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Cold outreach, explained

Plain-language answers to the questions that come up before, during, and after running a cold outreach campaign.

Cold Outreach & Deliverability

What Is Cold Outreach?

Cold outreach is contacting people who have no prior relationship with your business — usually by email — to start a sales conversation, using tools to find contacts, send at scale, and track replies.

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What Is a Sales Sequence?

A sales sequence is a series of timed, automated touchpoints — usually emails — sent to a prospect over days or weeks until they reply, book a meeting, or opt out.

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What Is Sender Reputation?

Sender reputation is the trust score mailbox providers (Gmail, Outlook, and others) assign to a sending domain and IP based on past behavior — high reputation gets mail delivered to the inbox, low reputation gets it filtered to spam or blocked outright.

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What Is Email Warm-Up?

Email warm-up is the process of gradually increasing send volume from a new domain or inbox — often by exchanging real, engaged-looking emails — so mailbox providers build enough trust to deliver its mail to the inbox instead of spam.

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What Is a Dedicated IP for Email Sending?

A dedicated IP is an IP address used only by your account to send email, so your sender reputation depends solely on your own sending behavior rather than being shared with other senders on the same IP.

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What Is Inbox Placement?

Inbox placement is where a sent email actually lands — the primary inbox, a secondary tab (like Gmail’s Promotions), or the spam folder — as opposed to whether it was simply "delivered" (accepted by the receiving server) at all.

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What Is Email Personalization at Scale?

Personalization at scale means automatically customizing each email in a large send — using data like name, company, or industry — so hundreds or thousands of recipients each get a message that reads as individually written, without manually writing each one.

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What Is a Spam Trap?

A spam trap is an email address planted specifically to catch senders with poor list hygiene — it never opted in and never sends real replies, so any mail sent to it signals to mailbox providers and blocklists that the sender isn’t validating their list properly.

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What Is Email List Hygiene?

Email list hygiene is the ongoing practice of keeping a contact list clean — verifying addresses, removing bounces and inactive contacts, and honoring opt-outs — so that sending to it doesn’t damage sender reputation or deliverability.

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What Is a Bounce Rate (in Email)?

Bounce rate is the percentage of sent emails that fail to reach a recipient’s inbox — split into hard bounces (permanent failures, like a non-existent address) and soft bounces (temporary failures, like a full inbox) — and it’s one of the strongest signals mailbox providers use to judge sender reputation.

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What Are the Google and Microsoft Bulk-Sender Requirements?

In February 2026, Google and Microsoft tightened the authentication and deliverability rules that apply to senders sending high volumes of email, extending requirements first introduced for Gmail/Yahoo bulk senders in 2024 — senders on shared IPs without proper authentication reportedly saw the steepest drops in deliverability.

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