Cold email tools have been getting it wrong for years
Our website’s headline is “Finally, a cold email tool that merges mailboxes.” We wrote this not to catch people’s attention, but to emphasize that we’re upset that no one has fixed some of the obvious problems that cold email tools have today.
If we're being honest, we're mainly an alternative to Lemlist and Mailshake. We based a lot of our product design on the fact that they are missing some key features. Both of these cold email tools pioneered the cold email space, but we’re picking up the baton.
This manifesto is designed to outline how our cold email tool is tackling some of these big problems.
You can’t add more than one mailbox on a campaign
Over 80% of cold emailers use more than one inbox to do outreach. This is a common practice to help get to scale while staying under the limits of email service providers. For example, Google Workspace has a hard limit on 2k sends per day per email address, but getting anywhere near this sending limit will ruin your sender domain reputation and set back your outreach plans, so marketers are forced to create multiple inboxes and sender domains if they want to send a few thousand emails per day safely. When our team ran a lead generation agency we did the same thing. We would typically build out 3 domains and 3 mailboxes per domain for one client (9 mailboxes total).
Current cold email tools only allow you to use one mailbox on one campaign. The issue with this is that you are forced to clone/copy the same campaigns over and over again if you want to scale your outreach.
Here’s how users currently do their structure if they want to have any type of scale.
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The issue with this current structure is that the user has to copy/clone campaigns each time, load up more contacts, make sure the inboxes are synced, and line up the schedules - it’s a lot of work. Even when everything is lined up perfectly when you go to do analysis on the campaign, you still have to manually merge the campaign data. The way we see it is that the more you want to scale your outreach the more data entry you need to do on these cold email platforms.
We spent a lot of time with our backend logic to ensure that if you wanted to have 100s of mailboxes on one campaign, you can do it. Here’s what our structure looks like:
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The more mailboxes you add to the campaign, the more Mailstand will evenly distribute the load balance so that you stay within the sending limitations of the email service providers. This also cuts down on the amount of work needed to scale your outreach and makes analying your campaign metrics much easier.
Bad architecture on the template level
If you look at all the cold emails tools out there today you have to build email templates within the campaign itself. The issue with this is that if you copy a campaign it will also create copies of the templates and in turn make it very difficult to do analysis on the template level.
The current tools will have something set up like this:
“Template A” and “Copy of Template A” are the same template, but they will have different reporting data points. In current tools this will look something like the below, where three of the templates are essentially not needed.
Now imagine this at scale. If you are creating multiple campaigns each week you will end up with multiple worthless templates and your data gets very skewed, very quickly. With this structure you can really only look at metrics on the Campaign level and not analysis on the template level properly.
Mailstand allows you to create one template and use it across multiple campaigns.
Mailstand forces the user to reuse templates that have been created in the past to ensure cleaner data for campaigns.
Current tools are too expensive
Most cold email tools charge per user seat, why? If you're adding an account executive to your email account who isn't doing cold outreach, why do you need to pay for viewing access? We believe pricing should be affordable and sustainable the more you scale your outreach, not based on the size of your team. Mailstand’s pricing allows for teams to add many mailboxes at an affordable rate.We took our main competitors and compared them based on the number of mailboxes that you sync and we made sure we are the best priced.
When you breakdown pricing per mailbox synced, Mailstand comes in at $12/month versus a typical $40+/month with other providers.
Campaign emails build up and there is no control
When you set sending schedules on a campaign and set sending limits on a sending mailbox, you are putting barriers in place. If you upload a lot contacts to a campaign then your barriers will always create a backlog of emails.
Here’s a scenario:
- 1 mailbox synced
- Uploaded 1,000 contacts
- The campaign has 3 steps (1 initial email and 2 follow up emails)
- The mailbox has a limit of 100 emails per day
Half way through Day 3 your sending queue will look something like this:
Current tools will grab whatever contact has been waiting longest in the queue and send to that person next. The issue with this is that you have zero control of what is going on with your campaign.
When you have a sales quota you may want to send more initial emails to reach more new people faster. Or if you are busy with closing deals at the end of the month, you may want to send more follow up emails as those typically get lower reply rates.With Mailstand, we give the user control (with a dial) on how we choose who to send to next. It looks like this:
We’re just getting started
We’re not claiming that we solved all the problems in the cold emailing world, but we’re aiming to! Our goal is to build a simple, easy to use platform that everyone can afford and we feel like we’re onto something great. If you have any questions about our manifesto or would like to chat with us, please reach out.