Can You Automate Cold Email Outreach? (& Should You?)

There are parts of cold email outreach that can be automated.

However, if you try to automate everything, your results will be worse than if you still had some manual components.

In this article, I will share everything that you need to know about automating the cold email outreach process:

• What is cold email automation?
• Can you automate cold emails?
• Should you automate your cold email outreach?
• How to automate cold email outreach
• Final thoughts

What is cold email automation?

Cold email automation is the process of sending cold emails (unsolicited emails), while automating certain parts of the sending process.

For example, you can schedule automatic follow-up emails.

You can also automate personalization by adding custom variables into your cold emails. Instead of manually writing “Hi John”, “Hi Mary”, “Hi James” and so on for each lead, you can use a first name custom variable {first_name} which will automatically update the first name of each lead, so that you can send a single campaign to many leads at the same time, without having to manually update each lead’s first name.

Can you automate cold emails?

Yes, you can automate your cold email outreach.

There are many cold email softwares on the market that allow you to automate the cold email outreach process.

I recommend that you use Emailchaser, as it was specifically built to help salespeople and entrepreneurs automate their cold email sending.

Should you automate your cold email outreach?

There are certain parts of the cold email process that you should automate, and others that you shouldn’t.

The below list assumes that you are sending a high volume of emails (not manually emailing each lead):

You should automate the following:

• Automatic follow-up emails
  This will save you countless hours, and will also dramatically increase your response rate as most leads don’t respond to the first email.

• Personalization with custom variables
  Use custom variables such as {first_name} to automatically insert your leads’ first names into your emails, so each email looks personalized without you needing to manually update each lead's name.

• The sending process
  Cold email softwares such as Emailchaser allow you to upload a list of leads to a campaign, and will email your leads over a period of time that looks natural.
  
  If you blast 1,000 leads with the same email at the exact same time from a single email address, then email service providers (Gmail & Outlook) will mark all of your emails as spam.
  
  Emailchaser will email your leads over a long period of time in a way that looks natural, with time gaps in between each email being sent, so that your emails don’t go to spam. It does all of this automatically without you needing to manually send each email. Simply upload your leads and click “launch campaign”, and watch the responses roll in.

You should NOT automate the following:

• The email writing process
  You should not use AI (such as ChatGPT) to write your cold emails for you from scratch.
  
  AI writing tools usually don’t write the best copy. Your response rate will be low if you completely rely on ChatGPT to write your cold emails for you.
  
  You can use AI to give you ideas or slightly modify existing text that you already wrote, but you shouldn’t delegate your copywriting entirely to AI.
  
  Emailchaser has a feature that will automatically modify the text in your emails so that no two emails you send are identical (this helps with deliverability). However, the overall message is still very similar to your original email that you still have to write yourself.
  
  
  
  You can learn more about how sending the exact same email too many times can hurt your deliverability in my article Does Sending The Same Cold Email Multiple Times Decrease Deliverability?

How to automate cold email outreach

1. Sign up for a Google Workspace account, and create an email account.
2. Sign up for an Emailchaser account, and connect your Google Workspace email account to Emailchaser.
3. Find leads from LinkedIn Sales Navigator using Emailchaser’s LinkedIn Email Finder Google Chrome extension.
4. Create a campaign in Emailchaser and upload your leads to your campaign.
5. Launch your campaign, and allow Emailchaser’s numerous automation features to save you countless hours.

You can learn exactly how to do the above in my article How To Send Cold Emails Without Landing In Spam.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

It is possible to save a significant amount of time by automating the cold email outreach process.

I recommend that you automate the following parts of your outreach:

• Personalization with custom variables.
• Automatic follow-up emails.
• The sending process.

You can do all of the above (and more) using a specialized cold email software like Emailchaser.

You can learn how to automate your cold emails in my article How To Send Cold Emails Without Landing In Spam.

I also recommend that you read my article How To Personalize Your Cold Emails At Scale.