How Many Cold Emails to Send Per Day (2024)

How many cold emails is too many? It is a common question many email marketers ask when starting with cold emailing. Let's find out the answer!

Eager to share your killer cold email with the world?

That’s great! Just be mindful, one of the things that can kill your campaign before it even gets off the ground is sending too many cold emails per day.

How many cold emails are fine to send per day? Well, it depends on many factors - mainly how old is your sending address and inbox.

The rule is to start small (10 - 20 emails per day) and gradually increase your sending volume while keeping an eye on your deliverability and reputation.

Last but not least, there are certain limits by the email service providers. The limit set by your ESP designates how many emails you can send out each day.

Let’s explore how you can make your next cold email campaign a resounding success.

1. Start with an Email Warmup Service

Whether it’s your first time orchestrating a cold email campaign from your current account or you’re revamping a previous strategy, the first step to avoid landing in the spam folder is to employ an email warmup service.

You can warm up your inbox manually, but the process is quite tedious and time-consuming. Using an email warming service will automate the process so you don’t have to worry about math and can focus on other business matters.

An email warming service will steadily send more emails from your account each day until you reach your target number of emails sent in a day.

2. Understand Daily Sending Best Practices

Consumers are overwhelmed with content on a given day.

Think about the number of emails that arrive in your personal inbox compared to those you actually open.

Every ESP has its own spam filter functions. But a universal red flag for all ESPs is an email account suddenly sending a ton of emails. So please be mindful of the number of cold emails you are sending per day.

Unfortunately, many spammers will create an email account and send their messages to as many people as possible before getting shut down. This 0-to-100 method ruins email blasts for the rest of us and makes warming up your inbox necessary for cold email campaigns.

The best practices for any type of cold emailing are the same:

Other good practices include verifying your emails before reaching out to the recipients, registering your domain for the proper security settings (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), and keeping your inbox warm.

And, of course, know and follow your ESP’s daily sending limit.

3. Know Your ESP’s Daily Sending Limit

Depending on the number of emails you want to send in a day, you may want to look into upgrading your ESP. We do not recommend sending email blasts from a free Gmail or Outlook account because scammers tend to use these and you will be flagged.

It’s also important to note that many ESPs equate “number of emails sent” with “number of recipients.” In short, trying to circumvent the limits by BCC-ing all of your recipients on a single message won’t work.

Here’s a quick list of some of the most popular ESPs and their sending limits.

What Happens If I Exceed the Daily Sending Limit?

It depends on your ESP.

In many cases, like with Google, you won’t be able to send any more messages that day. Some services, such as Microsoft and Zoho, will hold your messages until the number of sent messages drops below the limit of the set timeframe.

Most ESPs won’t immediately suspend your account if you exceed the daily limit, but over-sending can lead to an account suspension if you continue to push the boundaries.

The best things you can do to ensure your emails are delivered are to send a lower volume of higher quality emails, employ a warming service to help you optimize your output, and use multiple email accounts to scale your outreach.

One of the ways to avoid reaching the sender limits is to split up your overall sending volume between multiple email addresses (services such as Mailstand can help you with that). This helps with deliverability and reduces the possibility of unexpected issues arising when putting a single email address under stress.

Why Sender Reputation Matters

Your sender reputation is important because it’s a score assigned to your inbox and domain to measure the security of delivering your message to the recipient.

Higher scores mean that your message will likely land in your readers’ inboxes.

Lower scores can get your messages into spam folders or your domain placed on a block list.

Having a positive sender reputation is essential for a successful cold email campaign because mail servers will use your sender reputation score to determine if you’re a trustworthy sender.

If your reputation gets too low, your messages will land in your recipients’ junk folders.

What Impacts Sender Reputation?

The top three culprits for a low sender reputation score are:

If too many users report your content as spam, it will damage your score.

If you’re sending emails to old accounts or try to exceed your ESP’s daily sending limit and end up with a high bounce rate, your reputation will be affected.

It’s best to avoid buying email lists of “people in your target audience” because that list will likely include at least one spam trap.

Spam traps are inactive or fake accounts used to weed out senders who are sending emails out to anyone and everyone.

Not only can landing in a spam trap harm your reputation, but it can also get you placed on a blacklist.

Routinely Clean Your Email List

Because your sender reputation relies on keeping your bounce rate low, it’s essential to clean your email list regularly. While some of us still hold on to the first email account we ever made, others phase out old email addresses in favor of new ones for various reasons.

As soon as you notice an email to a specific recipient has bounced, remove them from your mailing list. Continuing to send messages to an inactive account will damage your sender’s reputation.

Additionally, many old or inactive emails are turned into spam traps. Cleaning your mailing list can help you avoid an inadvertent message to a spam trap.

TL;DR

Cold emailing is one of the most effective marketing tactics for building relationships with new clients if you: