What email provider should you use for cold emails?

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Here's a quick breakdown of what we recommend to our users at supersend.io, having observed thousands of cold outreach campaigns mature over the last two years👇

There are three key levers that affect the decision:

- Price

- Preference

- Deliverability

We like to classify this into four broad tiers:

Tier 1 - Google & Outlook

Google Workspace, Microsoft Outlook

The best lead-gen agencies we know use either Gmail or Outlook based on client preference. Their clients likely pay them $3-7k a month. Metrics are extremely important, hence, they can naturally afford these.

You can expect to send 30-50 emails/day from a fully-warmed up account, long-term.

Tier 2 - ESP

Privateemail by Namecheap, Godaddy, Zoho, Any Email hosting plan by a reputed email provider

There are budget constraints and we understand that. Tier 2 providers work well as long as they do. The only issue is that they experience unexpected deliverability issues from Gmail and Outlook after a few months, or in some cases, a few weeks of sending, and the only option you have is to get a new one.

Privateemail starts at ~$14/year and $8/year for any subsequent mailboxes.

Zoho starts at ~$12/year.

Tier 3 - Cheap Inboxes

These providers offer 100 emails for like $20. We see emails sent through these providers getting blocked very quickly, all the time. Understand who's buying these emails and what's motivating them.

Tier 4 - Bulk Senders

AWS SES, Mailgun, Sendgrid, Resend

These are bulk email providers, used for sending newsletters, transactional emails, and not really built for sending regular emails. Get a plan that offers a dedicated IP and you might be sending thousands a day. These are a bit of a grey area.

Some have had some success using these, but we don’t have enough data to weigh a verdict on either side.

These are starter notes I wish I knew when I was setting up my first cold outreach campaign – feel free to test a couple of providers and stick with what works best for YOU.

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