10 Oct 2024
Cancelled Instantly Instantly - too many issues.
Setup Smartlead a couple weeks ago on the basic plan ($39/month) to start warming up emails & testing the platform with CSV uploads.
IMPORTANT: in Smartlead, DNS verification only requires the unique part of the selector, eg
spacemailand notspacemail._domainkeyto pass validation.
Campaign Import Settings:
4 emails out of 37 (10%) got blocked as having bounced with others, despite having been checked with Bouncer!
Unclear how to get a report of blocked emails 🤔
Had to download as CSV and run a script to filter out the blocked emails.
They are:
sabine.mueckenhausen@infineon.com: valid with both Bouncer & Clearout.
john.morgan@informa.com: valid with Bouncer, Clearout. Bulk Email Checker reports Status: Unknown, Event: inconclusive, Details: Transient error, please try again later..
juliet.bligh@informa.com: Bulk Email Checker reports Status: Unknown, Event: inconclusive, Details: Transient error, please try again later..
kathleen.puttemans@allianz.com: valid with Bulk Email Checker.
See email checking tools at Tools for email finding & validation
Spintax
Use Spintax To Randomise Email Messages.
Spintax or Spin Syntax is a bulk emailing hack that creates variations of sentences or words by using multiple words or phrases in the template.
You can add similar words such as {Hey} and {Hi}, separated by a vertical line |
For example:
{Hi|Hello|Hey}
This tactic will help you generate a more personalized set of cold emails.
Sending email messages with a little variation from one another increases the chances of landing in leads’ inboxes.
IP
"We use dynamic IP rotation to send triggers using a pool of 88,000 IP".
List of IPS: https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json
DKIM
To verify DKIM, just use the DKIM selector from each provider, eg.:
- spacemail and not spacemail._domainkey to pass validation
- s1-ionos for IONOS
API
JSON response for "List all leads by Campaign ID" endpoint:
https://api.smartlead.ai/reference/list-all-leads-by-campaign-id
{ 'data': [ { 'campaign_lead_map_id': '1231723604',
'created_at': '2024-12-30T11:15:21.000Z',
'lead': { 'company_name': None,
'company_url': None,
'custom_fields': {'rowid': '472546'},
'email': 'email@example',
'first_name': 'Sabine',
'id': 1503408790,
'is_unsubscribed': False,
'last_name': None,
'linkedin_profile': None,
'location': None,
'phone_number': None,
'unsubscribed_client_id_map': {},
'website': None},
'lead_category_id': None,
'status': 'COMPLETED'}],
'limit': 100,
'offset': 0,
'total_leads': '1'}
Bounces
30 Jan 2025
Noticing quite a few bounces from warmup emails in Smartlead, as I had with Instantly.
Here is the good answer from Smartlead support:
Thanks for reaching out. Apologies for the wait.
For full context on why this happens:  There are over 500k mailboxes connected to Smartlead. Each day every 8 hours, this happens:
1.Every email is parsed through a million verifiers to ensure only valid emails exist
2.Once done, the validated ones are pushed through a 6 Step SMTP check
3.Once done, the validated ones enter a week-long manual catch-all check across 2000 Gmail accounts checking for missed bounces
- In that time period, someone's domain may expire, someone may disconnect their account, someone may buy new domains
You will see bounces in snovio, lemwarm, instantly, mailwarmer, mailreach and every other warmup tool that exists in the market, some are sneaky and delete the bounces before you see it. Unfortunately this is the game of email warmup, and one bounce in retrospect to 100s or 500 delivered in the warmup pool will have no effect.
Given when you do cold outbound, even after using the best email validator in the market, you will have a <2% bounce rate, so for over 10000 leads, that’s 200 bounces.
But with that being said, are we working on improving this mechanism? Absolutely - just a bit of an engineering game of cat and mouse as we keep improving it 🙂