Sending too many cold emails per week can be fatal to your campaign.
How many cold emails can you send per day? It depends on many factors, including how old your inbox and sending address are.
Start small (10-20 emails per day), and increase your volume gradually while maintaining a good reputation and deliverability.
Last, but not least: email service providers have limits. Your ESP will limit the number of emails you can send each day.
Let’s find out how to make your next cold-email campaign a huge success.
Determine Your Cold Email Strategy First
Let’s face it: cold email is frowned upon by almost every ESP (email service provider) and SMTP because people always find a way to abuse it and SPAM cold prospects with irrelevant offers that they don’t need.
The reality is, most automated cold email is actually SPAM.
It’s not targeted enough, it’s not personalized enough, and it’s automated, so it feels robotic and just plain bad.
At the same time, sales reps around the world are firing out thousands of emails per day to potential prospects and closing deals.
So it’s all about:
- Your target
- Your message
- Your offer
That being said, I don’t think “bulk email” is the answer.
I’ve seen mass emails fail horribly and highly segmented, personalized emails create HUGE opportunities.
With any cold email campaign I run or advise on, we always limit our email sending to no more than 200 emails per day.
This keeps our domains around longer and Google isn’t constantly blocking us and making it difficult.
We also find that with 100 per day, warmup isn’t as critical and you’re able to scale up easily by adding more email domains.
But with anything, it’s good to test and build your own best practices based on your unique use case.
1. Get started with an email warmup service
You can avoid spamming your account by using a warmup email service.
Although you can manually warm up your inbox, it is tedious and time-consuming.
An email warming service automates the process so that you can concentrate on business matters.
An email warming service will send you more emails each day, until you reach the daily target.
2. Learn Daily Sending Best Practices
Every day, consumers are bombarded with content.
Consider the number of emails you receive in your inbox as compared to the ones that you actually read.
Each ESP has its spam filter functions.
A common red flag for all ESPs, however, is an email account sending a lot of emails at once.
Many spammers create email accounts and send messages to as many people possible before being shut down.
This is a 0-to-100 spamming method that can ruin email blasts for everyone else. It also makes it necessary to warm up your inbox for cold email campaigns.
These are the best practices for cold emailing of any kind:
- Reach out only to those who are interested in your brand.
- Reach out to them directly
- Make them feel special
- Keep reading
- They will be begging for more
Another good practice is to verify your email addresses before you reach out to recipients, register your domain for the correct security settings (SPF DKIM, and DMARC), as well as keeping your inbox warm.
You should also know the daily limit of your ESP and follow it.
3. Know Your ESP’s Daily Sending Limit
Depending on how many emails you send per day, upgrading your ESP may be a good idea.
Sending email blasts using a free Gmail account or Outlook account is not advisable. This is because scammers are more likely to use them and you may be flagged.
Importantly, many ESPs equate “numbers of emails sent” and “numbers of recipients”. This means that you can’t BCC all your recipients in one message to get around the limitations.
Here is a list of the most popular ESPs with their sending limits.
| Email Service Provider (ESP) | Sending Limit (Per Day) |
|---|---|
| Gmail (Free) | 500 |
| Gmail (Google Workspace) | 2000 |
| Outlook (Free) | 300 |
| Microsoft 365/Office 365 | 10000 |
| Zoho (Free) | 50 |
| Zoho (Paid) | 300 |
| Zoho (Custom) | 2500 |
| GoDaddy | 250 |
| RackSpace | 10000 |
| Yahoo! | 500 |
| BlueHost | 150 (/hour) |
| DreamHost | 100 (/hour) |
| Yandex.mail | 500 |
| HostGator | 12000 |
| Amazon SES | 10000 |
| Proton Mail (Free) | 150 |
| Proton Mail (Plus) | 1000 |
| Proton Mail (Professional/Visionary) | Unlimited |
| AOL | 500 |
| Mailgun | 300 |
| SendGrid (Free) | 100 |
| SendGrid (Essentials) | Up to 100,000 per month |
| SendGrid (Pro) | Up to 1.5 million per month |
| Sendpost (Starter) | 10000 per month |
| Sendpost (Growth) | 600000 per month |
| Sendpost (Scale) | 3 million per month |
What happens if I exceed the Daily Sending Limit
It all depends on your ESP.
Many times, such as with Google, you won’t be able send more messages that day. Microsoft and Zoho will keep your messages on file until you reach the set limit.
While most ESPs will not immediately suspend an account if your daily limit is exceeded, over-sending could result in account suspension.
To ensure that your emails get delivered, the best things to do are to send lower volumes of high quality emails and to use a warming service to optimize your output.
You can also use multiple email addresses to scale your outreach.
Splitting your sending volume among multiple email addresses is one way to avoid exceeding sender limits.
This improves deliverability and decreases the chance of unexpected problems arising from putting one email address under stress.
How Important is Email Sender Reputation?
It’s important to have a good reputation as a sender because it is a score that you assign to your domain and inbox to assess the security of your message being delivered to the recipient.
Your message is more likely to reach your recipients’ inboxes if you score higher.
Low scores could result in your messages being placed in spam folders, or your domain blocked.
A positive reputation as a sender is crucial for a successful cold mail campaign. Mail servers will use your sender score to determine whether you are trustworthy.
Your reputation can drop to a low point and your messages could end up in the junk folders of your recipients.
What Effects Does Sender Reputation Have?
These are the top three suspects for low reputation scores on senders:
- High rate of complaints
- High bounce rate
- Spam traps can be activated
It can damage your score if too many people report your content as spam.
Your reputation could be damaged if you send emails to old accounts, exceed your ESP’s daily limit or attempt to increase it.
Avoid buying email lists from “people in your target market” as they are likely to contain at least one spam trap.
Spam traps can be inactive accounts or fake accounts that are used to filter out spammers who send emails to everyone and anyone.
Landing in a spam trap can damage your reputation and lead to you being placed on a blacklist .
Final Thoughts on How Many Cold Emails to Send Per Day
Sending cold emails can be a great sales strategy, but you want to make sure you know the limits.
Hitting the inbox is always important.
We showed you exactly how many cold emails you can send per day with different services.
Best of luck and check out our Lead Generation Masterclass if you want to take this further.
