Learn and master Clay with Clay university

Running cold outbound normally means buying a sending tool, buying domains somewhere else, warming them in a third place, and getting all of it through procurement. It's a lot of work.

In Clay it's one flow, paid for with the credits you already have.

🧭 Walking the Wizard

Follow along from Campaigns, then Email accounts, then Add email account. You'll be offered two options, and buy managed accounts is the one we recommend. Bringing in your own accounts is the next lesson.

Step One: Domains

Before you pick anything, use the sizing helper. You tell it how many emails a week you want to send and it tells you how many domains that takes. In the video, 400 weekly sends comes back as two domains.

Start here, because guessing wrong is expensive in a way the next step will explain.

1. Enter your weekly send volume in the sizing helper and note the domain count it returns
2. Search a domain by putting your real domain in. Clay suggests variants that sit close to your brand, like youshouldtryclay.com
3. Pick something a person could plausibly believe is real, then select the number of domains the helper recommended
4. Set the Gmail / Outlook toggle, which is a targeting decision rather than a preference

That toggle matters because email providers prefer mail that comes from their own kind. Google likes mail from Google Workspace, Microsoft likes mail from Outlook. So you match your prospects: financial services and older, more traditional companies skew Microsoft, tech companies skew Google, and if you're selling to both you buy a blend of each.

Clay then handles the matching per lead once you're sending, reading the prospect's DNS records to work out who runs their email and sending from a matching account.

Step Two: Personas

A persona is who you appear to be. You give Clay a name and it generates address variations across the domains you bought. Add a persona named Larry and you get back Larry.Lee, Larry_Lee, L.Lee.

• Aim for roughly three accounts per domain. The range goes up to five
• Add more email accounts with the control on the persona list
• If reps are going to work these leads, put their names in here. Clay builds their personas, which is what makes reply routing work later in the course

Step Three: Contact Details

These are real Google Workspace and Microsoft accounts registered on your behalf, so this step asks for real company and person information.

One field deserves attention: the forwarding domain. If someone types your sending domain into a browser, this is where they land. Point it at your real website so a curious prospect finds an actual company.

Step Four: Payment

You pay in Clay credits, so there's no separate vendor and no new line item on your budget. The wizard prints the total before you confirm.

Two callouts on this screen:

• Accounts are created within about 48 hours
• Warm up for three weeks before you use them in a campaign

🚪 The Two One-Way Doors

Two decisions in this flow can't be reversed after purchase, and both are easy to click past.

1. You cannot add new accounts to these domains once the order is complete. The persona step says so on screen. If you need more capacity in six weeks, you're buying more domains, not adding inboxes to these. That's why you start with the sizing helper
2. The forwarding domain can't be changed either. Get it right the first time

📋 What a Working Fleet Looks Like

Once accounts exist, the Email accounts table is where you read them, and it filters by everything you'd want to sort on:

• Type, whether the account is Gmail or Outlook
• Source, where each account came from
• Status, whether the inbox is ready, still warming up, or showing an auth error
• Owner, who each inbox belongs to
• Domain, every domain that was created

🔥 What Warming Does For You

Warming happens quietly in the background. Your new accounts send and receive ordinary looking email with a managed pool, so by the time your campaign starts, the account has a history behind it. Traffic that goes from zero to a hundred overnight looks exactly like what it is.

Buy your accounts here and you never see any of that, because Clay filters the warmup mail out for you.

🏭 The Vendors Underneath

The vendors underneath this are Smartlead and Zapmail, and you can go to them directly if you want.

You won't save much, and you lose the ability to have one team debug the whole chain when something breaks.

🚀 What's Next

You now know how to size a fleet, walk the four steps of the buying flow, read the accounts table on the other side, and name the two decisions you can't take back.

Next is the other path: connecting inboxes you already own, when that's the right call, and what it costs you in maintenance.

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