How to run a cold email campaign

Outreach lets you send sequenced cold emails to your contacts and have every reply threaded back onto the contact record, so a warm lead lands in your CRM rather than someone’s personal inbox.

Cold email is a paid feature. The free plan includes 300 outreach emails — enough for a realistic first campaign before deciding — see your free allowance.

Step 1 — Connect a sending domain

Go to Settings → Outreach. You’ll need a Mailgun account and a sending domain (for example mail.yourcompany.com).

1. Add the domain in Mailgun and complete its DNS records (SPF, DKIM and the tracking CNAME).
2. Paste the domain and its API key into Settings → Outreach.
3. Set the From name and From email your recipients will see.

Use a subdomain, never your main company domain. If a cold campaign damages a domain’s reputation, you want that contained to the subdomain and not affecting the email your team relies on.

Step 2 — Warm the domain up

A brand-new domain that sends 500 emails on day one will land in spam. Turn on Warm-up in Settings → Outreach and NerdCRM will ramp the daily limit for you, starting small and increasing each day.

While you’re warming up, also set:

• Send window — only send during working hours in your timezone. Cold email that arrives at 3am reads as automated.
• Send interval — a minimum gap between messages, so you trickle rather than burst.
• Daily cap — a hard ceiling per day regardless of everything else.

Step 3 — Build the sequence

Outreach → New campaign. A campaign is a series of steps, each with a delay:

• Step 1 — day 0, the initial email.
• Step 2 — day 3, a short follow-up. Follow-ups thread onto the original message, so they appear in the same conversation.
• Step 3 — day 7, a final short note.

Use {{firstName}} and {{lastName}} to personalise. Keep it short — three or four sentences beats a wall of text.

Send yourself a test first (Send test) and read it on a phone before it goes anywhere near a prospect.

Step 4 — Choose recipients and launch

Recipients come from your contacts. The send confirmation tells you exactly how many people will be enrolled, and warns you if the campaign is larger than your remaining free allowance.

Anyone who has unsubscribed, bounced, or was contacted within your cooldown window is excluded automatically.

Step 5 — Handle replies

Replies land in Outreach → Inbox, matched to the contact who sent them. Replying from there:

• keeps the whole thread on the contact record,
• automatically stops the sequence for that person, so nobody gets a follow-up after they’ve already answered,
• doesn’t consume your free allowance — once someone writes to you, the conversation is free.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Likely cause
Campaign paused on its own	Free allowance used up, or the daily cap hit. Check the campaign’s status message
Emails not sending at all	Outside the send window, or the sending domain isn’t verified in Mailgun
Replies not appearing in the inbox	The inbound route isn’t configured — see the outreach inbound setup runbook
High bounce rate	Your list needs cleaning. Validate addresses before enrolling them