Setting up your first cold email campaign

What do I actually need before I launch?

Two things are genuinely required. The rest is judgement, and we will be explicit about which is which, because the difference matters when something looks wrong.

Required:

• A connected mailbox. Nothing sends without one. See connecting your mailbox.
• Authentication records on your sending domain. Your domain needs SPF, DKIM and DMARC published in DNS. This is not a WarmySender rule — every mailbox provider expects it of every sender at any volume, and mail from a domain without it is filtered before your subject line gets a chance. If you set up nothing else on this list, set up these.

Strongly recommended, but not enforced:

• Warmup running for about three weeks of sending days first. Nothing in WarmySender blocks you from launching a campaign the same hour you connect a mailbox — there is no warmup gate, no minimum mailbox age and no health-score threshold standing between you and the Launch button. We are telling you plainly rather than inventing a rule, because a customer hunting for a gate that does not exist concludes the product is broken. What warmup does is give a brand-new mailbox a history, starting at one email a day and reaching full speed around your sixth week of sending. Around week three is where most people can start cold outreach without the mailbox looking like it appeared from nowhere.
• A verified list. Bounces are the fastest way to damage a new domain, and an unverified cold list typically bounces several times harder than a verified one. Running the list through verification first is the highest-return twenty minutes in this entire guide. See do I need to verify my list before I send?

How do I create the campaign?

Go to Campaigns and click Create Campaign, then choose Email Campaign. If you have LinkedIn or Instagram seats on your account you will also see LinkedIn and Multichannel options here; ignore them for your first run and get one channel working end to end before you combine them.

Give the campaign a name you will still recognise in three months. "Q3 — agency founders, US" is a name. "Test 2" is not, and you will have four of them by October.

You can also do all of this in plain language through an AI agent connected to your account — ask it to build and launch a campaign and it will write the whole thing for you. The agent never sends anything itself and can never raise a limit; it hands the finished campaign to the same scheduler that paces every send.

How do I add prospects?

Four routes, all in the campaign builder:

• Import a CSV. The most common. Map your columns to fields on the import screen — anything you map becomes available as a merge tag in your emails, so a "Recent funding round" column in your spreadsheet becomes {{recentFunding}} in your copy.
• Paste directly. Fine for a short list you already have in a document.
• Add individually. For the handful of people you want to reach personally.
• Select from an existing list, including prospects you saved out of the Leads Database.

Start small. 50 to 100 prospects for your first campaign is the right size: enough to tell you whether your message works, small enough that a mistake costs you a hundred addresses rather than five thousand. You will learn more from the replies to a hundred well-targeted emails than from the silence after a thousand generic ones.

Whatever you import, make sure every address is one you have a defensible reason to contact. That is both the law in most places and the difference between a campaign that builds a domain and one that burns it.

How do I write the sequence?

A sequence is your first email plus its follow-ups. Three steps is the right shape for a first campaign:

1. Step 1 — the initial email. Short. A subject line that reads like something a colleague would send, a first line that proves you know who they are, one specific reason you are writing, and one easy question. If your first line would make sense sent to anybody on your list, it is not personalisation.
2. Step 2 — a follow-up after 3 days. Not "just bumping this". Add something: a different angle, a relevant example, a shorter ask.
3. Step 3 — a close after another 4 days. Brief, gracious, and genuinely final. A clean "I'll stop here — if the timing changes, you know where I am" earns more replies than a fourth nudge.

Merge tags pull each prospect's data into the copy: {{firstName}}, {{company}}, {{role}}, plus any column you mapped on import. Always preview with real sample data before you launch — an empty merge tag is the single most obvious tell that an email was automated.

Threading: each step can start a fresh email or reply inside the same thread as step 1. Threading follow-ups keeps the whole conversation in one place in the recipient's inbox, which is both more natural to read and more likely to get seen. See sending follow-ups in the same thread.

You can also add conditions — branch on whether someone opened, clicked or replied — but leave those out of your first campaign. Get a linear three-step sequence working first. Sequences, delays and conditions covers them when you are ready.

Every campaign email carries a way for the recipient to opt out. You choose the wording and whether it is a link or a reply — see the unsubscribe footer and your opt-out style.

What daily limit and sending window should I set?

Leave the daily limit at its default of 50 per mailbox. It is a ceiling, not a target — setting it to 50 does not mean 50 emails go out, it means no more than 50 can. Raising it above the default buys you nothing on a young domain, because your domain's own ceiling will stop you first.

Volume is the question people get wrong most often, and the site now has one canonical answer for it: how many cold emails can I send per day? — a week-by-week table of what is safe by domain and mailbox age, and which of the four separate ceilings is the one actually limiting you. Read it before you touch the limit.

Sending window: pick the hours and days you want emails to go out, and the time zone they should be read in. Business hours in your prospects' time zone beats business hours in yours. Weekdays only is the sane default. Your emails never leave outside the window you set.

Pacing: your day's emails are spread evenly across that whole window rather than fired at the top of it, which is why a campaign checked ten minutes after launch shows only a couple sent. That is the system working. How sending schedules and pacing work has the detail.

Mailboxes: assign one to start. More mailboxes is how you scale volume later — four mailboxes at 50 a day is far safer than one at 200 — but one is the right number for a first campaign.

What should I check before I hit launch?

• Preview every step with sample data. Look for empty merge tags, a name in the wrong case, a company name that reads oddly in your sentence.
• Read your subject line as a stranger. If it sounds like marketing, it will be treated as marketing.
• Check the footer. Your company address and opt-out sentence should read the way you want them to.
• Confirm the window and time zone. The most common launch-day surprise is a campaign that starts tomorrow morning because it was launched after today's window closed. That is correct behaviour, not a fault.
• Confirm the list is verified and that you removed anyone already in a different campaign.

Then activate it. The campaign moves to Running and the first emails go out at the next open moment inside your window.

What should I expect in the first week?

Less activity than you are bracing for, and that is the point. With a hundred prospects, a three-step sequence and even pacing across a business-hours window, your first day is a couple of dozen emails going out a few minutes apart. Replies to a first step usually start arriving on day one or two and keep trickling in for a fortnight — most people do not answer a cold email the hour it lands.

Watch three numbers and ignore the rest for now:

• Bounce rate. The only one that is urgent. A bounce rate climbing above a few percent means a list problem, and it damages the domain every day you leave it running. WarmySender pauses a campaign automatically if bounces cross the safety threshold; if that happens, fix the list rather than resuming.
• Reply rate. The metric that actually tells you whether the message works. For what counts as a good number, the site keeps one sourced figure with primary citations rather than a house guess — see the reply-rate row on our deliverability benchmarks.
• Open rate. Directionally useful, but treat it gently: inbox privacy features pre-fetch tracking pixels whether or not anyone read the message, which inflates open rates across every tool on the market. Reply rate is the honest signal.

Spam complaints are worth a word, because their absence from your dashboard confuses people. Complaints are reported to the recipient's mailbox provider, never to us, so no outreach tool can show you yours. Google Postmaster Tools is where you see them for Gmail recipients. See why your spam rate can be high when your spam folder is empty.

Replies land in your Unified Inbox, and anyone who replies is automatically stopped from receiving the rest of the sequence — nobody gets a "just following up" after they already answered you.

How do I scale up from here?

In this order, and not faster:

1. Fix the message before you add volume. A sequence that gets no replies at a hundred prospects will get no replies at a thousand, and will have cost you a thousand addresses to find that out.
2. Grow the list, not the per-mailbox limit. Keep the mailbox at 50 a day and add prospects.
3. Add mailboxes once your domain has earned a higher ceiling.
4. Add a second sending domain when one is no longer enough — and warm it from scratch, because its clock starts at zero.

Leave warmup running the entire time. It is not a setup step you complete and switch off; it is what keeps the mailbox's reputation intact while your campaigns spend it.

Common questions

Do I have to wait for warmup to finish before my first campaign?

No — nothing in WarmySender stops you launching immediately, and there is no health-score threshold or minimum mailbox age standing in the way. We recommend giving warmup about three weeks of sending days first, and warmup keeps ramping to full speed around week six while your campaign runs alongside it. That is guidance about how sender reputation is built, not a gate the product enforces, and we would rather say so than have you hunt for a switch that does not exist.

How many prospects should be in my first campaign?

50 to 100. Large enough that the reply rate means something, small enough that a mistake in your targeting or your copy costs you a hundred addresses instead of five thousand. Scale the list only once the message has proven it earns replies.

What daily sending limit should I use?

Leave it at the default of 50 per mailbox. It is a ceiling rather than a target, and on a young domain your domain-wide ceiling will bind before the per-mailbox one does, so raising it changes nothing. The week-by-week guidance for your specific domain age is on how many cold emails can I send per day.

What is a good reply rate for a cold campaign?

Rather than publish a house number, we point at the one figure on the site that carries primary citations and archived sources for every value — the cold-email reply-rate row on our deliverability benchmarks page, which gives both the cross-industry average and what the top decile actually achieves. Compare yourself against the average first; the top-decile figure is what a tight list and a real trigger buy you, not what a first campaign should expect.

Why has my campaign sent nothing yet?

Almost always one of two normal things: you launched after today's sending window had closed, so it starts at the next opening; or it already reached today's limit and resumes tomorrow. A third, gentler case is the first few minutes after launch, when even pacing has only released one or two emails. All three are the system working. If a campaign genuinely sends nothing for a full day inside an open window while under its limit, email us with the campaign name.

Do I need to verify my list first?

You are not forced to, and you should anyway. Bounces are the single fastest way to damage a young sending domain, and an unverified cold list bounces far harder than a verified one — hard enough to trip the automatic bounce pause and leave you repairing a reputation instead of reading replies. Verification is the cheapest insurance in cold email.

Can an AI agent build the campaign for me?

Yes. An agent connected to your account can create the campaign, write the sequence, enrol prospects, verify emails and launch it, all in plain language. What it cannot do is send anything itself or raise any limit — launching only hands the finished campaign to the same scheduler that paces every send inside your caps, whether a person or an agent pressed the button.

Related guides

• How many cold emails can I send per day? — the canonical volume table
• Connecting your mailbox
• Sequences, delays and conditions
• How sending schedules and pacing work
• Do I need to verify my list before I send?
• How your campaign metrics are calculated
• Full documentation