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Infrastructure

The Cold Email Setup Checklist

Everything that has to be in place before you send a single cold email, in the order it has to happen, with the reason for each one.

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Most recruiters who try cold email fail for one of two reasons, and neither of them is the copy.

Either they send from their own company domain and quietly wreck their email reputation, or they send four hundred emails, hear nothing, and conclude the channel is dead.

Almost everything below exists to stop one of those two things happening. None of it is secret. All of it is boring. That's rather the point. The difficulty isn't knowing what to do, it's doing it consistently while you've also got roles to fill.

Realistic timeline: three weeks from starting to first send. There is no way to compress the warm-up, and anyone telling you otherwise is about to damage something of yours.

Phase 1

Infrastructure

Week 1 · before you write any copy

Do not send from your main domain

Send a few hundred emails a day from yourcompany.co.uk and eventually someone marks one as spam. Your domain reputation drops and it takes your ordinary business email with it. Invoices in junk, replies to clients never arriving. That damage is slow to undo and costs far more than the campaign was going to make.

Buy lookalike sending domains

Variations on your real domain: .com, .net, .co, hyphenated versions, "getyourcompany", "yourcompanysearch". Two to four to start.

Point every sending domain at your real website

Anyone who checks lands on your actual business rather than a dead link. This matters more than people expect. It's the first thing a cautious recipient does.

Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC on each domain

Non-negotiable. Without these you go to spam regardless of everything else you do.

Create your inboxes

Two to three per domain is the safe ratio. Each will send roughly 30–50 emails a day once mature. Plan your total volume backwards from that number.

Budget for it properly

Domains, inboxes, a sending platform and lead data all cost money every month, before a single reply arrives. Work that number out before you start rather than discovering it in month two.

JONNY: insert your actual current monthly costs here before publishing. Don't estimate; people will hold you to a number on a free download.

Phase 2

Warm-up

Weeks 1–3 · runs in the background

Put every new inbox into a warm-up network before it sends anything real

Think of every email account as having a credit score. A brand-new inbox that starts sending immediately gets flagged by Google and Yahoo and never properly recovers.

Give it two to three weeks, genuinely

The most-skipped step on this list, and the most expensive one to skip.

Don't stop warm-up when campaigns start

Leave it running underneath. It holds the reputation up as your volume increases.

Phase 3

Data

Weeks 2–3 · while the inboxes warm

Define who you're targeting before you open a database

Job titles, seniority, company size, industry, geography. Titles are where most lists go wrong. "Construction manager" means a site manager at one firm and a contracts manager at another.

Build the list against those criteria, not the other way round

Apollo will happily hand you 25,000 names. That isn't a list, it's a liability.

Aim for 2,000–4,000 contacts per campaign

Big enough to learn something. Small enough to stay relevant.

Include title synonyms

Commercial director / head of commercial. Talent acquisition / head of talent / people director. Miss these and you lose a third of your market.

Verify the emails before sending

High bounce rates damage your sending reputation directly.

Eyeball the first page before you commit

Open a handful of profiles at random. If more are irrelevant than relevant, the filters are wrong. Fix those rather than deleting rows by hand.

Build a suppression list

Existing clients, anyone mid-process, anyone who's said no, and any firm you'd rather not approach. Load it before the first send, not after the awkward reply.

Phase 4

The emails

Plain text only

No images, no logos, no heavy formatting. Anything that looks like marketing gets filed as marketing.

Signature: your name and your company, nothing else

No phone numbers, no social icons, no address block, no "sent from" banner.

No links in the first email

Links are one of the fastest routes into a spam folder on a cold send. Earn the reply first.

Keep it under about seventy words

Nobody reads a long cold email from a stranger. The goal of the message is a reply, not a decision.

Write five to ten variants, not one

You're not guessing which version works. You're going to find out. Run them simultaneously.

Build a three-step sequence

First email, three days, second, then a short third that closes the loop. The first converts best, the second does real work, and the third, the polite "I'll leave it there", reliably shakes out replies.

Put an unsubscribe on every message and honour it permanently

Phase 5

Sending

Start low and ramp

Even after warm-up, don't jump to full volume on day one. Build across the first fortnight.

Treat the first two weeks as a test, not a campaign

You're learning which copy your market answers. Kill the losers quickly and put the volume behind the winners.

Know your benchmarks so you can tell signal from noise

Open rate	50–60%
Reply rate	1–2%
Rough maths	500 emails → ~250 opens → 2–5 replies

What volume actually means

A business typically needs to see you seven to twelve times before they'll consider a meeting. Four hundred emails is not a test of cold email. It's a test of luck.

Phase 6

Handling replies

Where the value is

Tag every single reply

Interested / not now / no / out of office.

Treat "not now" as your most valuable category

Nurture sequence, touch every few weeks. A large share of eventual business comes from people who said no first time. They weren't rejecting you, they just had no live need that week.

Take "no" off the list permanently

Straight to suppression.

Treat an out-of-office as good news

It means the email arrived. Drop them back into the sequence for when they're back.

Read your bounces

There's only one real reason an email bounces: the person has left. That tells you two things: your message isn't reaching that company, and there's a contact worth finding again on LinkedIn. Hiring managers keep their profiles more current than candidates do.

Reply within the hour during the working day

A warm reply that sits for two days is a cold reply.

Phase 7

The bit that doubles everything

Post content to the same market at the same time

The first thing anyone does with a cold email from a stranger is look them up. If your profile is job adverts and work anniversaries, you've answered their question and the answer was no.

Content and outreach aren't two tactics. They're one system where each half makes the other work. Run outreach alone and you're a stranger asking for time. Run content alone and you're visible to people who'll never quite get round to contacting you.

An honest word about all this

All of it is doable on your own.

None of it is complicated and I've deliberately left nothing out. What it is, is relentless: four posts a week, a few thousand emails a month, list building, inbox triage and deliverability management, every week, forever, alongside actually recruiting.

Most agency owners hold it for about six weeks before the desk takes over. Stopping halfway leaves you worse off than never starting, because consistency is the only thing either channel rewards.

PipelineOS · everything on this list, run for you. £2,000 a month for recruitment and search teams of one to twenty consultants, both funnels live inside three weeks.

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