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At this point, agentic development likely plays some role within your engineering team, but you may be seeing uneven adoption, effectiveness, and coverage, leading to a chaotic experience for your team. How can digital product companies build outreach that actually reaches the inbox, earns a response, and scales without burning their domain in the process?
In this episode of Growth Stage, we interview Kseniia Skobelska, Growth Market Strategist at Snov.io. With over 3 million users on their platform, Snov.io has a unique window into what separates outreach that works from outreach that wastes everyone’s time, and Kseniia is here to share what the data actually shows on:
- Why open rates are misleading and what metric you should actually be optimizing for.
- What’s really triggering your emails to land in spam and how to fix it.
- How to build a cold outreach system from scratch that’s deliverable, human, and worth replying to.
If you’re a founder doing ad hoc outreach or a small team trying to build a repeatable pipeline motion, don’t miss this episode of Growth Stage. Watch or listen now!
Podcast Full Interview: Audio
Podcast Full Interview: Video
Transcript
Jesse Paliotto (00:04.088)
Hello everyone and welcome to Growth Stage, Podcast by FastSpring, where we discuss how digital product companies grow revenue, build meaningful products, and increase the value of their business. So I’m your host, Jesse Paliotto I love being part of the community here, and I’m really grateful that as part of my role here at FastSpring, I get to bring the best of the community to you here. So today we’re gonna be talking about cold outreach in the era of AI, what actually works and what’s killing your deliverability. We’re with
Kseniia Skobelska of Snov.io Most SaaS founders have sent cold emails, but between AI-generated noise, spam filters, domain reputation pitfalls, getting a reply in 2026 is harder than ever. So, how can digital product companies build outreach that actually reaches the inbox, earns a response, and scales without burning their domain in the process? And if you don’t know what that means, you will know what that means here shortly. So, in this episode, we’re going to interview Kseniia.
She’s a growth market strategist at Snov.io and with over 3 million users on their platform, Snov.io has a unique window into what separates outreach that works from outreach that was just wastes everybody’s time. And Kseniia here is here to share what the data actually shows on things like why open rates are misleading, what metric you should be optimizing for, what’s really triggering your emails to land in spam and how to fix that. How to build a cold outreach system from scratch that’s deliverable, human, and worth replying to.
So if you’re a founder doing just, you know, ad hoc outreach or trying to figure this out, this one is for you. So Kseniia, thanks for being here today. Really appreciate you joining the podcast.
Kseniia Skobelska (01:41.976)
Thanks for having me. I’m really excited about our organization.
Jesse Paliotto (01:46.658)
Yeah, me too. I I think this is just so of the moment where, you know, everybody’s inbox is just blasted with AI outreach. And so what do we do to do things right? Such a that’s such a needed answer. can you just for a second maybe tell a little bit about who you are and what Snov.io does?
Kseniia Skobelska (02:06.134)
Okay. I will just spill the light on how many years I’m in is in into this industry because I think that’s that’s the most important information here because I will actually travel to the past with you today a little bit. Yeah, so I am seven years plus in the industry. I started in twenty nineteen. I sent cold outreach
I failed and I succeeded because you know cold outreach is such a game. there is no one who does the successful outreach with a first attempt. So you gonna have these experience for sure and you should not actually be afraid of it. and in simple terms, you know, I thought of how people present their companies and like saying we are la blah blah blah blah blah blah.
And I just want to say a simple thing about Snov.io and that what actually does and what you can do with Snov.io. So Snov.io is the platform where you can build a system that will help you find leads, your future clients, prepare for this outreach, send the actual outreach, and then take care of the leads.
So there’s like a CRM where you can manage manage it all. And care about your domain reputation and your email accounts. So this is the part where you care about the deliverability with Snov.io So if we look at Snov.io this is like an ecosystem, so to say. Because people who actually in the market, you may know that some people have
For example, the warmup, some people have the tools for lead generation, some people have the sell the tools for email outreach. And you buy s a lot of subscriptions for that. So sometimes businesses that come to us, they have like five subscriptions and you know they kinda expensive. So inside of Snov.io you save also the money and you have everything in one place.
Kseniia Skobelska (04:30.626)
But so this is what Snov.io is.
Jesse Paliotto (04:33.728)
Excellent. And maybe just a quick note for folks that are listening, you know, if you’re on the B2B side of life and you’re marketing business to business, this is probably bread and butter of your marketing and sales strategy. But even on B2C side, I think a lot of startup SaaS founders, you know, the way they’re getting their initial clients is by outreach. The way they’re building partnerships is by doing outreach. The way that they’re trying to connect with other people in their ecosystem is
through outreach. So I think across the spectrum in the business world, you know, there’s different flavors, but cold outreach, it’s pretty rare that there’s a business that this is not somewhere within the organization. so, you know, to that point, I think a lot of SaaS founders send cold emails, even themselves. maybe it’s just a few here and there. maybe even without any sort of system, even though you’re saying that people come with like five tools, but sometimes people have no system and they’re just making it up as they go, right?
So what are they missing that they don’t even know they’re missing when people are doing this sort of outreach?
Kseniia Skobelska (05:36.824)
To answer to answer this question, I want to say a peculiar thing. That’s what I noticed from my work with the founders, that they have like this is like the characteristic of the founders. So they see the goal and they don’t see the obstacles. And that’s good. That’s good. Because if you start thinking about the obstacles
You will never even get to that goal. So you will stop there and you won’t go further. But then later, I think this kind of mood or vibe, right, that has impact on what we’re gonna talk about. And to explain this kind of absence of the system, I wanna give you a metaphor.
just to simplify this and you know to romanticize this discussion, let’s imagine that founders are the people that are responsible for launching the rocket into space. Yes, a little bit difficult, there’s a lot of details, but anyway, that’s a metaphor, we’re simplifying this. they are responsible for everything. And they are just the people that send that hit the launch button. That’s it. They
Don’t check the whether this rocket is ready for launch. They don’t check whether it’s technically equipped. They don’t check whether all the wires are connected there. They don’t check whether there’s fuel in there. They don’t check anything. They just hit launch. And what they think about, well, they think about the results. So that rocket is there in the space and it’s actually completing the mission.
the same thing with the cold outreach So people actually saying that it’s well, it’s simple. And if even if I’m right now telling you all of the storm things, you may also agree that it’s simple. What do you need to do? Just click send, send emails. You have the offer you just write it and send. That’s fine. That’s easy. That’s no hard. You know, there is no friction in it, for example, right? Yeah. But but
Kseniia Skobelska (07:53.794)
There is something that they miss. and let’s call it in simple terms preparation. In in you know, in industry terms that’s called infrastructure. And that’s one of the things that most of the founders skip. What infrastructure mean? It’s
In fact, something technical. It’s not even s the scene where you need to use your creativity. It’s just something that, you know, you need to sit in front of your computer, you know, open certain tabs, enter certain data, and then all you’re set. That’s it. But it’s it’s difficult, you know. So what is included there? So it’s the domains.
Jesse Paliotto (08:36.333)
Yeah.
Kseniia Skobelska (08:43.521)
By the way, never send cold outreach from your main domain. I usually say unless you want to burn it down. If you have this goal, okay, do it. But so typically it’s better to buy separate domains. That’s like one part. The other part, then you create the email boxes, mailboxes, and you need to warm them up. By the way, the warm-up stage. I would say cruelly.
skipped people like rudely skip it like even people write on Reddit how do I skip warm up I you know I will that for you you can’t there is no way you can skip warm-up again unless you want to burn down all your efforts so then you warm up your email accounts and
Seems like it’s not all, like you need to send also to set up the domain records, that’s another part, also technical. But when we talk about infrastructure, that’s not all. we also talk about data quality and that also goes into infrastructure. because let’s say I had lots of cases where people came frustrated. They were, you know, the founders or just the marketers.
They didn’t know what happened, like, hey, I did this and this and that. I I have my domain set up. I have my email account warmed up. You know, what is going on? My all of my emails are in the spam or they my email account is blocked And the thing is that they didn’t verify the data that they get. Sometimes people buy the lists.
Sometimes they actually do prospecting, but you know, leave this list for a while. You know, everyone has their own reason for why they leave that list. And then they get back in three months, and you know what? We live in a world where data is such a thing that changes constantly. So it’s not something stable that we can rely on. in three months, all the whole list can be invalid.
Jesse Paliotto (10:58.05)
Yeah.
Kseniia Skobelska (11:04.15)
The whole. For example, you have 500 leads there, and all of them may be invalid in three months. So the cases there, why those founders were frustrated. They sent the campaign, but they sent to unverified emails. And when we then verified those lists, it turned out that half of that list wasn’t valid. And here’s the thing.
you can’t send emails to invalid email addresses. So you’ll be stopped, first of all by your email service provider. So that won’t destroy their reputation and you know the reputate the all those connections between the ESPs that they have. So they will stop you.
Jesse Paliotto (11:49.772)
Yeah. So for a couple great things in there, I just want to kind of poke a little bit more at using a different domain makes total sense. You’re gonna burn your own domain when you know you keep getting flagged as sending spam or something. But if you use an alternate domain, do you have any thoughts on like does that have the same credibility when it shows up and the the domain is th you know?
Get Snov.io versus Snov.io? If I’ve seen you in the marketplace, I’m like, wait, what is this one?
Kseniia Skobelska (12:21.96)
here’s the thing. if you buy the fresh domain, so like it’s it’s it’s a t it’s a baby, it’s an infant, you know? Like one day old. Yes, it’s gonna be bad. It won’t work. So the common recommendation is that you need to buy domains at least one year and more old. and we talk about like you asked me, like
you saw the domain Snov.io but then get Snov.io what is this? The things that here is not in fact the get domain will be I mean GetSnov.io for example would be percepted as a company name. here is not this case. when you create the domain your domain should contain your company name so that people then can find information about you.
But that doesn’t mean that, you know, this is specifically the exact company, in fact. So they will they will find information. You know, it’s easy. Customers right now, you know, they have access to internet. And even if they write get snow.io, you know, Google for example, it will suggest them the variants.
right now Google is not that popular. Let’s take Chat GPT Claude whatever. You know, those those guys will help even better. So they will say maybe you meant and suggest the right company name. And then for example, you follow that website, you see your email, you read what is written there, and then you see the website, okay, that’s the match, these are these guys. So that’s that’s not the case.
Jesse Paliotto (14:12.95)
that’s great. And then on the warming up and people trying to skip the warm up phase, how long does it take? I mean, what are what how much time are people really trying to save on that? Weeks, months?
Kseniia Skobelska (14:23.192)
Well the let’s say the least period that you need to warm up your account is four weeks. So this like one month in other terms.
Jesse Paliotto (14:40.098)
Okay. So that’s what people are trying to get it get past. Yeah.
Kseniia Skobelska (14:42.87)
Thing well, I I have a theory, why people are doing it and why they want it. And I think this is we’re we’re just all the victims of the industry, but I’m not talking specifically about the industry that I’m working in or you’re working in. I’m talking about that globally. So that everywhere you go, for example as a consumer, you know, we’re all consumers, right? So that’s like right now we’re professionals, we’re like in B2B but anyway,
besides the work where consumers and they’ll also impact everywhere and everything is easy. Become a millionaire in two steps and two steps. You know, do this and get one billion dollar. And you know, people sometimes I don’t know why they believe in it. Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s not. I still don’t have my personal opinion on that. But they have this vibe and then they just enter like for example this cold outreach or any other thing.
It’s yeah, in fact, we can even go like something relatable. we can take fitness. You know, I want a super cool fit body, but I I want it in one week. This is the real story. my coach, she actually told me like the woman came to her and she said, I don’t wanna work out a lot, but I want to lose 12 kilograms in one month. So
Jesse Paliotto (16:08.686)
Unrealistic.
Kseniia Skobelska (16:10.134)
That’s another lesson. The same thing is here. So you in fact you can send without warm-up. But here’s the question. What are you going to achieve? Do you want to get the results like that satisfies you? Or you want to get frustration? Well, if that’s the second thing again. No one is actually holding you. Do it.
Jesse Paliotto (16:35.32)
So this is actually a great transition to my next question, which is, you know, speaking of people trying to do things the easy way, AI tools. So this has made it super easy for anyone to write and send outreach at scale now, not even just to a small list, but people can, you know, scale that up pretty high. has that made cold email more effective, or is it just creating more noise?
Kseniia Skobelska (17:00.46)
I will respond right away. No. AI did not make cold outreach effective. And then I will explain why. I think I will I will look a little bit skeptical about AI because I saw some of the podcasts before that you had and you know those guys were so excited about AI and I’m just like right now I will sit and say that no guys, AI is hype just you know, a little bit
Jesse Paliotto (17:28.958)
I saw the last episode with Chris because he is devoted. Yes.
Kseniia Skobelska (17:33.26)
Yeah, yeah, so it’s it’s it’s gonna it’s it may look weird, especially if you compare that the rest of the world is so obsessed with AI, like in the right garrison. I am so why you’re so obsessed with me. So but the thing that you need to understand about AI, and you said like it helps you scale that.
you know weekly or fast and you know the about the volume in fact it all were available before ai but I want to say one thing that you need to keep in mind when you look at AI in terms of writing emails right now but as I promised we are traveling back in past when I started in 2019 there was like the popular saying
Jesse Paliotto (18:09.965)
Mm.
Kseniia Skobelska (18:30.51)
people send templates. Cold email templates that were such a popular, you know, we need to find the best convert. Well, it’s it’s now it’s also n something that people are searching for, but at that time there was like something like let’s say AI right now. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but anyway. and what AI is actually doing, we all know that AI is being taught.
Jesse Paliotto (18:48.782)
Yeah.
Kseniia Skobelska (18:58.796)
By what? By open source data and that means internet. And as earlier people just searched for the websites where those Hodima templates were published, they copied and pasted that and send.
Jesse Paliotto (19:13.952)
Interesting. Yeah.
Kseniia Skobelska (19:15.584)
And right now, the AI is taught by these templates. So for me, if we talk about writing of the emails, nothing changed. In fact, AI produces the same templates that people used in 2020. And the peculiar thing you may notice in your inbox, and you can definitely say right now that is written with AI.
and it’s one of the features that actually help you detect that it is the AI written templated email. Is that the first line? I hope your email finds you. Well, I hope my email finds you. That became a meme already. But still, if you see this, you can close the email because this person definitely does not know what they are doing and actually me well.
Probably that’s exactly what I said. They don’t they they don’t understand what they are doing. So in terms of writing, if if people consider that copy-pasting the template was hard and right now they can just write the prompt write an email for me and it’s easier for them right now, maybe it’s somehow simplified the life and writing emails in general. But if we look at the
let’s say at the core nothing changed just the way people the the the only way that changed the the way people find those templates the other thing that is important here to notice that as far as this is the templates they are generic they they are let’s say let’s find an adjective here they are humorless so you won’t
Jesse Paliotto (21:02.993)
They
Kseniia Skobelska (21:12.086)
find anything there. So they’re like robotic. In fact, people started detecting those generic robotic messages before AI. Currently they they have their AI inside their brains that detects that instantly. Like no, there’s AI. They don’t even read. They just see the patent, closed, block, or send a spam. And
second part of your question whether it’s actually creates noise or somehow make the life better of those who you know do cold outreach. it creates more noise. But I can’t say that so that definitely currently we have more emails stand like cold emails. There’s like definitely a lot of emails.
It’s more emails than in 2019. Actually, there was a trend in the cold outreach, and it started way earlier than AI AI, is that when you send more emails, you will get better results. So more emails, more replies, you know, more money. But it’s not that. And with AI, whether it actually increases that thing, yes, but before that
The prospecting boxes were already flo flooded by the emails, like those templated generic emails. And back in the days it was already hard to, you know, catch the person’s attention. right now it’s even harder. But it’s not only because of the increase of the noise that AI helped, you know, created more. That’s also the changes that in fact happens
To all of us. right now we have so many distractions around us. Yeah. And we even have, you know, with the TikTok and reels and Instagram, we have the changes in our attention. So that if I’m not mistaken, it’s called popcorn brain. So you just like
Jesse Paliotto (23:28.674)
Yeah, people
Kseniia Skobelska (23:30.188)
People besides that they have this AI detection in their head, besides that there is a lot of noise and distractions it’s super hard, super hard just just to focus, you know, to catch their focus.
Jesse Paliotto (23:47.832)
Mm-hmm. This is you made a couple points that are really kind of insightful for me. One is that, you know, if AI, we’re thinking if we’re generating templates with AI, AI is trained on the templates from five years ago. And so all we’re doing is recreating knowledge we already have. Not even recreating, just re-spitting out knowledge we already have. And then the point you make around like our own brains sort of automatically are pretty good BS detectors and see stuff.
And I know that’s always a question with people, like, well, you know, AI is going to get good enough that you won’t be able to do that. Well, okay, whatever. But for right now, most people can spot it. And I think that speaks to one question people might have, which is, well, what if I’m using AI to personalize my templates? So that, you know, it says, instead of saying, Kseniia, I hope you’re feeling well or hope you’re doing well, mine says, Kseniia, I saw on LinkedIn that, you know, you published an episode recently. Isn’t that so cool?
love to talk to you and you know they’re personalizing it. But I think even still the auto detection filter, you’re still gonna see the pattern and be like, yeah, this was written with AI.
Kseniia Skobelska (24:55.042)
in fact the example that you gave currently it’s you know it doesn’t well s it’s it is not well spread right now. I mean like I saw your post on LinkedIn, people don’t use that. But definitely I need to say a good thing about AI. And you know, I was like
Jesse Paliotto (25:16.14)
Not trying to force you to.
Kseniia Skobelska (25:18.35)
No, but well, it i it it’s obvious because like it has bad side and it has good side. And where it’s good it can actually help you research better and faster. That’s where AI is really useful. when we talk about volume, yes, but still it doesn’t mean if AI searches for the information you should you should believe it, like you should rely on it one hundred percent.
Jesse Paliotto (25:46.892)
Point. Yeah.
Kseniia Skobelska (25:48.15)
You need to always remember that and I I think that you saw those videos online that AI is asked to spell the word syllable and say how many L’s in there. And the responses are like one, then no no no, think about it. Two, and you know, maybe in the third response the AI will say yes, there’s like three. So you need to remember this. This is an AI, yes.
It’s technology, it’s created but humans people make mistakes, so the technology makes mistakes for sure. So yeah, in terms of AI, it fastens the process of research. It help it may help you with analysis, it may help you if you you know, do those things, do those steps good. It may help you actually create personalization.
Jesse Paliotto (26:45.72)
Mm-hmm.
Kseniia Skobelska (26:45.998)
But it’s not something that you know you can again delegate to AI. it’s something that r still requires your involvement. And here’s another thing I just that s sli slipped my mind. I just thought about that. recently there have been the term circulating. Currently we say single signal based
Jesse Paliotto (26:53.006)
Mm.
Kseniia Skobelska (27:15.316)
outreach Signal base outreach. So I think well it doesn’t mean that it’s something new or the terms is new. No, it’s not new, it’s something that you know, been in the industry. But I think right now with this term, all the people that are in the industry that know what they do, they want to focus people’s attention to that, you know, to make the emails relevant and to, you know, somehow stop that AI noise because
In fact, you know, if you send those generic mails, they don’t bring you any results. And signal-based outreach is that, you know, a lot of examples, like the most typical one that you hear is that for example, someone is hiring SDRs, so that means for example, they are expanding and blah blah blah, or maybe
this company got a new VP of sales and he’s new he’s ready for some new things, you know, trying blah blah blah. But it’s obvious, right? So it’s like this signal is obvious, but I think what’s also an important thing to mention here, the about the relevance is that when you know your solution pretty well, you know.
Who you built the solution for, you know, the pain that these people that might be interested in your solution have. And you can use this as a signal to reach out to them. And here’s another thing that I want to add about cold outreach is that your initial goal is not to sell with your first email.
It’s not. Your goal is to see whether there is an opportunity for you and involve the person into the conversation. That’s what you do. And then when you start communicating with the person, you actually see whether they are interested and blah blah blah. Then you continue the conversation. That’s how it works. Then you can pitch, then you can go on a meeting with them and blah blah blah, you know, proceed with the cycle that you have.
Jesse Paliotto (29:38.924)
It’s funny you say that about the signal-based outreach. I literally got emails this morning that were those of like, I saw Fastpring recently had this happen in the market. Is this the right time? And I’m like, I ignored him because I know that it’s exactly what you’re describing. So let’s let’s take a look at some kind of of the details and numbers stuff. most founders who do track anything when they’re doing this sort of outreach, regardless if they’re using AI or not.
They’re usually looking at open rates. Is that actually a useful number to gauge success off of?
Kseniia Skobelska (30:10.528)
I I’m thinking whether to keep an intrigue or to say it right away. But I say No intrigue intrigue. All right. I I I just did that previously. I I r I responded right away, so I think I I I have a right to keep an intrigue. I wanna start with that we are humans and we love to create stances.
And I look back again at my past experience and about open rates in general, and I think we actually created the stance for this statistic. Maybe you know, someone actually created you know this option and you know they need to sell this. So, you know, they they made us believe that it’s important cold outreach. But here what I wanna say maybe when when there weren’t
less noise, you know, about the dinosaurs that who started cold outreach. For them, open rates may have been a useful rates because they were like an additional thing, additional signal to say that your emails are getting delivered to the prospect’s inboxes. Currently it has no sense in tracking open rates at all.
Because think about this. The second second, like two seconds after your email is sent, it’s already opened. And it’s opened by your email service provider. By bots, but they by their checkup system. And think about this. This is like the first meeting, so to say, with a bot. On the journey to your prospects inbox, we can only imagine how many times.
the email is opened by again the boss of the other mailbox provider, s email email service provider about antiviruses. we don’t have to forget about the internet service providers that also check because they care about IP IP reputation as well. So when the email lands right now, it has been opened a lot of times. Yeah.
Kseniia Skobelska (32:34.602)
Not by humans, by machines, let’s so to say, but still. Yeah. So you cannot say, well, let’s say you see in your open rates that it’s like five opens, but you cannot even guess that those opens, at least one, was from a real person. That’s why it’s useless. You need to concentrate on reply rate. These are the rates that actually sign to you whether you’re doing great.
Jesse Paliotto (32:52.429)
Yeah.
Jesse Paliotto (32:58.36)
Yeah.
Kseniia Skobelska (33:04.168)
Or not when you don’t have replies, it’s actually the signal for you to think what you are doing wrong. Maybe this is something about your infrastructure, maybe this is with the list. Maybe, maybe there’s something else. So you need to check these things. For example, there may be replies, for example, like I’m not interested, is also the signal for you.
Maybe this is not relevant for this segment of people right now. But anyway replies that’s what she need to concentrate on.
Jesse Paliotto (33:40.846)
So what about spam? So a lot of times you send an email, you think like this was seemed like a good email. I sent this and I’m seeing it’s ending up in spam. Like why why does that happen?
Kseniia Skobelska (33:51.506)
I want comment here a little bit about writing emails generally in cold outreach. and about this vision like perfect email. I wrote a perfect email and boom, nobody responds. or it got to spam. In cold outreach, you need to keep that in mind that there is no perfect email copy. Why?
Not because you are bad at writing or something is wrong with you, no. Just because cold outreach is an ongoing experiment. Again, as I mentioned before, about the data that you know it’s not stable, the email copy is something that is not stable as well. And you can even check this within the segment. For example, this email copy generates a lot of replies with this certain segment of people, for example, from
Jesse Paliotto (34:42.146)
Mm-hmm.
Kseniia Skobelska (34:50.248)
This tier of companies or from this specific industry or country. And then you take the exact same thing, the pain points, the all those things, they all the same, but for another segment of people and zero replies. Even you know, the difference may be in such a tiny circle, so to say. That’s one thing, and let’s get back to to the spam. honestly.
Jesse Paliotto (35:05.228)
Mm-hmm.
Kseniia Skobelska (35:18.582)
Honestly, people I think this is something in our nature. We cold outreach is something that you you you never saw the person and you want to be good and you know how can you represent it in text, you know, with the letters, how can you look good? And sometimes people start, you know, stuff in their email with the things that in fact
impact their deliverability. For example, people write the H you use the HTML emails. And for you to understand how it may look like, think about the marketing email. But you know, the first thing that comes into your mind that it’s something like bright and blah blah blah, but it’s not all. You know, you can make it pretty good, not that bright, but still it’s gonna be created in HTML, it’s gonna be created in the code And that’s what
ESPs don’t like. Why they don’t like it? Because this code makes the email heavy. The same thing here, not the same, but another thing about the heaviness of the email. Sometimes you may see people write the plain that’s gonna be a plain text and people attach the PDF with the catalog, with the sales presentation, whatever.
Jesse Paliotto (36:26.119)
Mm, mm.
Kseniia Skobelska (36:43.79)
Also makes the email happy and it may go to the spam box even if everything was good, even if you’re targeting and your offer is relevant for those people. You know, it’s you know, they don’t look at it. They look like heavy get to the in get to the spam. The other thing is that the formatting of the email, like
People sometimes use different colors or different fonts in one of the in one email. So like you open it the email and you don’t know whether it’s screaming at you or what is going on there.
Jesse Paliotto (37:21.336)
Right.
Kseniia Skobelska (37:23.032)
So that’s also what ESPs don’t like. That’s a complete spam. Go. Go to that corner, so to say, where nobody will see you. The other thing is links. Yeah, it’s in fact I would say not only links, it’s also tracking the links and tracking the opens, by the way.
there’s another thing not to track opens. So if you talk about open rates, how they are tracked, they are tracked with the tracking pixel. Currently the ESPs detect this and they will send you to the spam. you may find the reason you may you may have a plain text email, but they will send you to spam and you will see that notification there’s like
Jesse Paliotto (38:00.77)
Right.
Kseniia Skobelska (38:16.008)
phishing or suspicious links, but you’re saying I didn’t insert any links, but boom, you have tracking pixels that you know, ESPs they don’t you know, have to explain to yourself to you, you mean I mean why they send you to spam. Like they found this suspicious and actually it’s a tracking pixel, you know, that were figured out by industry later. That’s why you go to spam. we go back to the link tracking
And here’s the thing, people want their prospect to book a call, visit their website, I don’t know, check this valuable resource and they all put that in one email. that’s what ESPs don’t like. And there’s another thing, as I mentioned previously.
with your cold email you need to establish connection you need to involve the person into conversation and only then you can exchange the links and you know all that sort of thing but not in your first email that’s suspicious for the as looks suspicious for ESPs and the other you know downfall here is that those links you know why do we insert them? We want to trend them for sure we want to know
Whether people that receive our email they actually follow the link. And here’s another thing: like, again, the links are opened by bots as well. And when we talk about tracking links, imagine this: like your link is a candy, and the tracking link is a wrap. So the tracking link wraps your link, and when the
Jesse Paliotto (39:51.437)
Mm-hmm.
Kseniia Skobelska (40:08.914)
ESP gets the email, they see like, hmm, there’s like one link and then behind the other link, they do not match. They’re completely different. And we all know that this is a common phishing tactic. I think you once in your life got those emails, for example, from Microsoft. By the way, you don’t use it, but you still need to activate or reactivate your account. You see that, so there is a link.
Kinda with the Microsoft domain, but when you click on it, you are redirected to somewhere else. So that’s why that’s why links is not something that you need to put in your cold emails.
Jesse Paliotto (40:54.91)
Interesting. Which it seems to really make a case for having multiple emails, that your outreach instead of it instead of viewing outreach as a single email, like stage your relationship building and when you’re going to actually deliver those valuable resources, links, sales pitches, whatever across multiple emails. With is that is that fair? Is that accurate?
Kseniia Skobelska (41:19.016)
yeah. In fact, well, as I mentioned, we it’s so hard to attract people’s attention. And we if I say this, I d I don’t think that the you know, I I would be people will throw tomatoes at me. But we don’t like when someone tries to sell us something, even if it’s relevant to us. Even
If you need it, you don’t like it and you feel it. And in most of the cases, yes, from one side, people like you know, they don’t hide an email anything, like they are straightforward, this and this and this and that, but you feel that they they they want to sell you this and you don’t want to communicate with them. So yes, you need to let’s say not pitch or sell in your quote email, you need to establish their relationship.
Jesse Paliotto (42:15.156)
Mm-hmm.
Kseniia Skobelska (42:16.702)
need to involve the person into conversation. And then, you know, you know what to do then if you if you sell.
Jesse Paliotto (42:24.13)
Yeah. What so let me ask about LinkedIn. So particularly in, you know, business to business, I would say even in those environments of D to C, business to consumer, where you’re kind of reaching out to partners and to other founders and other types of outreach, there’s often like you’re gonna try and reach out to on LinkedIn. does that or I I assume you are. Does that in fact fit into a good strategy with email? And maybe you can talk about that for a minute.
Kseniia Skobelska (42:54.358)
Yeah. It’s definitely a good thing to do, but there is one thing that you should not do. You should not consider LinkedIn as a platform where you just copy paste your email. So you need to understand the specifics of that. So so LinkedIn is a social media platform. You have the option there to chat with people in private messages. And that means
that like what chat even the word chat actually shows us what you need to do you should be short be novels so if in the email you actually can write you know the benefits you know you use more space there and you can you can use that if it’s relevant if you describe the benefits that the person will get but in the email in the LinkedIn the situation is a bit different so I wanna
Jesse Paliotto (43:28.588)
Mm, mm-hmm.
Kseniia Skobelska (43:51.318)
give you an example of the outreach that in fact is not good and I I honestly I would love to talk to that person and just but they don’t answer by the way when I ask them about the you know the their strategy and what they were trying to achieve they don’t answer you know to those questions so I would say just what what I got I got is actually one of one of the practices that can be used. I got not a big message
and there was the useful resource. There was something about LinkedIn and you know, I am interested in LinkedIn. I I post about LinkedIn and blah blah blah. So it’s something relevant to me and yeah, what I followed the link. And the part in your opportunity here is to start the conversation about what you send to me. You use it like a hook, so to say. You use it like
you know, bait, so okay, I got it. And we can build our conversation based on it. In fact, this is the whole idea of sending the person the valuable resource. But we didn’t have a conversation. In more than a week I received the second message. It was long, but it was pitch. Like
Jesse Paliotto (45:01.155)
Mm-hmm.
Kseniia Skobelska (45:16.312)
Something like I could see in my email, you know, it’s something like the person just copied from there and send it to me. No, it’s not it doesn’t work that way. So on LinkedIn, you again, there’s like you can chat there. So it means that the entrance, so to say, is quick. So you jump into conversation and you need to, you know, catch this opportunity, not leave it for long or
Bombard a person with the novel on LinkedIn, people won’t read it. People won’t read your long messages. They will they will see that they will we are ske we don’t read by the way. We skim. Like we find the important words there. Well, definitely that’s a bitch by. Goodbye. I won’t continue conversation with you. And in l on LinkedIn, when you start this way, for example, these there is another version how that person
Could communicate with me right away. For example, he sent to me that valuable resource. He saw that I opened the message, but for example, I didn’t respond to anything. I checked, and he could use the information that he sent to me. For example, create a question about the information from that resource and send it to me, like what you think or.
Do you see and somehow to try again to talk to me in this case? Yes, the there may be the version you always need to understand that people may ignore you, so yeah, you need to accept this. This is the part of cold outreach, but it’s another version. So you so you didn’t wait for too long, you gave the person the time to read the resource, then you got back.
Jesse Paliotto (46:46.966)
Yeah.
Kseniia Skobelska (47:06.838)
And then you start a conversation with them, maybe they respond, and then again you start discussing, and naturally you may lead the person to the thing what you’re actually selling while you have this communication. But here’s another thing that works amazingly. the best thing that you can do in those in that tiny conversation, you need to make the person feel good.
Jesse Paliotto (47:35.486)
Mm-hmm.
Kseniia Skobelska (47:36.478)
I’m not talking here about the jokes because you know. jokes are pretty tricky and especially if you work with the global market. it may be funny in your country, but you know.
Jesse Paliotto (47:50.774)
And yeah.
Kseniia Skobelska (47:52.224)
Not funny at all. And it’s not a good thing to start with the joke. For example, it’s another example of the outreach, a little bit off topic, but again, just the example of what you should not do. I received a cold email with the subject line Give me your money, and then the email. No, I did not kidnap your
family, like relatives and blah blah blah. And I was like reading and then he wrote like I want your money and we both know it. And I’m like w I I don’t even know what he was offering. Like there was nothing about offer. So there’s about the money. And like probably that was a joke where he thought this is a like a kind of a creative way to attention. Yes. He attracted my attention.
But the feelings that I got, they are negative. So make sure that you create a positive feelings while communicating with the person. Let’s get back to whether it’s a fit for your strategy or not. combining email and LinkedIn right now, for example, you can even not only, you know, limit yourself with email and LinkedIn, you can also use the phone and make this like flow
But you can also stay with email and LinkedIn. Why is it why is it good? we talked about the noise a lot. And you know, to stand out in the inbox is super hard. And besides standing up standing out in the inbox, there is such a thing as trust. And let’s let’s look at this example. You send your initial email.
Jesse Paliotto (49:39.053)
Mm-hmm.
Kseniia Skobelska (49:45.802)
We don’t know whether the person opened it or not. We don’t know about that. And then you send the LinkedIn connection request. Let’s use the perfect example. This person saw you in LinkedIn, connected with you on LinkedIn. Here’s the chance you can continue the conversation on LinkedIn. We actually discussed earlier what how you can start the conversation. Or you may leave it as it is and continue.
send in the email but engaging with that person on LinkedIn as well. For example, commenting their posts or liking their posts if they are active. You also need to look at this thing because not a lot of people are active on LinkedIn, which is currently think a huge disadvantage because this is like a free platform where you can be visible for free. And
It does not take a lot of effort and it does not take a lot of time. If we compare this with, for example, SEO or with the paid ads. Stand out there just with your content, with your personality, with your expertise. Well, this is like if you if you don’t have a good LinkedIn profile, think about it. So you can engage with that person and what that what it kick what it creates. by the way, a small hack.
Jesse Paliotto (50:51.31)
Mm-hmm.
Kseniia Skobelska (51:11.018)
make sure to have the same avatar on LinkedIn and in the email. Person can easily you know detect you as yeah they may not know your name, but we all have eyes. We you know just our brain did not let’s say it remembers everything but you know gives that the priority so to say it still remembers so what tactic creates
Next follow-up that you sent, this person may open the email. Okay, I saw that guy. Like, he commented on that post, or I just recently accepted his invitation. So it may, by the way, the good thing about the developing your LinkedIn profile, as far as people have the success to check everything, it’s so good, they may go to your profile, see what you’re doing.
Here you can show your expertise and then, you know, if you combine all those those things, when they read your email, they think, I saw that guy, he commented on my post, I saw his LinkedIn, he probably knows who we what he’s talking about. So why not having a chat with him? Yeah. So this is how it may work. That’s why you should definitely try.
Jesse Paliotto (52:36.408)
So this is this is great. And I even love the little the hacks and stuff. This is this is really insightful. I’m gonna I’m gonna kind of zoom out for a second and you know, there’s been so many details we’ve we’ve talked through. that is probably if if somebody’s starting at the beginning because they’re a SaaS founder or they’re a small team, you know, question is where do I start and maybe what are the first things I might trip over? And so if you’re a SaaS founder, you’re a small team, you’re doing cold outreach.
for the first time, what’s the mistake that kills you before you even get started? You know, what what should people watch out for just as they try and begin this sort of thing?
Kseniia Skobelska (53:14.932)
that’s a that’s n that’s simple and not simple question at the same time. Because I can say like infrastructure right away. This is the most common problem, but I think it starts way earlier and it starts with the targeting. the other thing that actually kills everything is wrong targeting. You may have great infrastructure, you know.
This information is available everywhere. You just even ask Chat GPT, he will give you the pieces of advice, you know, how to build your cold email infrastructure. but wrong targeting is something that will spoil everything. And this is actually the problem that I see so much. because because why? Because on the internet they saw that for one of the cases, they saw that like send.
more emails get more results or something like that or I sent one million emails and I got one billion dollars. You know, people are inspired by those things and they don’t think that everyone does not need their product. That’s the most important thing. So you need to clearly know your customer or your potential customer. Not only their pain points
you know, just to create your solution and blah blah blah, but also understand the value that you bring to those people. And I would say, I don’t know, this time probably I will be thrown the tomatoes will will be thrown.
Jesse Paliotto (54:57.387)
Yeah.
Kseniia Skobelska (54:58.67)
But cold outreach, the successful one is always with small batches of leads. These successful cold outreach campaigns are not the campaigns for million leads inside. That’s the people that were taken, you know, that were gathered, the information was gathered, they were researched on, they you know what things necessary things were analyzed.
the personalization was created. You know, for example, as may we talked about the signals, signals were also included in that campaign. And then they send. Not something like I will send to everyone, you know, because sometimes people think like you know, they generalize their product so much, which is not which is not good. So this is the first thing you need to to actually take
your focus on that’s the targeting. Who we’re gonna target. Then the infrastructure, because that’s the second thing. After the wrong targeting, that’s the second problem where you know you get to to spam folder or you get blocked because like scenari the scenarios are various. So like sometimes getting into spam is not that really bad because sometimes you can be blocked for example by Barracuda that’s
Jesse Paliotto (56:01.517)
Yeah.
Kseniia Skobelska (56:26.764)
you know, the Titan of the block lists and you know, you you definitely you do not want to have any d anything with them. It’s better to do everything right at the beginning.
Jesse Paliotto (56:41.614)
So so you kind of got right into my final question, which would be, you know, if somebody wants to start off and they’re starting from scratch, what’s a quick list or like how would they actually step by step set this up? And you I think you started to say targeting infrastructure next. Maybe you can just break that out for a second. What would like my startup list look like?
Kseniia Skobelska (57:02.106)
let’s say with the targeting I want to repeat this again. and when you find the right category of leads that will be interested in you, the other thing is the data quality. And we’ve talked about that. If the leads may be interested, but the data that you have, the contact information, it’s not valid. So you need to make sure that the data you know, the contacts that they are valid.
This is one thing. The other thing, that’s the infrastructure, and we go. The best scenario that can you can use is like the Gmail API sender. This is just the way of the connection. There is an SMTP, there’s an API, so most Gmail has bowls, but it’s better to use their API. Next, the domain age, we mentioned that it should be not one day old. It should be one or two years old. That’s important.
Jesse Paliotto (57:40.248)
Mm-hmm.
Kseniia Skobelska (58:00.738)
The necessary records that you need to set up and no, there are no exceptions. You cannot miss one and set the rest. You set you need to set all of them. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records, that’s for sure. The next thing is the warm up. No, you cannot skip it. I will again repeat it once again. You can’t skip it. You need to warm up your email account for at least one month.
If we talk about, for example, the sending behavior, in fact, we didn’t talk about it while you know the general conversation that we had, but it’s also important because the part of the infrastructure, why we need so many domains or why we need the email accounts, because you cannot send one thousand emails from one email account. That’s why you need to have multiple and use.
It’s better to use mailbox rotation. And you cannot send more than fifty emails, but generally and it’s better to send twenty thirty emails per one email account. So yes per day. Yeah, pretty you know, this is where people like they have the same expression that you had because like hey, twenty emails is not a lot. I just like
Jesse Paliotto (59:12.302)
Okay.
Jesse Paliotto (59:25.422)
Yeah.
Kseniia Skobelska (59:27.424)
Yeah, I in my dreams I had like, you know, those guys said that would they send one million emails and you say me that I I can’t I want to repeat that they are success and you say me just like twenty emails per email count. Yeah. So this is one of the important thing. you need to keep in mind so before you create your strategy, you need to plan with your entrance, I mean how many email accounts you’re gonna have at the beginning.
Because it in factually defines your speed. Think about it. the email limits, like those limits, they are distributed not only to the first email. So for example, if you have twenty emails per d I mean like you can send twenty emails from the email account, you have a list of one hundred people. So think about it. For example, the follow-ups, you have this this
Jesse Paliotto (01:00:01.966)
Mm.
Kseniia Skobelska (01:00:26.706)
The first email, 20 people sent the next day. For example, in your sequence, those people that got the first email, they should receive the follow-up, but they won’t receive the follow-up because you know the rest of 80 people didn’t receive their first email and the sequence can’t go further. So you need to keep that in mind and calculate how many you need for the entrance. And then if you want to scale, then you need to plan how fast you want to scale.
And based on that, you go, you know, you create mailboxes, you buy domains. yeah. The next thing is the daily, not not daily, but the interval between sending emails. Well, for example, the c one of the common mistakes, in fact, this is the worst scenario. I want to send more emails and I want to send fa them fast.
Jesse Paliotto (01:01:14.37)
Mm-hmm. So
Kseniia Skobelska (01:01:25.59)
And they use the five seconds delay. Super, super small. And by the ESP such behavior, you know, it’s defined as suspicious. They start to think that it’s probably bots, you know, something artificial, people cannot send the you know emails, you know, five seconds, every five seconds, so there is something wrong in there. So they block.
Jesse Paliotto (01:01:29.262)
Okay.
Kseniia Skobelska (01:01:53.986)
They can block you just because of that interval. And again, I will repeat here, you may have best targeting and the great infrastructure, but but if you have this short interval, you will be blocked or sent to spam. what is the number that you need to focus on when we talk about the interval? This is 200, 500 seconds. And we already mentioned that small batches work.
Jesse Paliotto (01:02:22.413)
Mm-hmm.
Kseniia Skobelska (01:02:23.446)
So my personal thing, from my personal experience, when I see the people that say like I send one million emails, I understand that there was something generic. Because when you really receive results, you receive results from the list of prospects that you kinda know. I mean like I will I will pull a joke here, you know everything about them, what they drink for breakfast, you know.
Doing the union, but I’m joking, we’re not talking about stalkin, but this this is a metaphor, so to say, for you to understand that you know those these people and when they respond to you you you you know you don’t have to think a lot to continue the conversation with them because you know them and you start, you know, this happens in naturally. So small patches of recipients next tracking.
No tracking, no open, you know, opens no with this is not something that you think about. Reply rates. No open tracking, no link tracking. you know, and danger of it, we actually discussed what may happen. Yeah. if we talk about email contact email content, no HTML, concentrate on plain text. With no links, with nothing extra, with you know
Not all those formatting, no, just a simple plain text. Personalization for sure is everything and anything in cold outreach. So you need to make the person understand that you’re, you know, you know what that you are talking about, that this thing that you’re talking about is relevant. Well, they might may feel that. And how you can do that?
Jesse Paliotto (01:04:07.949)
Mm-hmm.
Kseniia Skobelska (01:04:12.568)
We already mentioned about the signals, you can use them and they’re perfectly well in this case. we didn’t talk about spam words, and by the way, this is the other thing that may actually lead you to spam folder. So you can find those lists in the internet, just type that or ask AI if you if you like AI, you can ask that too. So the general understanding they will give you the list of
The words that may trigger spam filters. For example, such words like free, buy, urgent. You know, sometimes people use that in subject line, urgent. That may be just a signal for the spam filters to send you nowhere. The subject line, five ten words, the email lands, like 50, 200 words. But what I can say about the email content.
Jesse Paliotto (01:04:49.665)
Yeah.
Kseniia Skobelska (01:05:12.278)
Here, I just want you to leave with one thought. We meant I mentioned that earlier, cold outreach is an ongoing experiment. you should not stick to one right moment. Even the data that I’m saying to you right now, this is the data based on the research that we did inside the company. But you can find the other data online. what I want you to have in your mind.
Jesse Paliotto (01:05:22.114)
Mm-hmm.
Kseniia Skobelska (01:05:39.744)
Is that you always need to try different variants works best for you because you know better and you you know no one in the world knows what will work definitely for you, so you need to test, test, test, test. This is something that you need to go to bed and wake up in the morning with, and preferably it’s good if you target Gmail recipients. Currently, for example, in Snov.io, when you find the leads.
Jesse Paliotto (01:05:44.109)
Yes.
Kseniia Skobelska (01:06:09.75)
and their emails, you can see where their email is hosted, for example. Whether it’s Gmail or Outlook or some other providers. So it’s better to target Gmail as in combination with a Gmail API. It’s given you better deliverability. This is like in short
Jesse Paliotto (01:06:30.338)
Yeah, that’s a great list. Thank you so much. this has been an amazing conversation. It’s been very interesting and insightful for me. I think it will be for folks. Thank you, Kseniia, so much for doing this today. Really appreciate it.
Kseniia Skobelska (01:06:41.998)
Thank you.
Jesse Paliotto (01:06:43.646)
let’s go ahead and wrap up. I think if people wanna learn more, because there’s so much more. I mean, even as we’re closing, I’m like there’s a bunch of questions I still wish I we would have had time I could have asked. But I think people can probably find you on LinkedIn and then they can get to Snov.io at S Nov dot Io. And is that the best way to connect with you guys?
Kseniia Skobelska (01:07:03.426)
Yeah, yeah, we we have the chat there on on the website so you can jump into the conversation with our customer care agents right away or you can talk to our sales guy. Yeah, we’re so open to see you.
Jesse Paliotto (01:07:16.854)
Awesome. Thank you, Kseniia, so much. And thank you, everyone, for joining us on Growth Stage Podcast today. Again, I’m your host, Jesse Paliotto I’m grateful to be able to spend time with folks like Kseniia here on the podcast and talk about this sort of thing. So many thanks. Catch you all on the next one. Have a great week and cheers. Thanks, guys.
