THE SAUCE: Superwave's operator playbook to handle and convert huge email traffic like an expert

The non-negotiables:

• Use Smartlead.

  • Google and Microsoft do not like emails from discounted cloud services because of the rampant use by the lowest quality of spammers.

  • While their competitors cut costs to host their service and use cheap cloud infrastructure that will reduce your deliverability, Smartlead invests in enterprise grade systems to be the most reliable email scale frontend available.

• Don't ever track open rates of click through rates.

  • The only metric that matters is replies. Open rate and click through rate give you a false sense of accomplishment at the cost of your deliverability.

• Plain text emails only.

  • Based on our past data the best campaigns have humanely written emails with short sentences. Invest in being alluring, in making sure your offer is powerful and your market is actually interested in it. Gimmicks like HTML, videos and similar will not make an uninterested reader suddenly become fascinated.

• Do not scale losing campaigns.

  • You can't turn a loser campaign into a winner with volume. See the section on KPIs down below for more information.

Setting up a clean deployment:

• Invest in .com domains or the best available alternative only.

  • Buying a cheap extension like .info or .click may seem like a savvy purchase until you find out the AI machine learning filters at Google and Microsoft know the highest spam volume comes from the cheapest domains and then sentence yours to the spam folder.

  • Refer to the chapter on domain restrictions in this manual for further details.

• Keep domains classy.

  • How a address looks does not have a direct effect on deliverability.

  • However, if your senders look something like [e-mail] people will get the ick and be more prone to distrusting you.

  • That means you lost the click and the algos at Google and Microsoft will think you're sending undesirable unsolicited mail.

Smartlead warmup options to have the algos in your favor:

There are two routes you can take:

Route	Action
Immediate ramming	Launch campaigns immediately.
Strategic scaling	Warm for one week and then launch.

When picking one of the two routes, stick to it until the end. Do not dwindle between both mid-campaign or you may face unforeseen deliverability issues.

Superwave can fire on day one but your warmup and outreach combination must be tailored to your skills and launch speed.

• The way the warmup pool works.

  • The warmup pool in Smartlead is designed to send you to spam on purpose to then take you out and thus training the Google and Microsoft algos in your favor.

• Not everyone is a super skilled sender, and that's fine.

  • You can make the most of out the program by setting your own pace instead of letting fomo make you crash a profitable campaign by scaling too hard without thinking.

• Don't let the warmup pool backfire.

  • If you use aggressive warmup settings (Like the ones in the rest of the manual outside this playbook) while launching campaigns, the spam flagging you get from the warmup is going to extend to the outreach and damage your campaign.

  • How the top senders in Superwave do it is by warming one week, let the algo get re-trained and then launch.

Warmup settings for immediate ramming:

Setting	Value
Enable warmup	Enabled
Total # of warmup emails per day	24
Daily ramp up	Disabled
Warmup email amount randomization	Between 14 and 24
Reply rate	41.00%
Warmup sending ratio adjustment	Enabled

Warmup settings for strategic scaling:

Setting	Value
Enable warmup	Enabled
Total # of warmup emails per day	50
Daily ramp up	Disabled
Warmup email amount randomization	Between 38 and 50
Reply rate	81.00%
Warmup sending ratio adjustment	Enabled

Smartlead campaign settings to maximize performance:

1. Stop sending messages when a lead replies.

2. Do not track opens, clicks, and send without HTML. Refer to the non-negotiables section of this playbook.

3. The sending pattern prioritization ratio should be of 50.00% follow ups and 50.00% new leads.

4. Company-level auto pausing should be turned off.

5. AI-based provider auto matching should be turned off.

6. Intelli-categorize OOO replies with AI to not count them in the reply rate percentage.

7. Adding an unsubscribe message should be turned off.

You're doing spintax wrong and it's wrecking your campaigns:

• The facts:

  • Most senders approach spintax incorrectly.

  • The number of unique variations does not matter. If your lead list has 750 people what's the point of having 2 million unique variations? This makes zero sense.

  • Google and Microsoft pay machine learning engineers multi six figure salaries to build the most ruthless and sharp algos to stop cold email. This means your sequences should have zero recognizable patterns.

• How an email that flies under the radar looks:

  • No more than five words in a row that does not have a spintax bracket to break it up. This minimizes pattern recognition.

  • Signatures and business addresses are the things that algos watch out for to identify mass sending patterns. Spintax these as heavily as possible.

  • Each spintax bracket should have up to three variations. More is not better. You do not need an arbitrary number of unique variations.

  • Spintax any use of numbers as well.

The most revealing metric you didn't know existed and other KPIs:

• The out of office reply rate:

  • The most important metric for deliverability is the out of office autoresponder reply rate.

  • Regardless of copy or offer, if you're inboxing this means you will be getting OOO replies.

  • A OOO reply rate that signals you're inboxing is of around 2.00% to 3.00%. Adjust for your geographical region, holidays, etcetera.

• Bounces:

  • Bounce rates should be around between 0.20% and 3.00%. This is very subjective because it varies depending on data source, industry, etcetera. Do your homework.

  • There's no such thing as minimum bounce rate. There are domains that had a 0% bounce rate that completely flopped.

  • Anything above a 3.00% bounce rate means you're causing hard bounces beyond the expected "Email no longer exists" bounces.

  • The reason for the bounce is much more telling than the bounce amount. Hard bounces tell you're doing something very wrong and that the algos have blocked your domain, while soft bounces just tell you about minor issues.

  • Pay attention to what type of bounces you are getting in live campaigns.

  • The Smartlead warmup pool may cause bounces on your sending addresses. This is a good thing, so ignore any issues there.

• The two other most important metrics for scaling campaigns:

  • Replies and positive replies.

  • You will rarely burn a domain that's getting between a 10.00% and 15.00% reply rate that book meetings every day.

  • Never try to scale volume on a campaign with less than 1% reply rate (Excluding OOO, see "Intelli-categorize"). Fix your targeting, copy and try again with a new domain.

Comprehensive data validation practices:

1. Run your entire list through BounceBan. They verify catch-alls. It beats almost every tool in the market on regards to price and coverage.
2. Verify all lists regardless of source.

3. Verify all lists even if they are "verified" by the provider.

4. Verify recycle leads before campaigns always.

Final words

All of the information above is more art than science. Remember that at the heart of quantum mechanics there is no causation, only probability.

Credits to the Sauce provider:

Ben made this playbook possible with his expert technical knowledge based on years of experience in securing multi figure contracts between promising startups, professionals, offers and Big Pharma's most renowned institutions (Pfizer, J&J, CVS, Merck, Novartis, Harvard Medical School, Stanford Medicine, and many others).

This playbook has only the bare minimum for you to make the most out of Superwave and finally make powerful email performance be reflected in tangible revenue numbers that make your clients zealous about your brand and your pipeline always full of generous contracts ready to be signed.

If you're already on the higher levels of performance but actively seeking for that edge that will finally let you enter the 7 figure club, Ben is the private advisor you may message for the gatekept alpha that outperforms the SDR teams of most Fortune 500s.