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: Setting up the DNS records (namely: SPF, DKIM and CNAME) is very important, but you can set them up while your first campaign is running. You can ask your IT admin for help, as DNS records are directly connected to your domain settings.
1. Connect your email address
In order to schedule campaigns using Growbots, you have to integrate your email address.
If you are using Gmail or Outlook, choose the appropriate provider in Settings→Integrations:
If you’re using email with 2 Factor Authentication, check out this article.
Not using Gmail or Outlook? Check out this article on connecting other providers’ inboxes.
After connecting the account, you’ll be asked to set up a 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 until you reach 150;
- is completely new, then there are two things you should do:
First, set up your sending limit to 30 emails per day for the first week. Then you can gradually increase the limit by 20 or 25 emails every week. So your timeline would look like this:
SL: 30 ------- SL: 50 ------ SL: 70 ------ … ------ SL: 150
(Week 1) (Week 2) (Week 3) ... (Week 7)
It’s also important to 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.
We also have a new tool called Warmbots, which you can use to warm up your inboxes - you can read all about it here.
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. 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 others 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. These are not necessary to schedule a campaign, but they’ll definitely help with the deliverability of your emails. You can go ahead and start scheduling your first campaign without these records, BUT 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 (the tracking is turned on by default). But 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.
That's it! With those steps set up you can start sending out your first messages.
