Yes, that's one of the solutions within our platform. We work with domains, integrating with Cloudflare, GoDaddy, and working with SPF, DKIM, and BIMI records. We make sure everything is set right and provide insights from all those records and solutions like monitoring your mailbox and fixing email content based on our email content knowledge.

How do you see Artificial Intelligence being used for marketing strategies going forward, aside from just cold email marketing?

Since AI is booming, many people are adopting these technologies. The most generic way is using AI to generate any sort of text content, like drafting emails. But it can be used even more, like understanding the data it works with. For instance, language models like GPT-4 or GPT-5 can visit websites, analyze data assets, and help you gain insights from all that data. It's a good use case for AI, not just for drafting emails but also for analyzing and understanding data.

As far as cold email marketing, many people still want to do it, but they've seen dropping response rates and decreasing open rates. What would you recommend to startup founders or marketers looking to improve their cold email marketing strategy?

The first thing is not to treat email marketing as a casual process. It's not just about writing a quick email and hitting the send button, hoping for a reply. Nowadays, it's a tough and technical process. You need to understand the domain zone you're at, work on your domain's hygiene, and avoid bounces. You should also avoid attachments and spam words, keeping the email straight and simple. Focus on a couple of sentences to initiate a conversation. Lengthy emails with attachments or stories don't work. Once you get a conversation going, you can take it offline to an actual meeting.

So, you recommend short emails to elicit a response, and then you can provide more materials like PDFs in subsequent emails, using Google Drive links instead of attachments?

Exactly. Short emails work well to elicit a response, and once you establish a connection, you can provide additional materials like PDFs. I suggest utilizing Google Drive and sending the recipient a link instead of attachments. It's a trick that people use in the second or third email of the sequence. Yep, a lot of people ask how many emails are too many to send to a cold prospect that hasn't responded yet. The gold standard is a four or five email sequence with a re-engagement campaign within one to two months after the initial campaign. However, this applies specifically to cold email marketing campaigns. Nurturing campaigns, like newsletters, are a different story where people bombard everyone with hundreds of emails. For cold outreach, four or five emails over a few months is recommended.

Now, let's talk about volume. Sending too many emails per day from a single domain can quickly flag your domain as spam. To avoid this, I strongly recommend splitting your volumes across multiple mailboxes. Ideally, you should send around 200-300 emails per mailbox with approximately a 100-200 second delay between emails. It's better to create more mailboxes and distribute the volume rather than sending a high volume from a single mailbox. This reduces the risk of getting blacklisted.

Using your primary domain for email marketing can be risky. While it may have more credibility, you must follow all the rules and guidelines to avoid damaging your domain's reputation.

Now, there's a question from the audience about AI for first-line generators in cold email marketing. AI can be effective in writing subject lines and the initial lines of emails, but it depends on the prompt and input you provide. With the right input, AI can generate good emails, and it's even possible to create entire email marketing campaigns using AI. We utilize AI to rewrite our emails and generate more variations, helping with automation and generating ideas.

Variation is crucial for cold outbound campaigns, not just for A/B testing but also to avoid spam filters. It's best to change your email copy once a month to prevent being marked as spam.

In terms of the future of email marketing, while new technologies like AI, blockchain, and robotics are emerging, email remains a vital communication channel. Businesses will continue to rely on email to acquire clients, and it's likely to remain relevant for a while. Cold calls and other acquisition channels also have their place, as long as they are done correctly. Ultimately, communication and client acquisition are essential in any business, and email will continue to play a significant role alongside emerging technologies. so we'll see. Great point. Another question from the audience, actually. So she's more interested in knowing about some of the first things you'd recommend for learning and mastering email marketing. So if you're just starting your strategy out, you laid out a lot of great ideas, a lot of checkboxes that everybody should hit, frankly, but what would be the first one to two things that somebody should do when putting together an email marketing strategy?

So I guess the first step would be the data that you work with. For instance, you can always write a simple email with a straightforward subject line and a good email body. But if you have more data, you're adding variables, case studies, links, etc. What I strongly suggest is to bound all those variables with some sort of strategy. One of the most best-performing campaigns that we have seen from our experience is a referral campaign, which is pretty simple. You refer to a colleague's name, so basically, you refer to the person that works with the person that you're sending the email to. It's a good hook that people are using to schedule meetings, etc. This is one good example of how to utilize the data that you can gather just from the LinkedIn or by doing simple research. I really suggest trying to find a way to get to your clients. Imagine that all the people you're sending email to are getting 50 emails per day. Even though I'm getting like 200 of those emails on my primary work email, I'm just shortlisting them based on the subject line and the first few words. So is it eye-catching or is it something interesting that grabs my attention? That's pretty simple. Imagine that you are fighting not for the responses but for the visibility in the inbox because email marketing is a crowded space. There are almost 400 billion emails sent on a daily basis, and approximately 60% of those end up in spam. So you need to focus on standing out and getting noticed.

That's a great tip. More personalization and having a clear, attention-grabbing subject line can make a big difference. It helps people determine if the email is relevant to them and if it's worth their time to read further.

Absolutely, plus the subject line should focus on the value proposition to grab people's attention and make them interested in the content. That's a great point.

Thank you. Great advice. We have another question from the audience. Can you share a time when you failed and what you learned from it? You have a great history as an entrepreneur, so I'm sure you've faced failures and setbacks along the way.

Certainly. When I started with email marketing, I made a mistake with variables. I sent an email saying "Hi, [First Name]" to 10,000 people, and the responses I received were "Hi, [First Name]" because I didn't properly set up the variables with the actual names and companies. It taught me the importance of paying attention to what you're doing and double-checking everything. Attention to detail is crucial in email marketing to avoid sending out bad emails. It's a common mistake that many email marketers have made.

Another failure that comes to mind is when our company's mailboxes suddenly started going to spam for no apparent reason. Our open rates dropped significantly, and it was a real challenge to fix the issue. It taught me the importance of paying attention to technical setup, tools, and reputation management. Email marketing is a complex process, and you need to be meticulous in setting up your campaigns, managing your mailboxes, and ensuring the right content and lead hygiene. We eventually resolved the issue and learned a lot from that experience.

That's a great example of how failures can lead to important lessons and growth. Attention to So, what kind of challenges are you facing there as a company? I mean, I'm sure scale, uh, adding more people. Continuing to build around the culture is one of your main key areas of concern now. Anything else? Yeah, choose the right architecture for your product from the very beginning, and I strongly suggest at least speaking to someone like if you don't have a CTO or chief technology officer or Chief Architect, just find someone who can advise you on the entire architecture. Because you, like everyone, started with a model with architecture which is like one table, and it's hard to support and maintain it. And since probably it's only two years old, one year we built the modeling and another year we're migrating to microservices, splitting all those functions to microservices in order to have better scalability. And it's just a thing that if you're building a hard product, you need to understand your roadmap and entire process or architecture before jumping in. Because it can be really hard to implement, how to hard to develop, and you will require a lot of people. So that's my advice so far. To backtrack later and change everything is like the foundation. That's true. If you have a good foundation, hold onto it. If you don't like one wall, you could tear it down, but if you have to start over from the beginning, the whole thing's coming down. Yeah, that's true. And one more thing, not challenging but maybe you will count as advice. We're bootstrapping. We're not raising any money with all of my companies because we can do it by ourselves. And since all those economic downturns, recessions, raising money is really expensive. Like, you need to pay double equity or so. So try to bootstrap as long as possible. Because you end up with a better situation, no matter what kind of economic conditions are out there. Especially at the beginning too, don't take money if you don't need it until you have a strong product-market fit and some good traction metrics to actually validate the valuation that you're trying to raise. Otherwise, even if you have a great idea and investors want to put in money, they could take a big chunk of your company, and that adds up every round as your company continues to grow. Yeah, yeah, I agree on that. So you mentioned a future roadmap. So, I guess what other exciting features does Folderly have coming out next? Yes, so since I've already mentioned that we are working with all those entities, we will split work with domains in a completely new solution. And you will see how you can work not just from the email marketing standpoint we're doing, but for all other matchers, like listening by listing monitoring and seeing outbound inbound emails. All those foundations. So, this is the technical stuff. It's called the Email Gateway. So, we're building around the domains, and the long-term goal with Folderly is to not be an outreach tool or send emails. We basically are on the email acquisition side, not on the email stand side. We're not like Outreach or MailChimp or all those tools. We're on the technical side, and our goal is to make sure that your emails, your documents, your mailboxes will work. So, we will continue to develop tools around the email marketing channel, and Folderly will be a one-stop shop with all those email marketing solutions for our sales and marketing people to fix, monitor, and get all those problems done. Because it's not that obvious that having a first look because it's real technical, and if you mess it up with all of those, you will pay some sort of consequences. You need to migrate to another domain. Well, that's great feedback, Vlad. I appreciate you coming on today. Yes, thanks Andy, it's been my pleasure.