How Many Cold Emails to Send Per Day to Expand Your Audience And Increase Sales

You have a great product or service, so you naturally want to let everyone know! Sending emails to everyone potentially interested is a great way to find customers. There’s only one “but.” 

Unfortunately, you can’t just create an email account and start sending unlimited messages to prospects. Doing that will most likely harm your sender reputation and turn you into a spam mailer. In this case, your email account will face serious repercussions that will stifle your marketing efforts.

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So, what’s the perfect number of emails to send per day? You’ll find the answer in this post. What’s more, you’ll discover why regular email warmup matters and how to reach more people with your cold emails safely!

How many cold emails can you send per day?

Email service providers (ESPs) limit the number of emails their users are free to send per day. This measure helps keep spam messages at bay. 

❗We recommend sending 20-30 messages daily for new accounts to prepare them for bulk sending better.

It’s worth noting that ESPs can’t determine if you’re sending cold emails or not. The daily limit applies to all messages sent from your inbox.

The exact daily email-sending limit depends on your provider and your plan. For example, you can send up to 500 daily emails from your free Gmail account. In contrast, being a lucky user of a paid Google Suite account allows you to send 2000 emails daily.

💡Pro-tip: We recommend carefully studying this list of ESPs’ daily email limits. Pay attention to the number of emails each allows you to send daily. Also, consider the size of the attachments allowed per message and the pricing to choose the one that suits your business needs.

What happens if I go over the daily sending limit?

This depends on a particular case. Some ESPs, including Google Mail, will simply stop delivering messages for the day. Others, like Microsoft and Zoho, will halt your emailing until the next day. Most providers won’t immediately penalize you, but consistent over-sending can lead to restrictions or even suspension of your account.

The consequences of regularly exceeding the daily email-sending limit include:

• Damaged sender reputation. Though the sender reputation is determined based on multiple factors, exceeding daily email limits can significantly hurt it.
• Reduced deliverability rate. Your emails may be flagged as spam and land in the spam folder instead of the inbox.
• Account restrictions. In case you go over the limit often, ESP may temporarily or permanently ban you from emailing.
• Increased costs. If you waste resources on emails that are not delivered, your efforts won’t show the desired ROI.
• Legal and regulatory issues. In a number of cases, excessive emailing can even lead to legal action against you.

That’s why we advise against chasing immediate revenue by just blasting out the maximum number of emails. It’s much better to play by the rules and achieve long-term success with your cold emailing.

What is a sender reputation, and why does it matter?

In this post, the sender reputation will be mentioned many times as the key aspect of successful inbox placement. So why is email reputation so important?

A sender reputation is a rating given to your email account by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) based on your activity. To assign a particular sender reputation to an account, ISPs consider several factors, such as:

• The number of emails sent per day, per month, and per year
• The email frequency
• The number of users who marked your messages as spam
• Every case, when your emails are bounced back
• An open, reply, and click-through rate of your emails
• The number of unsubscribed recipients

ISPs use your reputation to decide whether to deliver your message to the inbox or block it. A high sender reputation is crucial to ensure your emails go to the inbox instead of the spam folder. 

Note that a high number of emails won’t bring you any customers if spam filters catch those messages. Instead of worrying too much about how many cold emails to send per day, focus on maintaining a good sender reputation.

Best practices for daily cold email sending

Sending cold email campaigns requires a strategic approach to maximize responses while avoiding spam filters. Otherwise, your sender reputation might get worse and your cold outreach won’t bring desired results.

Here’s what you need to do for an efficient daily cold email outreach:

1. Warm up your email account first
2. Set a sending limit
3. Use several accounts for bulk email sending
4. Verify your contact list
5. Provide an option to unsubscribe
6. Leverage email engagement best practices
7. Diversify your outreach channels

1. Warm up your email account first

To avoid raising your ESP’s suspicion, dedicate the first month to email warmup. This means gradually increasing the sending volume before you launch a cold email campaign. 

Start with 20-30 messages daily for the first couple of weeks. And try to mail to existing contacts first. Then, slightly grow the daily number. In this case, you’ll do the warmup smoothly, raising your volume month by month.

💡 Pro-tip: Why regular  email warmup matters You should continuously do the email warmup regardless of whether you’re using a brand-new account or an existing one. With a continuous email warmup, you’ll maintain a steady mailing pattern. Regular email warmup ensures positive engagement, which strengthens your IP and signals you’re a trustworthy email sender. By performing warmup consistently, you can adapt to changes such as switching domains, ESPs, IPs, etc. Special warm-up tools will help you make sure your account will handle a large campaign without being penalized.  For example, with an extremely flexible Snov.io Email Warm-up, you can configure the process depending on the particular use case: Connect all accounts you plan to use in the campaign Choose the schedule that fits your timezone Set up the strategy based on whether you’re warming up a new or an existing account Determine the content of your warm-up message. After you’ve set up the warm-up campaign for a month, you’ll be able to monitor the results. This will give you an idea of when you’re ready to launch a large-scale cold mailing campaign from your email account.

2. Set a sending limit

Configure your email automation software to keep the number of emails sent daily under your provider’s limit. If you discover that the particular limit is not high enough, consider switching from a free to a more advanced plan. You can also switch to a different provider. 

In case you’re changing an email service provider, make sure that your new ESP has a reliable domain. Sending emails from the compromised domain will jeopardize your inbox placement rate.

3. Use several accounts for bulk email sending

If you see that your campaign volume can’t help but exceed the limits of your service provider, consider using multiple accounts. In this case, you’ll also be able to manage risks if, say, one of the accounts faces deliverability issues.

4. Verify your contact list

Sending a cold message to a person who definitely won’t be interested in your offer will hurt your sender reputation. That’s because, most likely, such recipients will never open your emails, or even worse — they might immediately flag them as spam.

The same goes for messaging inactive or invalid addresses—this will diminish your reputation and hurt your deliverability rate. So, the best approach to cold emailing is to ensure your contact list is clean. In other words, your prospect list should consist of qualified leads with active emails.

💡Pro-tip: We don’t recommend buying unverified databases of lead emails. They often contain inactive or fake addresses or prospects that don’t belong to your target audience.  Using a purchased address list often results in a high bounce rate and low open rate for your messages. If that’s the case, you might never launch a successful campaign. Sad but true. If you want to gather email addresses in bulk, try the following: Start with Email Finder to gather the leads relevant to your business (the tool will find them anywhere on the web, including LinkedIn): Then,  clean the list with Email Verifier.

Remember to maintain your email list hygiene and clean it at least once a year. For extensive lists, you can run validation every second month. This will save you from mailing to disengaged users and free your list from duplicates. The latter, in turn, will help you avoid sending a message multiple times to the same inbox.

5. Provide an option to unsubscribe

It will be much easier for you to keep your email list clean if disinterested users can just opt out of your emails. Besides, it will prevent you from facing those unwanted spam complaints. More so, cold emailing best practices call for adhering to the CAN-SPAM Act, GDPR, and other similar anti-spam legislations. They require an unsubscribe link to be included in commercial emails.

6. Leverage email engagement best practices

High open and reply rates ensure a good sender reputation. Experts recommend sticking to the following recommendations to increase your open and reply rates:

• Write a compelling subject line. Including the prospect’s name in the subject line is the most powerful way to increase the open rate. Adding a question mark, a currency, or an emoji also increases the chances of your email to appeal to your recipient.
• Create an intriguing introduction. Some mail service providers display the opening line of your message. If it draws the recipient’s attention, your message is more likely to be opened once it’s in the inbox.
• Make your recipient feel special. Personalize your email to appeal to each recipient using dynamic content and offering value. For this, carefully segment your contact list first, combining your recipients into groups with similar interests or pain points.

→ Check out our free detailed guide on writing cold emails that reach the inbox and keep your open and reply rates high.

7. Diversify your outreach channels

Need a way to increase the number of prospects you can interact with in a day for free? Mix your cold email with other communication channels, such as social media. In this case, you’ll be able to send a higher message volume than your service provider allows.

LinkedIn is a great platform for reaching out to prospective customers. Use LinkedIn automation software to launch successful campaigns on social media, similar to bulk email sending. Remember to adhere to similar recommendations to maintain a strong reputation for your account:

• Warm up your profile
• Don’t flood one recipient’s inbox
• Personalize your messages and
• Interact with a prospect by offering value.

💡Pro-tip: As managing two separate channels is inconvenient, we recommend launching multichannel outreach campaigns. Such campaigns encompass both cold email and social media but can be set and controlled from a single dashboard. Snov.io LinkedIn Automation Tool enables you to easily run multichannel campaigns even if you have little experience with multichannel outreach. Use it to: Gather leads from LinkedIn and solid company websites to create a quality mailing list. Add automated LinkedIn touches, such as profile views, connection requests, messages, and InMails, to your cold mail. Do the warmup of both your mailing and LinkedIn accounts. View detailed analytics on campaigns’ performance to further optimize your cold messaging strategy. Stay within daily limits for your cold email sending and LinkedIn actions. Snov.io keeps your account from being flagged as spam by LinkedIn or email service providers.

Key takeaways

While some sales reps view the email-sending limit as an obstacle, see it as an opportunity. After all, without the sending limits, the chances of your email getting lost in someone’s Gmail inbox would be much higher.

Using the practices described above, you’ll be able to maximize your cold outreach without going over your daily email limit. More so, you’ll maintain your sender reputation high, never be associated with spam, and make your further campaigns more successful. 

And remember, following best cold email practices is much easier with a reliable outreach automation tool like Snov.io. With a free Snov.io account, you’ll get all the features necessary for your emails to reach any inbox. The tool will let you test your inbox placement rate, do a consistent warmup, set smart mailing limits, and many more.