It's always good to prepare yourself and your equipment before you start any kind of task. Outbound works the same way! You have to set everything up on your account in order to start sending messages and not to harm your domain's reputation and deliverability.
Before you start sending messages:
- Connect your email address
- Exclude prospects/companies from being generated in Growbots
- Set up DNS records for your domain
- Consider turning on click tracking
NOTE: When it comes to setting up the DNS records, you can ask your IT admin for help, as DNS records are directly connected to your domain settings.
To get started, log in with your credentials under app.growbots.com.
Make sure you use Google Chrome for the best user experience.
1. Connect your email address
To be able to send emails through Growbots, you need to connect your email account. Go to Settings -> Integrations and connect your email account.
If you’re using Gmail or Outlook, it’s really simple, just choose a dedicated option, log into your account and allow for access (keep in mind that while adding an Outlook email account, you need to be logged into that particular account on your device).
If you use any other email provider, take a look at this article.
If you’re using email with 2 Factor Authentication, check out this article.
After connecting the account, you’ll be asked to fill in your personal data (to be used as custom fields in the future) and set up a daily sending limit for it. The app won’t send more messages than the daily limit you put in. Our recommendation is sending no more than 150 emails/day from one email account.
When setting up the sending limits, it’s really important to know whether the email inbox you're integrating is new, or was previously used for outbound or email outreach in general. We recommend using email inboxes that already have an established reputation.
If your email inbox:
- has been used for email outreach and already has a reputation, then you can start with 50/100 emails per day and gradually increase the limit by 25 every 2 weeks until you reach 150;
- is completely new, then there are two things you should do:
Firstly, set up your sending limit to 30 emails per day for the first two weeks. Then you can gradually increase the limit by 25 every two weeks. So your timeline would look like this:
SL: 30 ------- SL: 55 ------ SL: 80 ------ … ------ SL: 150
(Week 1) (Week 3) (Week 4) ... (Week 9).
Secondly, warm up your email account before you start sending out regular campaigns. To do so, you can create a warm-up campaign to your colleagues, friends, or family. Ask your recipients for a warm reply like “I’m interested” - that will help you build a good reputation for the email address.
You can also subscribe to some newsletters, which will make your inbox “look” more human.
It's also a great idea to use our own tool called Warmbots to warm up your domain.
2. Exclude prospects/companies from being generated in Growbots
You can exclude certain prospects or companies (e.g. your current customers, competitors or leads you’re currently in conversation with), so they won’t be generated in Growbots.
There are two ways to do so:
- Integrate your CRM
This will allow you to “push” Growbots prospects to your CRM and track their status and activities, and make sure you don't generate leads from your CRM in Growbots. You just need to go to Settings -> Integrations and integrate your CRM.
Zapier integration allows you not only to integrate your CRM, but also to integrate other apps and pick specific triggers. Here is a list of Zapier-compatible integrations.
- Upload a Do-Not-Contact List
If you are not integrating Salesforce or Hubspot CRM (or want to exclude whole companies, not individuals), but still would like to prevent contacting your current clients in Growbots, then it’s best to import a Do-Not-Contact List.
You can create a list of:
- Prospects - the file has to be in the .CSV format and include the prospects' data that you want to import (only a column with Email address is necessary, but it's good to have other information as well). The file cannot be bigger than 4,8 MB.
- Companies - the file also has to be in the .CSV format and include the companies' data that you want to import (only a column with Website is necessary, but it's good to have more of them). It should only consist of domains in the following format: growbots.com (not www.growbots.com or http://growbots.com). The file cannot be bigger than 4,8 MB.
NOTE: you can use the formula in Google Sheets to “clean” your http::// domains:=regexreplace(SUBSTITUTE(regexreplace(A2,"https?\:\/\/",""),"www.",""),"\/(.*)","")
To import a DO-NOT-CONTACT list, go to Settings -> Exclusions, where you’ll be able to switch between Prospects and Companies views and import the list accordingly.
3. Set up your DNS settings
After integrating your email address, it’s really important to take appropriate precautions regarding the deliverability of your messages.
SPF, DKIM and CNAME are three main domain settings that you should set up in your first weeks of using Growbots, we also advise to set up DMARC as well. These are not necessary to schedule a campaign, but they’ll definitely help with the deliverability of your emails. Make sure to share the DNS setup instructions with your IT admin to ensure the best deliverability possible.
4. Click tracking
The reply and warm reply rates in Growbots are tracked automatically. You can decide if you want to track open rates of your campaigns, but the tracking is turned on by default. However, if you wish to track clicks in your templates, then you have to turn this option on in Settings -> Organization. Remember that click tracking can have an impact over your deliverability, so make sure to turn it on only if you actually need this metric.
Also, in order to protect your domain reputation, keep in mind that having a CNAME record configured correctly and added to Growbots as a Custom Tracking Domain is really important when you have click tracking turned on.
That's it! With those steps set up you can start sending out your first messages.
