If my cold email deliverability drops and accounts are placed on warm-up, should I wait for them to recover or start sending small volumes from a new email account immediately?

#289 · how to hit $2.5k/mo with 3 hours a day in 2026

If my cold email deliverability drops and accounts are placed on warm-up, should I wait for them to recover or start sending small volumes from a new email account immediately?

First, don't overreact to a single day of zero replies when sending at a small scale like 100 to 150 net-new leads per day. That is well within normal statistical noise—one day could be 0% and the next could be 6%. However, if your deliverability score has genuinely tanked below 80% on platforms like Instantly or SmartLead, warm-up usually will not fix it. The best move is to replace those accounts with fresh ones. To prevent getting stuck, you should always maintain a buffer of extra mailboxes on continuous warm-up—roughly 20% above your active sending capacity. Treat this extra 1.2x cost as an insurance policy so you never have to pause sending entirely while paying for software, domains, and leads.

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Should I continue sending cold emails to this industry, test other industries, or increase volume to 5‑6K per month before deciding?

With a positive reply rate below 0.1% after 1,000 emails, your copy likely isn’t resonating. Instead of just raising volume, rewrite the email with completely new angles and test again. If the next batch yields over 0.1% positive replies, you’re on the right track and can keep iterating; otherwise, continue refining the messaging.

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How do you handle the waiting period for new clients while keeping deliverability high when using new domains for cold email?

The way I handle it is I don’t start the guarantee period until after the warm‑up is done. I give clients two options: they can go pre‑warmed and start today, or they can warm up the emails over a 21‑day period. Pre‑warmed costs more, but the client pays for it so it’s not my problem. The 21‑day warm‑up is longer, but the benefit is they get branded, own domains, etc., which aligns with what you want. So if you have a 60‑day guarantee, it effectively becomes about 90 days because you need the 30‑day warm‑up. In practice I don’t wait a full 30 days; I wait 21 days, which shortens the timeline a bit.

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I want to start a cold‑email outreach but only have manual tools—what should I do?

I’ve been in the same spot. I started by rotating a handful of Gmail accounts—sometimes five—sending about ten cold emails a day from each. It’s not ideal, but it works to get started as long as your emails are well‑researched and the approach is solid. Gmail accounts have lower deliverability, especially new ones, so they need to warm up. You can also buy cheap inboxes (e.g., three Instantly airmail inboxes for around $4 each per month plus a domain) which gives you roughly 90 emails a day. Build a quick lead list, template your messages, and spend the first hour‑and‑a‑half each day sending them. You can also DM prospects. The key is to keep sending, refine your copy, and don’t worry too much about the tools at the start.

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What is the best strategy for sending cold emails, when did you start your first campaign, how many days did you send them, and after how long did you get your first client?

I started cold emailing around 2018‑2019 with my business partner Gurinder; those early attempts didn’t work well. I kept sending emails for about three to four years before I made any money, and it was probably closer to two years before I saw real revenue. The breakthrough came in roughly 2021 with what I called 'one second copy': I ran many cold email campaigns and offered free sample articles that were produced cheaply using AI, which hardly anyone else was doing at the time. That got me attention from big companies like Kixie. The best cold‑email strategy is to front‑load value—give the recipient more work or benefit than you’re asking for. Instead of asking for free labor, identify a problem they’re suffering from, solve it, and attach the results to your email. For example, I once rewrote 40 YouTube titles for a follower, provided a one‑click doc, and they saw immediate CTR improvements. That’s how successful, ‘rich‑people’ cold emails work: you save them time or make them money, not the other way around.

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