you buy getwptonic. Com? Would you get a domain that’s similar to your business name so that there starts to be that brand recognition?
[00:48:29.440] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. You’re on the right track. But depending on how many… But don’t get too sentimental with it, and don’t spend too much money, because after a few months, you’re probably going to have to use another one. If If you’re going to… If you get enough response, because this is for lead generation, probably with a membership, to launch your membership website. I’m looking at doing this to launch your membership to get that. Now you’ve done your soft launch, you’ve done what we recommend, your half a dozen to dozen, you’ve sorted out, that’s the course solver problem, you’ve got feedback, you’ve done a proper soft launch, right? And then you really worked out your landing page, your offer. Probably a good idea to offer a discount using cold email, and you’re looking to get that first to get that 1,000, and you wanted to do it in a cost-effective way. I think it’s well worth looking at cold email outreach to get that all really well, get the fin turning, basically.
[00:49:50.920] – Nicole Ouellette
I have a question about… It sounds like it takes time to warm up the domain, a couple of months, two, three months, and then you start sending emails, and then you said at some point, You’re going to have to change your domain. So am I going to have to go through that warming up process? Once it’s warmed up, can I do it for a few months? And then I’ll have to go through that process again of warming up- It depends if you want to use this to get another a bunch of people in, doesn’t it?
[00:50:17.420] – Jonathan Denwood
But hopefully, you’re doing all the other things that we’ve discussed in this podcast, and you’re getting enough income that you might look at paid advertising or a mixture. But But if you haven’t got the budget, this is going to be a much more cost-effective methodology of getting the will turned. Because the problem with a lot of podcasts around membership, around building courses, Nicole, and It’s the purpose of this podcast, Nicole, is they don’t actually tell anybody how they’re going to market the ID course.
[00:50:53.250] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, they tell you how to build it.
[00:50:56.340] – Jonathan Denwood
Or they talk… There’s a lot of fannel, but they don’t actually tell anybody how. Yeah. It just depends how much email you’re sending about having to get another domain. If you do an initial launch, But a lot of people that are doing this, they’re into B2B, or they’re churning out 10,000 email month after month after month. It just It really does depend on the opening rate, and do they get complaints? Do they get flagged as a spammer or not? But these platforms, instantly, they really do help in reducing that your emails are going to be classified as spam automatically. And if you do a nice signature and you’ve really worked out who the persona is, Look, I don’t see… Other people really get very heated about this, but if the email has got some interest in me and it’s offering me a good deal, and am I that bothered, I’ve never heard from them before. Be truthful, I’m not. But that’s my view. What’s your view about it?
[00:52:23.690] – Nicole Ouellette
I mean, I just get a lot of email. And I guess what I really hate is the presumption, which is more like a copy issue, right, than actually getting the email. It’s like, oh, do you have a… You must have a really hard time closing, getting… You must need an appointment setter or something. And I’m like, How do you know what I need? We’ve never talked before, but I don’t know. I just find when someone assumes a certain problem, I find it a bit presumptuous. But, yeah. Like I said, if something’s good, I don’t really… I’m open to it.
[00:52:59.720] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, it does work. If cold email didn’t work, folks wouldn’t do it. People wouldn’t do it because they do it, folks, because it works. But the copy, you do not want to send long-winded emails in the call. It wants to be to the point. Changes in the tagline and personalization are significant, and it instantly has an excellent interface. It has functionality that helps. Another factor is that if the gateway providers see a load of emails with the same tagline, the same in the email tagline, and they see the exact wording going to 10,000, their technology using artificial intelligence will flag you. What it instantly does is it takes a certain percentage and changes the tagline so it doesn’t trigger. And they provide a lot of… They’ve got a perfect YouTube channel, folks, and they give a lot of educational material.
[00:54:31.140] – Nicole Ouellette
And this is the instant people that you’re talking about?
[00:54:33.670] – Jonathan Denwood
They’ve done a great job on the education front, but the others are also good. I’m not getting any affiliate income by saying that. I’m just saying they’re the people I will probably be using for my campaign. I’ve gone through the basics here. No, be honest. I know you will. Nicole doesn’t care. She does tell me. What do you think? Do you think I’ve done a read? Because I get a feeling that you might want to shower after this set aside because- No, no.
[00:55:15.110] – Nicole Ouellette
Honestly, I feel less gross about it than I thought I would. I think some of this makes sense, and I’ve had various products that haven’t gotten a lot of traction. I don’t think it’s because they’re bad, but I am like, okay, this is an avenue I haven’t previously considered, but I like the idea that it’s off the domain. There would be a way to try it at a smaller scale before, and seeing, like you said, the interaction and things you get, I think that all makes sense to me. Like I said, I’m not as morally opposed to it as I thought it would be.
[00:55:53.570] – Jonathan Denwood
No, other people will be outraged by this episode, I think I’ll probably get heat mail for this episode.
[00:56:00.490] – Nicole Ouellette
Oh, heat mail.
[00:56:01.650] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, heat mail. But I think many people go wrong in the copy, the offer, and the language they use. Keep it short: This is not a medium to send out war and peace, folks. Nobody’s got the time, but if it’s targeted to the right audience and the offer is worded and is good value, I think you can get results with this. Because, like I say, if people weren’t getting a result from this, they wouldn’t keep doing it. It’s as simple as that.
[00:56:45.970] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah, it’s true.
[00:56:46.780] – Jonathan Denwood
Right. So, Nicole, what’s the best way for people to learn more about you and what you’re up to?
[00:56:53.240] – Nicole Ouellette
Yeah. So, if you go to technical support. Com or technical support on most social media platforms, you’ll see me there.
[00:57:02.360] – Jonathan Denwood
And if you want to support the show, why don’t you consider joining the Membership Machine Show’s Facebook Group? Putting that into Facebook is free. It’s a mixture of people like you trying to build their business, plus WordPress professionals and marketers. It’s a great group. Love to see you there. If you have any questions, that’s the best place to put it. I always attempt to answer any quick question set in the group personally. We will see you next week with another great show to help you build your membership business in 2025. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
[00:57:45.010] – Nicole Ouellette
Bye.
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