Getting Started with Mailshake

Hey there Mailshaker! 👋

Our team is super excited to have you join us and we’re here as trusty guides to help you on your Mailshake Journey. In this guide, our team walks you through everything you need to know to set up your account, sending out your first campaign, and taking your outreach to the next level.

First, how does Mailshake work? 🤓

Let’s jump right in. Mailshake connects with your email address and helps you automate all of your cold email outreach so you don’t have to do a bunch of work to email all of your contacts. 

We send emails right from your mail account so it’s just like you’re emailing from your own email address which is the best way to send outreach emails. We recommend that you send cold emails from a different domain than your main business domain - it might seem counterintuitive, but this actually protects your main domain. 

Check out our FAQs for answers to the most common questions before getting started.

Now that we’ve got that covered let’s move on. 

1 - Connect your Mail Account

With Mailshake, you can connect your mail account in just a few seconds using almost any email address! 💌 You might have already connected your mail account when you first created your Mailshake account. 

To double-check, click Mail Accounts and check to see if your email address is connected. If it is, woo-hoo! 🥳

If you don’t see it, click the big pink + Add Account button and follow the prompts.

Note: For Microsoft accounts, you’ll want to log out of your Microsoft account in a new tab. Click here for a shortcut.

Have a different email and not sure about your SMTP settings? Check out this guide for the most common SMTP settings. Or reach out to your mail provider’s support team directly to make sure you’re getting the right SMTP and IMAP information. 

Once you connect your mail account, set your Sending Calendar Rules 📅  to tell Mailshake how many emails to send each day and set up your signature. ✍

🔥🔥 Warm Up Your Email 🔥🔥  To boost your sender reputation and get the best deliverability possible, use our Email Deliverability Warm Up tool - it’s free with your Mailshake account 🎉

2 - Create your first campaign

Okay, so this is probably the part you’ve been thinking about the most. Now that you’ve connected your mail account and supercharged your deliverability, it’s time to create your first campaign.

In the menu on the left, click Campaigns, then click +New Campaign. We walk you through the wizard steps with best practices below.

1

Basic Settings ✅

1. Check the General settings to make sure everything looks right.
2. For the Lead Catcher, most people keep the default rules of "Reply 1 Time" but if you want to customize your rules, check out this guide for an explanation.
3. Sync To Apps - if you haven’t connected a CRM yet, you can skip this part. Otherwise, select the CRM instance where you want to sync this campaign.

2

Import Prospects 🙋

Now it’s time to import your contacts, or what we call Prospects in Mailshake. We give you a couple of options but let’s focus on the most popular one for your first campaign:

If you’re importing from a CSV file check out our step-by-step walkthrough to make sure your import goes smoothly.

Just make sure your file is a CSV file and not an Excel file or other formats. Not sure? Here’s how to save as a CSV

😓 Having trouble with your CSV? We’ve got you covered with our Formatting Guide 

Planning to import from your CRM instead? Follow this guide to connect your CRM before importing prospects.

3

Create your Campaign Sequence Messages 📧

Now it’s time to craft your campaign messages - with Mailshake you can create a single message campaign, or add follow-ups, drips, and on-click messages to add additional touch points.

Copywriting not your thing? Check out a training session Watch an email teardown session for copywriting ideas, best practices and tips to make your campaign messages shine! 💥

⚠️ Don’t forget to use Text Replacements (aka Mail Merge) to automatically personalize messages for each prospect - this saves you a TON of time and helps to boost engagement with your prospects. 

Follow-ups are your best bet for adding additional messages to your sequence - they’ll stop going out to your prospect if they reply so you don’t bug them. Check out Drip Messages and On-click Messages for different ways to structure your campaign.

💡Pro Tip💡 Try A/B testing to test out different subject lines or campaign messaging to see what is most effective for you and your outreach. Click here to learn more.

4

Manually Personalize Individual Prospect Messages 📝

This is the perfect time to review a few prospects to make sure your Text Replacements are working correctly and that everything looks good. If you need to make changes for everyone, we recommend going back to the Sequence step to make edits that will apply for all prospects.

If you’re the type that likes to manually write out personalized messages to each person, we give you that chance in the Personalize step. 

But, we’re a bit biased and prefer using Text Replacements in the Sequence step to save time. Check it out.

When you’re ready, click Confirm to head to the last step. ➡️

5

Start your campaign! 🎉

Now you’re ready to launch! Click Start Campaign to start your campaign. 

Note: It takes just a few minutes for Mailshake to start generating and scheduling your emails, so don’t worry if you don’t see anything on your sending calendar right away. Just refresh the page after a bit to see your Sending Calendar populate.

Not ready?? Don’t worry, if you need more time, you can still click Start Campaign, then click the Running toggle to switch the campaign off to prevent emails from going out. Or you can just click Exit Campaign to leave the campaign in Draft Mode.

3 - Engaging with your Leads

So you’ve started your campaign - now you’re hopefully receiving some replies from prospects. When a prospect replies, they end up in your Lead Catcher.

The Lead Catcher is a one-stop shop for managing and replying to your leads. Consider this your "to-do" list to run through and engage with your leads. ✅

Click on a lead to view their reply. You’ll have the option to reply back to them as well as set a status. 

Setting a lead’s status to Won, Lost, or Ignored moves the lead out of the open areas lead so you always know which leads still need your attention. If the lead replies back, they’ll jump right back into the open lead area so you don’t miss it.

Not familiar with handling leads in this way? Check out our guide for how to handle leads.

4 - Analyze and Iterate

Congrats! 🎉 If you’ve made it this far, you’ve likely started running your campaign - we’re excited for you! 🎉

Keep tabs on how your campaigns are performing by checking out an individual  campaign’s overview page. Want to track your overall performance for all of your team’s campaigns? Check out Mailshake’s built-in reporting features.

Prefer to run your own reports or need to export your data? Check out your options here.

To keep things fresh, we recommend using A/B Testing so that you can try new subject lines or content and see what performs the best for your and your team. 

5 - Supercharge Mailshake

Lastly, we’ve got a few tricks to make Mailshake work even harder for you!

Connect your Hubspot, Pipedrive, or Salesforce to Mailshake to sync lead data. Plus you can also import data right from your CRM. Just head to the Integrations section and click Add Integration. We also have Slack and Calendly integrations too!

Have a different CRM or another app you want to connect to Mailshake? We’re big fans of using Zapier to connect with just about any app you can think of. Get started with Mailshake zaps here.

💡Pro Tip💡 If you’ve chosen our Sales Engagement Plan, you’ve got access to the Mailshake Dialer and Automated Tasks. You can easily call prospects and automate your task list to add additional touchpoints and really take your outreach to the next level.

Interested in the Sales Engagement Plan? Book a Demo

Need Help? Your Mailshake team is here for you 💌

Get in touch by clicking the ? in your account and selecting the Contact Support option to send us a message. We’ll follow up with you via email. 😄

Also, don't forget to use the search bar at the top of this page to search the rest of our help guides.