Lesson 11: How many email accounts do you need?

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In this lesson, you’ll learn how to plan your cold email infrastructure – specifically, how many email accounts and domains you need to hit your goals.

We’ll cover two approaches: estimating based on desired leads, or estimating based on the total number of emails you plan to send. For beginners, we’ll focus on the second approach, showing you step-by-step how to calculate the right number of prospects, emails, accounts, and domains for your first campaigns.

In this lesson, you’ll learn:

• Why 700 emails sent is a reliable baseline for getting one positive reply when you’re starting out, and how that translates into 4 campaigns of 500 prospects each with a 2-step sequence
• How to use Woodpecker’s infrastructure planner to turn your sending goals into a precise account and domain count, with 25 cold emails per mailbox per day as the recommended ceiling to stay out of spam
• Why the starter setup of 8 email accounts across 3 domains hits the sweet spot between cost efficiency and sending capacity and how changing the emails-per-domain ratio shifts that balance
• Why adding a 30% backup buffer of accounts and domains from the start saves you from scrambling when something inevitably needs replacing and how the next lesson builds on this with scaling strategies used by experienced agencies

Hi, welcome to the lesson on infrastructure planning.

Here you will learn how many email accounts and domains you need.

You can approach this in two different ways.

One, defining how many leads you would like to have each month.

This approach requires you to have some data already.

Things like reply rate and your positive reply rate are needed.

I will show you shortly in the planner where to find this section.

For this lesson though I assume you are just starting.

We want to get you to your first leads asap, without prior email benchmarks.

Hence, we will go with approach number two.

Here, we estimate your infrastructure needs by the number of emails sent.

A reasonably safe target to get one lead, so one positive reply, is 700 emails. 

In a two step sequence that means 350 prospects.

This translates to about a o-point-three percent reply rate per email sent.

Now because we are just starting.

I planned for you campaigns with 500 prospects.

This should give you a good chance of at least 1, if not 2 leads, per campaign.

In chapter 3 I will guide you towards getting ready to launch 4 campaigns.

So, in the end we need 2000 prospects.

We will run 2-step campaigns.

And we end up with 4000 emails that need to be sent. 

Now, let’s head over to the planner and plug in those numbers.

Okay first I mentioned you can plan your infrastructure based on leads.

If you are more experienced you can use this view to do so.

For this lesson we will go with the, “emails sent in timeframe” approach.

First let’s enter 4000 emails to be sent as our goal.

For the timeframe we can pick 31 days.

This will be about 2 months as we assume a month having 21 workdays.

The remaining days are reserved for warm-up. 

If you do a longer warm-up as I recommended you could enter 42 days.

Do 3-4 weeks of warm-up and then do two full months for the cold outreach.

The next metric is how many emails 1 mailbox sends per day.

Here the upper limit I recommend is 25.

You will be running 25 warm-up emails and 25 cold ones, which is a good ratio.

If you wish you can go lower here but will need more emails and domains.

Then we pick 3 emails per domain. 

Now you should see 6 email accounts and 2 domains. 

A nice, budget-friendly, starter setup.

If you choose different values you may see different numbers here.

Lastly, I would encourage you to add some backups.

In my case I did 30% which translates to 2 email accounts and 1 domain.

In the planner you can see there is one last setting, scaling.

We will cover that in the next lesson.

Now if you followed my advice to the “T” you see the following.

Total email accounts, eight.

Total domains, three.

Now before you head over and buy your infrastructure, listen to my next lesson.

I will cover the scaling part in more detail.

You will get to learn how experienced agencies handle backups and scaling.

See you in the next lesson.