Connecting your email account is the very first step to send email campaigns through Growbots. It will take you just a few minutes, and you’ll be able to move on to the fun part: finding new leads!
If you want to find more information about choosing email accounts for outbound sales, check this article!
If you have some emails connected, but would like to connect more - you need to upgrade your subscription.
In this article, we will go through most important settings regarding the e-mail accounts and Growbots:
Adding your email account
To add your email account, go to Settings → Integrations
Select your email provider.
Gmail or Outlook
Connecting a Gmail or Outlook account is really easy. Select the dedicated button, choose the right email account and allow permissions.
Please note that while adding an Outlook email account, you need to be logged into the same account in Outlook on your device.
NOTE: you can also connect your Gmail account using IMAP/SMTP. You'll find the step-by-step instructions on how to do that in this article.
Other email providers
If your email address is neither Gmail nor Outlook based, you will have to integrate it manually by choosing Other option.
First, you need to enter your email address and password:
The system will check the setting prepared for your email provider. However, you can edit IMAP/SMTP form that will allow you to connect your accounts. Fill it out with your credentials including email address, username, password, IP addresses and ports for your IMAP/SMTP server. You can find the settings for the most common email providers here.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Growbots supports only fully secured IMAP/SMTP ports to ensure safety of your communication. Our recommended IMAP port is 993 and for SMTP 587 or 465.
NOTE 2: If you're using GoDaddy, make sure your plan supports IMAP (not only SMTP and POP3). In order to have access to IMAP on GoDaddy, you need to upgrade your plan. Here's a step-by-step instruction. You can check your Email Setup by going here.
NOTE 3: If you’re using a separate set of credentials for outgoing and incoming email servers, uncheck the box next to SMTP uses the same username and password as IMAP and provide the necessary credentials.
Hit the Next step to move to the Email account settings.
Setting up the email account
First, define the sending limit, which is a maximum number of emails that can be sent from this email account.
At the beginning of your journey with outbound, (for both brand-new email accounts and those that were already used in outreach), we recommend warming them up for at least 2 weeks before starting sending campaigns, and then set up the advanced sending limit in a way that there would be twice as many follow-ups as initial messages: initial messages - 20, follow-ups - 40).
Monitor your deliverability (you can do that in your Warmbots dashboard), and if it looks good, increase the limits after 2 weeks to send: 27 initials and 53 follow-ups.
We recommend keeping the daily sending limits at 100 messages per day or less, so after another 2 weeks you can increase the limits to 35 initial messages and 65 follow-ups. Those limits are especially important if your email's provider is Google.
Regardless of whether the email is brand new or not, make sure to turn on Warmbots for it to warm it up before sending the campaigns and ensure good domain reputation and deliverability - you can read all about this feature here.
Important note:
Please note that from 1 June 2023, Warmbots will stop warming up Gmail email accounts connected via our native Google integration. You can still enable Warmbots, but it will only provide you with the ability to monitor your deliverability, without the warm-up capabilities.
You can read more about the decision and how to maintain good deliverability in Gmail here: click!
When you scroll down, you'll see the section in which can add information about you that will be useful in your campaigns. You can use the data on the left as custom fields in your email templates. Required fields are first name, last name and company.
You can also create your signature (or import it from Gmail), which you can use at the end of your messages. Just remember to add the custom field sender_signature in the templates.
Go to Next step and voilà! Your email account has been successfully connected. Remember that one unique account can be connected to only one user seat in Growbots. You are advised of course to connect multiple accounts, thanks to which you’ll be able to send bigger batches of messages a day.
Editing your email account
Whenever something changes with your email account settings (e.g. you change your password) or professional information (e.g. you get promoted), you’ll need to update your email account in Growbots.
Go to Settings → Integrations.
Hit on Edit settings and update the selected data.
Confirm your changes by clicking on Save.
Disconnecting your email account
Perhaps sometime in the future, you decide to disconnect some of your email accounts. Before you do that, make sure that the address isn’t being used in any of your active campaigns. Once you disconnect your account, all active campaigns scheduled with this email address will be stopped. You'll need to reconnect the email account to be able to resume them.
Go to Settings → Integrations.
Find the right email account and hit Delete.
Confirm your decision by clicking Disconnect.
Email got disconnected on its own - what do I do?
Sometimes your email might get disconnected from Growbots - for example, due to password change, some other changes in your inbox provider's settings, or due to an email suspension.
No worries! To reconnect your email, head to Settings → Integrations and click on the blue reconnect button under the email that you want to reconnect. If the reconnect button doesn't appear, that mean you'll need to Delete the email from your account and connect it again.
If your Gmail account got suspended - here's a short article on how to reactivate it.
What happens to my email when I connect it to Growbots?
When you connect your email to Growbots (whether through GMail, SMTP / IMAP, Nylas, or whatever means of connection we might come up with in the future), you are essentially granting Growbots access to your mailbox.
Growbots uses this access to automate tasks related to how Growbots functions:
1) to send emails
2) to detect replies from prospects contacted using Growbots
Sending emails doesn’t require Growbots to read any of your emails, because in order to send a message we only need to know who are we sending that email to, what’s the subject and what’s the content of that email.
In order to detect if a prospect replied to your campaign, we check your mailbox every ~10 minutes, to see if there are any new messages. If there are new replies, we check if that reply was from a prospect contacted from Growbots by pulling contents of that message (full MIME message). We then use that message (email headers, its contents) to determine if that email is a reply from a prospect.
If it is a reply from a prospect, we save it to our database so that you can also see contents of that reply in Growbots app, perform message classification to check if it's a warm reply or a cold reply, and put the email in specific folders (if you have folder management turned on within Growbots Settings).
It’s important to point out that:
Growbots uses access to your mailbox to send emails and detect replies from prospects;
Growbots only saves replies from prospects that you have contacted using Growbots app and the system is built to only detect messages from prospects;
Growbots doesn’t access your contacts or previous emails from before you connected your mailbox to Growbots.
What about my credentials?
- credentials to the Growbots account are stored in hashed and salted form (one-way operation, i.e. we can't retrieve them back), as the industrial standard dictates.
- credentials to SMTP/IMAP accounts are stored in encrypted form (so they can be decrypted back, as we need to have a way to actually use them to log in to the mailboxes).