The New Way of Cold Emailing in 2026

In this video, I'm going to break down why the old way of doing cold email is completely dead in 2026 and then show you a new playbook you need to understand if you actually want to use cold email to book calls this year. What I'm about to show you is the exact same system that our top users over at Instantly are using right now to generate 5 to 10% reply rates while most people are stuck around 1 to 5% and be able to book hundreds of demos for their business or agency. So, first let's talk about why the old way of cold emailing is completely dead and just has stopped working.

If you've been doing cold email for the past couple years, you were probably taught the same playbook that everyone else was taught. Send 10,000 emails a month. Throw in some personalization, maybe with their job title, run a sevenouch sequence with a ton of different follow-ups, and scale that as quickly as possible.

Look, that was the game in 2022 and 2023. In 2024, Gmail and Yahoo implemented AI [music] powered spam filters that don't just look for keywords anymore. They detect mass campaign patterns.

They're analyzing the sender behavior, the engagement rates, the campaign structure. Then Microsoft did the same thing in 2025 and basically the entire email ecosystem just got smarter. And the data doesn't lie on this.

Just from 2023 to 2024, the reply rates have dropped 1%. And right now, the average cold email reply is sitting around 1 to 5%. And get this guys, inbox placement for bulk senders dropped 10 to 27% in Q1 2025 compared to just Q1 of 2024.

That is huge. So, here's what actually works in 2026. I call this the engagement first outreach, and it's pretty much a fundamental change in how email providers are actually evaluating your emails and how cold emailers are having success with cold email.

Here's what's changed. Gmail and other email service providers prioritize engagement quality over sender reputation alone. They're measuring positive replies, clicks, and the thing is is if you have low engagement, your future deliverability is going to be hurt.

Furthermore, receivers of cold email are becoming more and more savvy. I mean, CEOs are getting hundreds of emails every single day. And if we are just using the spray and prey approach and just personalizing the first line and blasting them out, they're immediately going to say, "This is spam.

I'm going to delete this. " Not only is it going to wreck your reputation and your deliverability, but you're not going to get any responses. So, we as cold emailers and we as business owners need to adapt to not only what technically is happening, but what the market is doing.

All right, let's start with pillar number one, which is deliverability infrastructure. This is really the unlamorous stuff that a lot of people skip because it takes a lot of time. There's a lot of technicality around it.

And usually when people are starting cold email, they want to jump the gun and they want to get after it and start sending emails as quickly as possible. But the problem with this type of mindset is that it tanks your deliverability and you're not going to actually land in any of the inboxes whatsoever. Gmail now requires SPF [music] records, DKIM, demark authentication.

They also require keeping your spam complaint rates below 0. 1%. So having the mindset that I just want to get my emails out there is the wrong mindset to start with because we want to make sure we have the foundation that we can actually build from.

So essentially what we like to do is we like to send 30 emails per email. What I used to do when I was sending cold emails is again I would use my work email and I would blast the same message to a list of people and then all of a sudden what happened is all of my emails started going into spam. And it wasn't until I started prioritizing deliverability, prioritizing the infrastructure to actually build from is where I saw my reply rates actually rise and I was actually landing in the inbox.

Really, the rule of thumb is we want to get one domain and we want to get five emails per domain. And the emails that are associated with the domain also can be sending up to around 30 to 40 sometimes maybe 50 emails per day. So if you get one domain, you link five emails to it, you could send maybe 250 emails a day max from that one domain.

Furthermore, you need to make sure that your technical setup is good and you are doing inbox rotation and you're actually warming them up. We don't just buy a domain, link up the five emails, and start sending the next day. We need to warm them up so that we can build a sender reputation from those emails so that you can actually land in the inbox.

And I know this can sound really confusing and at first it was really, really daunting for me to do this because I didn't like going through this process. I actually had to hire a team to do all this for me just cuz it took so long to set one up. But no longer is that the case.

If I go to instantly. ai, I can do a few things really, really easy. I can click on add new and they have something really cool called a donefor you email setup.

I can just type in my domain and then what that will do is it'll give me domains that I can purchase so that I could associate those domains with my emails that I'm going to then purchase. So let's just say I'm going to pick two of these. I'm going to click on next.

And then what's automatically going to populate is five emails per the domains that I'm going to purchase. So, I can see the domain annual price is going to be $30 for two domains and monthly is going to be $50 for the 10 emails that I'm going to set up through Google. Then, after I placed the order, what will happen is all the emails will show up inside of my email account right here.

And when I talked about, you know, warming up and the deliverability and making sure that it's actually set up properly, it is doing this automatically. So, if I pop this open, I'll be able to see that we are sending warm-up emails to keep the sender reputation high. I can also go to my settings and I can change how many I want to send per day.

I would recommend starting with around 30. And then all of the other technical setup that used to be a headache is all completed for us. It'll give us the health score, how many warm-ups sent, how many emails sent per domain.

It is absolutely clutch and saves me a ton of time and ultimately headache. The second pillar is what I call microtargeted value campaigns. And this is where a lot of people still get things wrong.

Look at the data here. Campaigns under 50 recipients get a 5. 8% reply rate versus 2.

1% for campaigns with over a,000 recipients. That's almost a three times difference. Not because of personalization, but because of relevance.

And I'm not saying that you should only send 50 emails a day and you should only create lists of 50 emails a day. What this tells me is that emails that actually are getting responded to are relevant because the smaller the list, usually the more relevant the email, the more personalized you can do, the more relevance you can provide in the email to increase the likelihood that you're actually going to get a response. So instead of sending the same email to 10,000 people who are CEOs of agencies, we can get more granular on this and find angles, find tactics on how we can be a little bit more microtargeted for specific lists with a value campaign that is actually super super relevant to the person that's receiving that email.

The more specific that we can be, the more likely that we're actually going to get a response and get engagement, which is going to increase our deliverability, which is going to increase the likelihood of getting us booked on sales calls and so much more. And I know what you might be thinking. Oh my gosh, I got to find a really micro list.

I'm not going to get as much responses. It's going to take me forever to figure out these personalized [music] lines. It's like, absolutely not.

It is so so easy in today's day and age, especially when using a tool like Instant because what I can do is I can just go to their super search and I can do job titles and I can say I want to find CEOs in the industry of recruiting. And furthermore, I can spend a lot more time on this by finding like different management levels. I can figure out how many employees I want at this company.

I can filter if they have job listings open and what that specific job is. There's a ton of different filters that I can use, but for this example, we can just pull this list of over a thousand CEOs of recruiting companies in the United States. And then what's cool is I can go ahead and click on find emails and I can fully enrich the profile, [music] meaning I can go ahead and pull their LinkedIn.

I can pull their LinkedIn heading. I can pull their LinkedIn summary. And what it's also going to do is it's going to verify the email so that I can have confidence that the email that I'm sending to this person is actually going to land in their inbox, which is really the purpose of using cold email.

And for the people who are like, uh, I don't know, it's just going to take too long to write personalized emails for 25 people. What we can do is we can click on add a column use AI. I can go ahead and create a prompt that's going to pull from their headline, their summary, company, website.

I'm going to templatize the email, give it some clear direction. I'm going to have it create a new column. I'm going to use Claude here.

I can generate test output. And voila, it creates a personalized relevant email. So really the relevance here if you don't want to write personalized emails for 25 people which I assume that you don't is all about the prompt and the prompt can help you be more relevant in what you're actually sending.

And lastly what we also need to do is we need to actually solve a problem in the email and get someone to respond and say yes to us. Like I said earlier engagement is a huge factor in your deliverability. And for this case what I like to do is I like to give away something that we do for clients typically for free.

So, like if you're an SEO agency, maybe you offer to optimize their Google profile for free. If you're a cold email company, send them a list of 100 leads in a sample email sequence. You just need to be creative there.

But actually add value. Booking a call is not valuable. Sending a Loom video is not valuable in 2026.

What we want to do is we want to solve the problem with an actual action. So then all we need to do is go ahead and click on generate. And this generates our whole email campaign.

All right. Pillar number three is going to be the two-touch rule. The rule is simply just one initial email and one follow-up.

And then you move on and that's it. And I know what you're thinking. Austin, I hear that we need to do x amount of follow-ups and the follow-up is based off of this touch.

Yeah, but to me, I'm I'm data driven. I like to look at data. So data tells us is that the first follow-up is the most important and it boosts replies by 49%.

And the third email shows that you get 20% fewer responses versus what used to be a actually a third email giving us a 9% lift in 2023. And get this guys, by the fourth follow Beimo that we send them, response rates drop by 55%. So the old sevenouch rule is now actually hurting people.

There's two reasons for this. One, more emails equals training spam filters that you're basically a bulk sender. And it's going to have implications on your deliverability and your technical setup.

And ultimately, it's just going to lead you to having a negative sentiment about your email service and the email providers that you actually have. Number two, if they don't respond after email number two or three, they're not interested. So, we don't just trash those emails, we actually recycle them and use them in a new opener campaign because it's the first email that actually piques their interest and the follow-up is actually just to bump that first email.

So, instead of sending an opener, offering them 100 leads, and then offering them again, offering them again, clearly they're not interested. So, what I would do is I would take a list of people who didn't respond, add it into them to a new campaign, and come up with a new angle for that opener so that you can try again and have another at bat rather than trying to follow up on the same message over and over and over again. All right.

Now, let me just tie this all together for us. So, again, we are in instantly. ai.

I can simply create my email accounts and build them inside of here. And as we can see, I can see how many emails have been sent, how many warm-up emails have been sent, what's my health score, and it's super super easy to do by clicking add new, connecting existing campaigns, and they'll do the warm-up for you, doing the done for you email setup, or even buying some of the pre-warmed accounts that they have set up for you. And then what we want to do is we want to give it two weeks to warm up and get our health score up to 100% so that we can begin using the emails.

So that is the first step, which is the infrastructure. Second step that we talked about was the microtargeted value campaigns. We built our list using filters just simply using the AI superarch could filter by job titles, location, how many employees they have, what revenue are they doing, any industry news that's associated with that company, funding type, and so much more.

And then the tactic here is rather than getting a list of a million people to send an email to, how can we come up with an angle to be a little bit more targeted so that our emails are what? Relevant. And then when it comes to actually executing the relevant emails, we can just go ahead and click on find emails and then we can fully enrich their profiles.

And what I love about instantly is it makes it really easy to create relevant emails at scale through the AI. So if I just click on use AI, I can create a prompt, test the prompt out, write the prompt multiple different ways, multiple different times to make the email more relevant to the recipient based off of data that I actually have from them. company industry, their website, their LinkedIn header, their email, where they work, where they're located, all that sort of stuff, and come up with more of a micro focused type of email that actually is going to be relevant to the recipient.

And then lastly, we want to make sure that our offer, what we're actually offering them in the email from the value perspective, is something worth something to the person. And again, what I like to do is I just like to simply give away the first step of what we actually do for people if it's relevant to the email that we're actually providing. a list of leads, email templates, optimize your Google profile, whatever it could be that's actually going to get them to respond because that's actually going to feed into the foundation, etc.

, etc. And then all I really need to do is I can go ahead and go to my emails inside of Instantly. I can go to campaigns.

I can create a campaign. I can go to my list of leads. I can go ahead and select these bad boys.

I can go ahead and move these to the campaign that I just created. And then what will happen is I can begin from the campaigns to see my leads in here. I can write my email sequences based off of that personalization.

If I go to the email, type variables, I can go ahead and go to the new column I added and I can preview it per lead and see that this is set up exactly how I need to relevant email sending to that person. And last but not least is the follow-ups. How am I going to remember to follow up with people?

Well, it's super super easy in here. All we can do here is we can do a separate by [music] X amount of days. I can add my follow-up email here and I can go ahead and save these two emails.

And then when I'm ready to launch, I can go to options. I go ahead and select the email accounts that have been warming up, that are all warmed up, that I have confidence in sending from and go ahead and click on launch. And that will execute the campaigns 100% done for me.

What instantly will do is they'll rotate the senders, the inboxes that we're getting that we loaded up here so that we're not blasting from one email. We're using all these emails that we loaded up here and we're rotating some emails from this email, some emails from this email to ensure that our reputation stays solid. And then all the replies will go to our uni box right here.

And we can simply reply to here and use this as a means of responding and organizing all of our leads. There you have it, the complete three pillar system for cold email in 2026. If you want to learn exactly how to use instant.

ai AI for all of your cold email infrastructure. I've created a full tutorial that breaks down everything step by step. Just click on the video on the screen where we cover account setup, domain warming, campaign creation, and everything that you need to do to start running campaigns the right way.