The first step in your outreach journey with Snov.io is to set up your sender domains, email and LinkedIn accounts for multichannel campaigns.
Step 1: Buy domains and email accounts
Step 2: Connect email accounts
Step 3: Get LinkedIn addon and connect LinkedIn accounts
Step 6: Add custom tracking domain
Step 7: Warm-up email accounts
Step 8: Run deliverability tests
Well-prepared sender accounts are crucial for doing outreach. Ignoring this step can lead to deliverability problems and hurt the success of your campaigns.
We’ll not only guide you through the steps but also explain the reasons behind each one, so you understand their importance.
The preparation phase, including the warm-up process, typically takes 3 to 4 weeks. Before getting started, log in to your Snov.io account, as a key part of the setup will be done there.
Outreach setup cost
Let’s break down the estimated cost of setting up your outreach system.
- Sender domains/email accounts:
Domains x5 (GoDaddy Domains $22 per year) = ~ $110.
Email accounts x10-20 ($12 per user/month on Google Business Standard) = from $120 to $240.
LinkedIn account x1 ($59.99/month for LinkedIn Premium Business) = ~$60. A LinkedIn account is optional, but highly recommended to expand your outreach to the LinkedIn channel.
- Lead lists and outreach software:
20,000 prospects + contacting 30,000 recipients per month = Pro 20K plan for $189*/mo. (*$142/mo if you take annual plan)
Total cost for the first month is around $480. The following months will be lower since your domains are covered for a year. Plus, you can save $567 annually by choosing the Snov.io annual plan instead of the monthly option.
Expected results as you start outreach:
- Outreach volume:
1000 emails daily = 50-100 emails* per email account. This is the safe per-account volume without risking the sender’s reputation.
20,000 emails monthly (except weekends).
- Expected engagement: (with the right targeting and email copy)
(30% open rate) → 6,000 opens (5% reply rate) → 300 replies (20% positive).
60 booked meetings (75% show-up rate) → 45 sales demos (25% success rate) → 10 deals closed.
Your average purchase x10 deals = your revenue per month using this outreach setup.
Follow these steps to get your outreach system ready. Let’s get started!
Step 1: Buy domains and email accounts
To determine how many domains and email accounts you’ll need, consider the number of emails you plan to send or the number of leads you want to contact.
Here’s a breakdown:
Each email account can safely send 50-100 emails per day. It’s recommended to have 3-5 email accounts per domain. Remember, a lower-end limit is the safer choice.
For example, to contact 100-200 leads per day, you’ll need 1 domain and 2 email accounts. To send 1000 emails per day, you’ll need around 10-20 email accounts.
Adjust the below formula for your daily sending goal.
| Daily sending goal | Number of domains | Number of email accounts |
| 100 emails | 1 | 2 |
| 500 emails | 2-3 | 10 (3-5 per domain) |
| 1000 emails | 5 | 20 (3-5 per domain) |
Buy domains
Having separate domains (aliases) for cold outreach is a smart strategy — this will protect the reputation of your primary domain. That way, if the cold email domain is flagged or blacklisted, it won’t affect your primary domain.
You can create a domain similar to your company name or just use a different extension (the part at the end).
Example: Suppose your primary domain is company.com. You could create cold email domains like “getcompany.com” or “trycompany.com”.
Such domain variations will still be familiar and recognizable to your recipients while keeping your primary domain safe from any potential issues.
→ Where to buy domains:
It’s recommended to buy domains from trusted providers such as GoDaddy or Namecheap.
→ Which domain extension to choose:
Buy domains with a .com extension—even though they are more expensive, they are more reputable and perform best for cold outreach. Domain extensions like .org and .io, or country-based (.ua, .uk) are also good choices for cold email campaigns. Extensions such as .biz, .online, or .xyz are often seen as spammy, untrustworthy, and emails from these domains are more likely to get flagged as spam.
→ Domain warm-up:
Before starting cold outreach with new domains, make sure to warm them up properly. Snov.io can help with this process — more details are coming up next in this guide.
Buy email accounts
The same applies to email accounts — stick with reputable providers. We recommend using Google Workspace or Microsoft for Business. If you choose Google Workspace, follow these steps: Go to the Google Workspace website and set up an account for your company.
During the setup process in the admin panel, you will connect the domains you’ve purchased by adding them under the “Domains” menu. For each added domain, create email accounts (users). Using 3-5 email accounts per domain is recommended.
Step 2: Connect email accounts
In the next step, you’ll connect your business mailboxes to Snov.io.
How to do it:
Go to the Email accounts page, click Add email account and choose your provider. We’ll suggest the default settings based on your provider.
Connect unlimited email accounts and use them for outreach without extra charges for each account.
This sets Snov.io apart from competitors who charge per account or have limits on the number of accounts per plan.
Set daily sending limit for every account:
To stay within the recommended limits, you can set a daily sending limit for each email account.
Click Edit to enter account settings and scroll down to the Optional settings. Select the Daily sending limit tab. In the Messages per day field, set your limit.
The recommended limit is up to 50–100 emails per day from a single account. Exceeding this limit may harm your sender reputation and result in your account being restricted by your ESP.
Start with fewer than 50 emails per day for optimal deliverability and gradually send more. To safely increase your sending volume, set up additional email accounts. You’ll be adding them to mailbox rotation in campaigns – more on that in the upcoming guide.
Note that Snov.io automatically adds a 30-second delay between each email you send. You can adjust this interval or even set a random delay between emails. This means that the time between emails will vary, which helps your emails look less like mass messages and more like personalized outreach.
Step 3: Get LinkedIn add-on and connect LinkedIn accounts
Your toolset in Snov.io will also include a LinkedIn Automation add-on. This is a tool for automating your LinkedIn outreach and adding an additional engagement channel to your campaigns. You will be able to create automations that visit and follow LinkedIn profiles, like posts, and send connection requests and messages.
LinkedIn add-on enables you to send multichannel campaigns. You’ll use LinkedIn actions in combination with email to increase your chances of engaging with your target audience.
Here are some of its key features:
- Extra account security: The price includes built-in proxies for LinkedIn account connection at no extra cost.
- Personalized and unique LinkedIn messages: We’ve added Dynamic Content and Spintax features to LinkedIn campaigns as well.
- SSI score tracking: Grow your SSI score and monitor it directly in your account settings.
- Safe daily limits: We’ll provide personalized recommendations for daily limits based on your SSI score.
- Flexible LinkedIn slots for accounts: You pay for the slot, not the account—meaning you can change the connected LinkedIn account up to 3 times a month at no charge.
- Pending requests management: We’ll help you track requests in your Snov.io account and stay within the recommended limits to avoid any account restrictions.
How to enable the LinkedIn add-on:
Go to the LinkedIn Accounts page and buy a slot for your account.
Billing is per slot, not per account, meaning you can switch accounts within a slot up to 3 times. Plus, with prorated billing you never lose any value.
If you’re using Snov.io as a team, Team leaders can purchase slots under the Team admin account and assign them to members.
Set daily LinkedIn limits:
After connecting, your account will be in “Safety limits” mode to ensure a safe start (20 actions per day). You can adjust these limits in the account settings to control the number of activities completed daily by this account.
Snov.io tracks your Social Selling Index to help you choose a safe limit for actions based on your account’s reputation. LinkedIn actions performed via automation will increase your score. You can track it in account settings and set higher daily limits as your score grows.
To safely increase your connection request limit, enable the warm-up mode in the settings.
Step 4: Check domain health
Don’t skip this important step: run a domain health check to ensure your technical configuration is correct.
How to do it:
Use the Domain Health Checker for this task. This tool verifies all DNS records and identifies any potential issues.
To access it, go to your email accounts list and click Edit next to the email account you want to check.
Scroll down to the Optional settings section. Select the Domain health tab and click on Check health. If the setup is correct, you’ll see a “valid” status next to all DNS records.
Remember to check all the other email accounts associated with your other domains. A domain health score above 85% is a green light to confidently launch your campaigns.
Step 5: Setup DNS records
After checking domain health, set up any missing domain records or update those with issues.
If your domains are newly purchased, you may need to set up everything from scratch. But take our word for it, the benefits are worth it – you’ll have a higher inbox rate.
→ Configure domain records:
These records include SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MX, A, and rDNS. You’ll find the necessary guidelines in the info window for every record in the checkup results.
Why it matters:
Correct DNS records improve email deliverability and sender reputation. They also enhance email security, protecting you from spoofing and phishing.
How to do it:
Log in to your domain’s admin account (on your registrar’s website) and find the DNS settings. This is where you add and update DNS records. For example, if you bought domains from GoDaddy, you’ll manage the DNS settings in your GoDaddy admin account.
→ Set domain forwarding:
This is important if you’ve made separate domains for sending emails. Sometimes your recipients may want to check the email sender domain. To make sure visitors are redirected to your main website, set up forwarding in the settings of the alias domains.
How to do it:
Follow the provider’s help documentation. Here’s how you can do it with GoDaddy and NameCheap.
To verify it’s working, visit the web address of your alias domain. If it’s set up correctly, it should automatically redirect you to your main website.
Step 6: Add a custom tracking domain
Next, you’ll add a custom tracking domain to your email accounts. It will be used for tracking in your campaigns.
Why it’s important:
A custom tracking domain can improve your deliverability by up to 20%. It will replace the default (shared) tracking domain used by many other senders.
How to do it:
Go to your email accounts list and click Edit. Scroll down to Custom tracking domain and follow the steps described there.
Create a new CNAME record snov-stream.com in the DNS settings: this record’s name will be your tracking domain.
Once it’s added to the DNS of your domain, add it to your email account settings.
Remember, all email accounts from the same domain can use the same custom tracking domain; just add it in the settings of each email account in Snov.io. If you have email accounts on different domains, create CNAME records on every domain.
Step 7: Warm-up email accounts
Don’t skip this crucial step. Always dedicate 2-3 weeks for the initial warm-up period. This sets a strong foundation for successful outreach.
To build a strong sender reputation and ensure consistent high deliverability, your accounts must go through a warm-up period.
You can achieve better deliverability and sender reputation with any email service you use. It is compatible with almost any ESP, whether you’re using a popular service or a specialized SMTP host.
How to start warm-up:
Snov.io automates the warm-up process, saving you time and money.
Go to your Email accounts list and click Start warm-up to configure it for all the connected accounts. In the warm-up settings, select a progressive strategy and set your daily sending goal to the desired limit.
If your goal is to send 100 emails per day in real campaigns, it’s important to gradually build up to that volume before launching your campaigns.
Warm up your email account for at least 3-4 weeks. During this time, don’t start your campaigns just yet. To get good deliverability from the start, you need to build a reputation for new email accounts.
During the warm-up, keep an eye on these key metrics:
- Saved from spam: This shows how many emails were removed from the spam folder (marked as not spam), which helps improve your sender reputation.
- Deliverability: The overall inbox placement rate achieved during the warm-up. This gives you an idea of the potential deliverability for this account.
Later, when you start real campaigns, keep the warm-up active alongside your campaigns, but reduce its daily limit to 10-20 emails (warm-up emails also count within your provider’s daily limit). This helps upkeep your sender reputation. Read more tips and advice for best warm-up results.
Step 8: Run deliverability tests
As your account is warming up, check its performance using the Deliverability check every few days. It will run several tests to ensure your email setup is well-prepared. These tests simulate real sending conditions to give you insight into the expected deliverability.
At this stage, you can run quick tests (all emails at once strategy) with generated content to check how your email placement improves during the warm-up. Once your actual email content is ready and before launching the campaign, run a real campaign simulation (one by one) for more accurate results.
In the test results, you’ll get personalized recommendations for better deliverability and guidance on troubleshooting issues that may affect your results.
What’s next:
Now, let’s do a quick recap to make sure everything in your setup is complete!
- Purchased domains
- Set up mailboxes (email accounts)
- Configured DNS records on all domains
- Connected email accounts
- Connected LinkedIn accounts
- Checked domain health (DNS records)
- Set up custom tracking domain
- Started email warm-up
- Performed deliverability checks
While your accounts are being warmed up, let’s move on to collecting prospect lists.
Lead generation guide: create your ICP and find targeted leads.
If you have any questions or there’s something you can’t figure out, contact us directly via the live support chat. We’ll be happy to hear your feedback.