Lesson 4: Reaching 10.000 prospects a month with cold email, setup, cost per lead and ROI (PART 1)

We’re adding new chapters to this cold email course as they’re released. Join the waitlist to get notified when a new chapter is available.

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to set up and budget for a cold email campaign targeting 10,000 prospects per month.

We break down all key costs: email tools, lead data, domains, and warm-up. You’ll also discover why this volume is ideal for A/B testing and how to maximize ROI.

This is part one of a two-part series – next up: calculating cost per lead and real return on your investment.

In this lesson, you’ll learn:

• How contacting 10,000 prospects per month in Woodpecker breaks down to $188 for sending and $219 for verified prospect emails via Lead Finder
• Why scaling to 10k prospects requires roughly 46 email accounts across 12 domains, costing $208/month – a figure dictated by daily sending limits and best practices per domain
• How much will you pay for cold email infrastructure in order to create campaigns that bring the results you want
• That 10,000 monthly prospects is a strategically valuable threshold – large enough to run meaningful A/B tests, which will be covered in later lessons

Okay, this will be a two-part lesson as I will dive deeper into cost per lead and ROI.

I set the goal here to contact 10 k prospects a month.

The first lesson will cover the cost for this setup.

10k is a good goal as it allows you to run multiple A/B tests in a month.

How to run efficient A/B tests will also be covered in the later chapters as well so keep going!

For now let’s continue with the return on investment, which is what matters the most.

For email marketing you probably came across the return on the dollar spent metric, from Litmus. 

A few years ago it was about $40. 

Nowadays it’s at about $38 per $1 spent.

As mentioned, this benchmark is for email marketing.

In this lesson I will try to make a similar metric just for cold email.

So let’s get right into our setup of contacting 10k prospects a month.

• contacted $188 monthly in Woodpecker.
•  Lead finder $219.

Best of our investment 

Follow ups – 2 (3 emails in the sequence)

30k emails month 

how many mailboxes 

• 30 cold emails daily from each email account.
• 22 work days during the month – we will not send on weekends.

Now we can calculate how many mailboxes we need:

• 30.000 cold emails divided by 
• 22 work days in a month divided by 
• 30 emails a day per mailbox

equals about 46 email accounts.

For email accounts per domain the best practice is between 2 and 5. 

We will keep 4 email accounts on one domain. 

That brings us to about 12 domains. 

Knowing what we need we can now proceed to buy domains and email accounts.

Of course Woodpecker offers these too.

46 email accounts cost you $184 a month.

And lastly, 12 domains in Woodpecker are $24 – when calculated as a monthly cost

So, in total you would pay $208 for the infrastructure.

If you use Woodpecker of course for all these purchases.

Now we have new domains – and those need a warm-up.

To make the cost more realistic I will calculate the warm-up cost in the cost per lead calculations.

We will do a one month warm-up –  but generally longer would be better.

If we warm-up for one month we will not send that month.

This means our cost for email accounts and domains will be doubled.

So we have to calculate $416.

Finally we can put it all together in terms of cost:

• $188 for the Woodpecker subscription.
• $219 for Woodpecker’s Leadfinder to get 10.000 prospect emails.
• $416 for email accounts and domains – this includes a 1 month warm-up

In total we are at $823.

With that we have everything we need to dive into the cost per lead calculations.

I will see you in the next lesson!