Revenge is a dish best served cold.

But how about an outreach email?

Should that be served up cold as well?

Well, sometimes we marketers have no other choice.

To generate awareness of and interest in our products and services, sometimes we need to make the first move.

Even when nobody asked for it.

When you’re sending cold emails, at the very least, you want to make sure that they’re likely to get you warm leads—people who are interested in what you’re offering.

The whole cold email outreach game is a time-consuming one as it is.

You definitely want to make sure that you’re getting results.

Mailshake is a tool that’s designed to help you with this.

Why You Should Use Mailshake for Cold Outreach

If you’ve ever started a lead generation campaign, you know how time-consuming cold outreach can be.

Even worse, manually executing the campaign without some type of tool can magnify the difficulty, inefficiency and frustration.

Imagine, sending out email after email. Clicking “send” on every single one. Then getting very little positive response from the recipients.

That’s why it’s absolutely essential to automate cold outreach campaigns whenever possible. Otherwise, you’re wasting time, money and effort. These days, it’s always possible to automate them.

It’s understood that cold outreach is one of the best ways to generate leads, so we might as well turn this essential but inefficient business practice into something quick, satisfying and that actually produces results that are worth your time.

This is where the Mailshake tool comes in.

Mailshake is an automated cold email service that allows you to customize, analyze and enjoy your cold outreach campaigns by taking full advantage of their large array of analytics and automation tools.

Basically, it turns all that wasted time that you would have to spend manually executing your campaign and puts it back in your hands.

If saving time, money and effort while getting more outreach done sounds like something you’d enjoy, keep reading—it gets even better.

How to Launch Your First Outreach Campaign on Mailshake

First, let’s take a look at the actual making of a campaign with Mailshake.

This will also help illustrate the pros of working with Mailshake, while also serving as a demonstration of the platform itself.

1. Start a New Campaign

To start, open your Mailshake account and head on over to the Campaigns tab on the right side of the dashboard.

Click the pink “plus” sign to start a new campaign. It will prompt you to enter the email address from which you’ll be launching the campaign.

After you select your email address, you’ll be guided through a series of prompts to launch your campaign.

2. Upload your email list

The very first thing you need to do is create and upload your email list of leads.

Mailshake isn’t a lead generation tool, meaning you’ll need to acquire the email addresses on your own, either manually or with another tool. The tool route is probably the easiest way to go—find a good optin bribe tool or something else to get those email addresses quickly.

Mailshake has powerful integrations that allow you to easily bring in your existing lead base. So, you can simply import those email addresses you’ve collected at this point in the process.

Aside from using an integration, the easiest way to enter emails is perhaps to upload a CSV file. The important thing is that you’ll never need to type in email addresses line by line again. Phew!

After you upload your email list, the site will filter through all of those email addresses, give you any warnings related to them (for example, if there’s an invalid address listed).

3. Write Your Email Templates

This is when you actually input the text of your outreach. The persuasive writing that will earn you customers. The content that will sell your product or service.

Whatever that may be.

What you put in the following boxes will be your communication with potential customers. First, you’ll be prompted to write your first outreach email. Keep in mind that this will be your first contact with anyone you’re cold emailing.

If you do an artful job with writing this main message, click “Save as Template” to keep it for future use in campaigns.

Are you not really that good at writing emails? No worries, Mailshake has a solution for you too.

If you need a little boost of inspiration or structure to get you going, click “Choose Template” to see the email templates stashed in the program.

Here you can find tons of pre-written templates that you can simply modify to fit your company and your specific needs.

There are email templates for many different scenarios and options for each one.

That means that your writer’s block just got a miracle cure.

This also allows you to access all of your previously saved templates and load them right into the email text box.

You can also click “Send Test” to send yourself a test email and preview how it will look in your inbox, sniffing out any errors or formatting issues along the way.

Follow-up emails

After you write the main text of the first email, you can click on the subsequent buttons to add follow-up emails that will send out if one of the recipients clicks, responds or performs some other type of pre-specified action—a pre-specified action of your choosing, of course.

You can also add drip emails, which will be sent a certain number of days after the original depending on what you specify (no action needed on the part of the recipient, it will just send with the passage of time).

Finally, you can even elect to send a specific email if a recipient clicks on a link provided within that first message. This gives you the ability to follow up in a specific way with those who have clicked, responded or in another way reacted to that first email.

4. Preview Your Emails

As noted briefly above, this tool allows you to see what each email will look like when your leads receive it.

It’s important to review each email to make sure everything will look as good in the recipient’s inbox as it does in your head.

Here I’ve written a couple test emails to myself to look at how they’ll turn out in the inbox when received.

Don’t forget: A couple of really important things to point out about this picture are the “Save as Template” and “Choose Template” buttons on the top of each box. You’ll have these options every step of the writing and testing process.

5. Send Your Campaign

This is the final step before you’re ready to watch Mailshake take the wheel and automate your campaign.

All you have to do is review the information on a screen that looks something like this one.

If everything looks right, just send it, sit back and relax. Good work.

6. Track Your Emails on the Mailshake Dashboard

Like we talked about earlier, the dashboard is really where the magic happens.

The home page of the dashboard gives you the metrics for opened, clicked, replied, bounced and unsubscribed.

These statistics give you the ability to assess the performance of your campaign at a glance and make any changes that might be necessary to boost your stats.

First of all, I hope your stats are better than mine.

Also, I hope your email list has more than one person on it. I have full confidence that both will be true.

Upon clicking on any of these stats, you’ll get in-depth analytics of the numbers and be able to respond individually and manage each response.

This detail allows you to take control of where your campaign goes even after you’ve already launched it.

It keeps you in touch with your campaign and gives you the opportunity to watch it closely.

These are incredibly valuable statistics for anyone building a lead base, and remember that you can use all the powerful extensions and integrations to get even more out of your campaign.

Integrations combined with the powerful analytics about would obviously be a good combination, so I think it’s important to recognize the versatility, power and customizability of Mailshake in addition to how much value it would add to the otherwise boring and generally inefficient practice of cold outreach.

And that’s it! That’s your first automated outreach campaign with Mailshake.

Now what?

How to Manage Outreach with Even More Mailshake Features

After you’ve created your first campaign, you’ve got to keep an eye on things and manage your outreach.

Other tools in Mailshake are designed just for this purpose.

These features should give you a competitive edge in your email campaigns.

1. The Calendar

Mailshake’s calendar feature allows you to customize every email you send out by giving you options for dates, times and how many emails per day you send.

These features help you space your emails out appropriately to avoid problems such as getting your emails flagged or marked as spam.

For instance, if you don’t want to send out emails on weekends, it’s easy to restrict that time on the calendar.

Mailshake will intelligently bump any follow-ups back if there’s ever a time when an email is delayed.

Another feature that comes with the calendar is the ability to only send a certain number of emails every day.

Google imposes quotas on the number of emails that you can send out in a day, so Mailshake helps you avoid that quota and, again, intelligently adjusts any email follow-ups that would be affected by this change.

2. The Lead Catcher

The lead catcher removes all the difficulty of finding, classifying and responding to leads.

Every response to your emails will be dropped right into your lead catcher inbox, which is already a huge advantage because you won’t have to dig through your email to find them.

When you go down the list of responses, all you have to do is click the email, find out if it’s an open or closed lead, and respond accordingly.

This tool works especially well in conjunction with the next tool we’ll talk about, which is the campaign team feature.

3. Campaign Team Members

The ability to add team members to your campaigns truly sets Mailshake apart because it allows you to divide and conquer.

After sifting through your leads, you can forward leads that might pertain to certain members of your team directly to them, which will appear directly on their Mailshake dashboard.

All team members are able to edit the campaign, which makes dividing the work and combining efforts easier than ever before.

4. Flexible and Affordable Pricing

Mailshake is incredibly reasonably priced, especially considering all the benefits that they give to their users.

Their services come with two payment options.

If you want to pay monthly, the service only costs $19 a month.

But that’s not the cheapest option.

If you choose to pay for a whole year at once, you only pay $199 for all 12 months. That means you get a month and a half for free.

An Example of How to Utilize Mailshake: Link Building Campaigns

Many of you reading this are probably interested in using Mailshake to optimize your link building outreach campaigns.

This is completely within Mailshake’s power.

Link building campaigns rely on being personable, efficient and having a large number of people to reach out to.

Mailshake gives you the ability to create and customize just the right email templates, which helps you make personal connections with people who might create links to your site. The efficiency and powerful integrations take care of the rest.

Then, once you’ve started getting affirmative responses from your leads, you just need to confirm that you’ve actually scored backlinks.

To monitor your backlinks and measure their strength, you can use Monitor Backlinks—an all-in-one link building tool to track your backlinks and other SEO metrics.

Side note: Using Monitor Backlinks, you could even spy on your competition to catch up on their most recent backlinks. Once you see what’s working for those guys, you can better inform your own outreach.

If a lead says that they’ve given you a backlink and it never shows up, then you can follow up.

If a lead says nothing but pops in a backlink for you anyway, you can see this here and then touch base with them to say thanks and discuss further collaboration.

This is just one tool pairing, though—you’ll need to seek out the additional tools you need to fully monitor the results of your outreach campaigns.

Why Mailshake Brings All the Boys to the Yard

There are many reasons to automate your cold outreach campaigns by using Mailshake, but we’re going to focus on some that we feel are truly revolutionary.

These could change the way you interact with potential clients and influencers over the internet, and they can also change how that interaction affects you and your business.

Cost-effectiveness

When considering the cost of email campaigns, there are several things that you need to think about. First, you obviously have to consider the amount of money that you spend on the campaign.

Since Mailshake is reasonably priced and has a couple pricing options for more flexibility, you know that you won’t be spending too much on automating your campaigns.

The second thing you have to consider, however, is the time you spend on the campaign itself. Your time is valuable, so it needs to be heavily considered.

Finally, you have to consider the number of leads you actually bring in from the campaign. If you save time and money but don’t achieve results, you’re not gaining anything.

All things considered, Mailshake gives you the absolute highest cost-effectiveness by reducing your time commitment, charging very reasonable rates and allowing you to bring in more leads than ever before.

Great Dashboard

With Mailshake, you get all of these perks and more with their fantastic dashboard that keeps all your campaigns just a click away.

It allows you to access campaign details and easily work with all your existing campaigns and add new ones with the click of a button.

From the main dashboard, you can access analytics, account settings, campaign settings and all the other details that will keep your outreach running effectively.

Powerful Integrations

Under the “Extensions” tab, you’ll discover a whole host of very powerful integrations that allow you to do more with Mailshake than with any other email automation service.

What exactly is an integration and why will it help with your campaigns you more than you ever thought possible?

Integrations allow you to combine the already powerful Mailshake interface with other powerful tools like Google analytics, Trello, Pipedrive, Slack, MailChimp and others.

For example, you can easily add new members to your campaign without manually typing them in by using the Google Forms extension.

Each time a potential client fills out the Google Form, their contact information will be automatically loaded into your campaign without ever moving a muscle.

Similarly, by using a powerful combination of Zapier and Google Sheets, you can easily record how many of your clients clicked certain links and easily transfer that data to other tools like Google Analytics.

Trello files feedback of clients into cards, while MailChimp can be used to easily add, unsubscribe and update recipients.

Each integration adds to your workflow by automating another part of the process.

Flexible Sending Settings

The two things you absolutely must have control over to have any semblance of an effective cold outreach campaign are what you send and to whom you send it.

If you don’t have control over the sending process, you don’t have control of your campaign.

Mailshake gives you complete control over who receives what, when they receive it, if any follow-up emails are sent to them and under what conditions, and allows you to filter the best and worst leads so you can prioritize your responses and follow-ups.

With customizable sending settings, you can control every detail of who receives what, the number of emails that are sent out daily, and set limiting factors for follow-ups.

In practice, that looks a lot like cold emailing on autopilot. You program the easy-to-use system to take control of your campaign, which means you can devote your time to dealing with all the leads that Mailshake finds for you.

 

With its next-level powerful tools and analytics, Mailshake gives you so many options to take control of your email campaigns and still spend less time working on them than ever before.

With the easy-to-use interface and premade templates, you’ll be able to launch your first campaign within minutes and begin generating new clients.

That’s efficiency in a nutshell.

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Yassir Sahnoun is a content strategist, writer and co-founder of WriteWorldwide. He helps online businesses with SEO and content marketing. You can learn more about Yassir at YassirSahnoun.com.