Experienced with tools like Clay, Smartlead, Instantly, or similar platforms, and have a strong understanding of:
- Maintaining healthy sending domains, mailboxes, and warm-up strategies.
- Email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and deliverability monitoring.
- Data enrichment for personalization (e.g., job changes, recent funding, tech stack, competitors).
Responsibilities:
- Optimize cold email infrastructure to maximize inbox placement.
- Use personalization tools to craft unique, relevant first lines for prospects.
- Monitor bounce rates, open rates, and reply rates to continuously improve deliverability.
- Keep domains and sending reputations safe while scaling campaigns.
Ideal Candidate:
- Proven track record of improving deliverability for outbound campaigns.
- Hands-on experience with deliverability tools (Postmaster, SNDS, GlockApps, etc.).
- Strong personalization skills that go beyond surface-level templates.
Summary
Title: Build a cold email system using Instantly or similar, with enrichment and HubSpot handoff
Project overview:
We need an expert to build a complete cold email system using Instantly or a comparable platform such as Smartlead, Lemlist, or Apollo. We have an existing list of contractor emails that likely needs verification and enrichment before launch. The goal is a turnkey outbound engine that generates warm replies and booked demos, with all warm leads pushed into HubSpot for follow up and pipeline tracking.
Objectives:
1. Launch compliant, high deliverability cold email campaigns at scale.
2. Enrich and validate our contact list for accurate personalization.
3. Book qualified demos and route warm leads into HubSpot with correct lifecycle stages, owners, and tasks.
4. Deliver a repeatable system with SOPs our team can run.
Scope of work:
A. Foundation and deliverability
1. Recommend tools. Instantly preferred, open to alternatives.
2. Set up dedicated sending domains or subdomains, DNS, and tracking for SPF, DKIM, DMARC with reporting, and a custom tracking domain.
3. Provision multiple sending inboxes and an inbox rotation plan.
4. Create a warming plan and ramp schedule to protect sender reputation.
B. Data work
1. Verify emails and remove traps and bounces.
2. Enrich records with first name, last name, company, role, phone if available, location or county, and contractor relevant fields.
3. Deliver a clean master file with enrichment sources and confidence notes.
C. Messaging and sequences
1. Create three to four persona based sequences with four to six emails each.
2. Set up personalization at scale using merge fields and conditional inserts.
3. A or B test subject lines, value hooks, and calls to action.
4. Provide short reply handling snippets for common objections.
D. Automation and routing
1. Configure reply detection and sentiment tagging for positive, neutral, and negative.
2. Push positive replies and high intent signals into HubSpot via native integration or Zapier or Make. Create or update contact and company. Optionally create a deal in the outbound pipeline. Set lifecycle stage such as MQL. Assign sales owner. Create call and follow up tasks.
3. Maintain global suppression and do not contact lists.
4. Capture unsubscribes and sync to HubSpot.
E. Reporting and handover
1. Build a simple dashboard that shows domain health, inbox health, open rate, reply rate, positive rate, and meetings booked.
2. Provide SOPs and a short loom style walkthrough that covers how to add new lists, how to launch and pause sequences, how to monitor deliverability, and how to update HubSpot mappings.
Compliance:
Follow CAN SPAM and applicable state guidelines. Include a valid company address and a clear opt out in every email. Maintain suppression lists and document consent where applicable.
Success metrics targets:
Open rate 40 to 60 percent.
Reply rate 5 to 12 percent.
Positive reply rate 1 to 3 percent.
Booked demo rate 0.7 to 1.5 percent.
Bounce rate under 3 percent after cleaning.
Healthy inbox placement and domain reputation.
Timeline:
Week 1. Domains, DNS, inboxes, warm up plan. List cleaning and enrichment kick off.
Week 2. Messaging finalized. Initial sequences live to a small test segment.
Week 3. Scale to full daily sending with monitoring and A or B tests.
Week 4. Optimize, document SOPs, handover.
What to include in your proposal:
1. Your approach to deliverability and domain warming.
2. Preferred tools and why, including estimated licensing costs.
3. One or two brief case studies with real metrics such as open, reply, positive, and booked rates.
4. A quick sample consisting of one subject line and one three sentence opener tailored to contractors.
5. Your plan for HubSpot integration and the fields you would map.
6. A fixed price for setup and an optional monthly optimization fee.
7. Estimated timeline and availability.
Please start your proposal with the phrase Rockstar cold email so we can filter generic bids.
Nice to haves:
Experience targeting contractors or construction trades.
Familiarity with HubSpot
Ability to add a light lead scoring model for routing.
Budget:
Open to proposals. Provide a fixed price quote for the full setup and a separate monthly fee for ongoing optimization, testing, and reporting.
Acceptance Criteria (Must Meet All)
- Work Email Only
○ Must be associated with the contact’s current company (as per LinkedIn).
○ No Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail or other personal emails. - No Previous Company Emails
○ The email domain (e.g., @company.com) must match the current employer listed
on LinkedIn.
○ Avoid emails from past roles. - No Generic Emails
○ Avoid info@, contact@, support@, careers@ etc., unless clearly the person’s main
email (rare; explain in Notes). - Check for Accuracy
○ No typos, double “@”, wrong domains, or misspellings. - Cross-Verification
○ Wherever possible, verify via tools (Hunter, RocketReach, Clearbit, Apollo,
NeverBounce, ZeroBounce, Debounce).
○ Confirm company email pattern (e.g., first.last@company.com) via trustworthy
sources (website, press releases, email pattern tools). Document your reasoning in
Notes. - Detail-Oriented Review — Please carefully review each email before submission to ensure
it is valid—correctly formatted, aligned with the contact’s current employer domain, and
verified.
Quality Bar:
● ≥ 95% of emails must be deliverable/valid.
● Free replacements for any bounces or rejections within 3 days of delivery.
Preferred Experience
● LinkedIn (Sales Navigator a plus)
● Email discovery & verification tools (Hunter, RocketReach, Clearbit, Apollo,
NeverBounce/ZeroBounce)
● B2B research and data hygiene
● Strong attention to detail and fast turnaround
Compliance & Ethics
● Use publicly available information only.
● Comply with relevant data protection rules (e.g., GDPR/CCPA) and platform terms.
● No unauthorized scraping or automation that violates site policies.
● Confidentiality of company information and tasks
○ All materials we share (contact lists, company targets, processes, communications)
are strictly confidential.
○ Do not share, resell, reuse, or publish any data or deliverables.
○ Use only secure, reputable tools; do not upload our data to public datasets or AI
training systems.
○ Store data securely and delete local copies after we confirm delivery/acceptance.
○ You may be asked to sign an NDA. Promptly notify us of any suspected data
exposure.
🎯 What You’ll Do
- Set up and maintain outbound workflows using Clay.com
- Build enrichment flows with tools like Clearbit, Apollo, Dropcontact, etc.
- Segment leads by persona, industry, or firmographic filters
- Sync leads to Instantly campaigns with proper tagging and logic
- Monitor and troubleshoot deliverability issues (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, warm-up, inbox rotation)
- Implement A/B testing and provide performance insights
- Collaborate with messaging and sales team to align strategy and targeting
- Identify issues in lead quality, segmentation, or campaign execution — and fix them before they’re noticed
✅ What We’re Looking For
- Deep experience using Clay.com and Instantly
- Strong understanding of data enrichment, lead segmentation, and workflow logic
- Familiar with outbound email deliverability best practices
- Comfortable integrating tools like Apollo, Clearbit, and HubSpot via API or native connections
- Technically independent and detail-oriented
- Familiar with basic metrics: open rates, bounce rates, reply rates, etc.
- Able to operate autonomously and proactively surface campaign issues
💡 Nice-to-Have
- Experience with outbound syncing to HubSpot or another CRM
- Familiarity with LinkedIn scraping or sales data tools
- Awareness of GDPR and compliance considerations in cold outreach