Hi, I’m Johanna with SalesMint and today I want to talk to you a little bit about email infrastructure and setting up your Smartlead account. Smartlead is a way that you can have multiple email inboxes and even different domains, and all of the replies will come back into one master inbox.
Now, why would you do this? Well, one of the main reasons is for deliverability because you don’t want your e-mail address to be sending out so many e-mails per day that you get shut down for spamming people. So, instead you spread the e-mails across multiple domains and e-mail addresses.
In my case, I actually have a mix of Gmail and Outlook and Zoho Mail addresses because you’ll have a better deliverability rate when the e-mail sender and receiver are with the same provider. So, if you have a Gmail account, it’s more deliverable to send to another Gmail account; and an Outlook account to an Outlook account. Smartlead will automatically match up those accounts for you for the maximum deliverability.
Now I want to show you what it’s like to add an account. You can automatically connect using Gmail, Zoho or Outlook, or if you have a different provider, like Private Email, you will do the SMTP setup.
Here I’ve entered my basic information, my email and password, the SMTP host (which I was able to find using ChatGPT), and also my receiving IMAP settings. I put just my basic signature.
You can enter a BCC email provided by HubSpot or your CRM, and then any emails that are sent through Smartlead automatically get recorded to Hubspot. That’s a great feature to keep everything in one place in your CRM. You can also set up a custom tracking domain, add tags, or organize by client. Everything has really clear instructions.
Okay, now here’s the moment of truth. I’m gonna verify my email account. Once it’s verified, then I’ll know that it’s all connected. Success. Alright, here we go.
Next step is to do email warm-up. Email warm-up is something that you’re gonna want to do for two weeks on each email account. Basically, Smartlead will send emails from your new email address and then they reply to make sure that your email address looks authentic. So I’m gonna say, just send warm-up emails on weekdays and enable warm-up. Here we go.
You can use a filter to filter out any of the warm-up responses because they’re not really real emails. So what you would do is take this “point-eager” word, and filter it out of your normal e-mail inbox. So I’m just gonna go ahead and get the warm-up started.
Back to my e-mail accounts, I’m gonna go to one of my accounts that’s been warming up for a little longer, and see what it’s been doing. So for seven days, it’s been sending 146 warm-up emails, and they all landed in the inbox. Great. No spam, and seven replies that the system replied back.
You can see the daily warmups have some variation, so it looks more human. Warmup gets your e-mail address ready for an outbound campaign, because now it’s not just a brand new inbox, it’s something that’s being used for emails back and forth.
Smartlead also offers the capacity to bulk upload a spreadsheet of new email addresses, so if you have a lot of email addresses to add, that will save you time.
If you would like to sign up for a Smartlead account, please use my affiliate link provided in this article. For setup help, email me directly at johanna@salesmint.com or schedule time with me on my calendar link.