What email provider should you use for cold emails?
What email provider should you use for cold emails? Here's a quick breakdown of what we recommend to our users at supersend.io, having observed thousands of cold outreach campaigns mature over the last two years👇
Here's a quick breakdown of what we recommend to our users at supersend.io, having observed thousands of cold outreach campaigns mature over the last two years👇
There are three key levers that affect the decision:
1/ Price
2/ Preference
3/ Deliverability
We like to classify this into four broad tiers:
Tier 1
Google Workspace, Microsoft Outlook
The best lead-gen agencies we know use either Gmail or Outlook based on client preference. Their clients likely pay them $3-7k a month. Metrics are extremely important, hence, they can naturally afford these.
You can expect to send 30-50 emails/day from a fully-warmed up account, long-term.
Tier 2
Privateemail by Namecheap, Godaddy, Zoho, Any Email hosting plan by a reputed email provider
There are budget constraints and we understand that. Tier 2 providers work well as long as they do. The only issue is that they experience unexpected deliverability issues from Gmail and Outlook after a few months, or in some cases, a few weeks of sending, and the only option you have is to get a new one.
Privateemail starts at ~$14/year and $8/year for any subsequent mailboxes.
Zoho starts at ~$12/year.
Tier 3
These providers offer 100 emails for like $20. We see emails sent through these providers getting blocked very quickly, all the time. Understand who's buying these emails and what's motivating them.
Tier 4
AWS SES, Mailgun, Sendgrid, Resend
These are bulk email providers, used for sending newsletters, transactional emails, and not really built for sending regular emails. Get a plan that offers a dedicated IP and you might be sending thousands a day. These are a bit of a grey area.
Some have had some success using these, but we don’t have enough data to weigh a verdict on either side.
These are starter notes I wish I knew when I was setting up my first cold outreach campaign – feel free to test a couple of providers and stick with what works best for YOU.