Do you ever wonder why some cold emails land in the spam folder, while others hit the inbox? Are there any secrets that savvy marketers use to increase email deliverability?
Cold emails are a great way to reach potential customers and build relationships. But the success of your campaign depends largely on whether or not your message reaches its intended recipient.
Email deliverability is a key factor when it comes to successful campaigns; if your emails don’t make it into a customer’s inbox, then they won’t get read.
So what should you do to ensure that your emails don’t end up in the dreaded spam folder? Cold email deliverability requires an understanding of how anti-spam filters work and how to optimize emails for deliverability. Here are 7 strategies designed to help you improve cold email deliverability and ensure that more customers receive your messages.
Glean an Understanding of Email Deliverability: What Is It and Why Should You Worry About It?
In terms of marketing and public relations, email deliverability is how successfully your emails are able to reach the recipient’s inbox.
In other words, it’s the level of success encountered when trying to get an email delivered to the user’s main inbox folder –not spam or Junk folders—and opened by the intended recipient.
It’s an incredibly important factor that should be considered when sending any kind of message via email. If your campaign or email isn’t delivered to the right folder and opened, it won’t matter what you’ve sent—it won’t get read.
However, if you’ve been using your email naturally for a few months with co-workers and clients (Sending 1-2 emails occasionally) chances are that your email deliverability will be good –for now.
But, if you’re planning to launch a cold email campaign overnight, your email service provider will notice that something isn’t quite ‘normal’ about the sudden spike in activity and react accordingly: Therefore decreasing your chances of getting into their inboxes.
Lastly, don’t send 10 emails manually to your team on Monday and then blast out 200 emails suddenly on Tuesday – it wouldn’t appear right.
The same goes for any additional attempts and patterns like this throughout the course of the week–as they could signal an automated process or algorithm as opposed to manual engagement which causes a decrease in deliverability rates.
What’s a Good Email Deliverability Rate?
When it comes to email marketing and all the ins and outs that come with it, one of the most important figures you can track is your deliverability rate. Knowing what’s a good email deliverability rate and how to improve it, are key to successful campaigns of all shapes and sizes.
While it’s hard to find exact figures on what a ‘good’ deliverability rate is, as Google and Microsoft are both secretive about their email data; it’s accepted in the industry that any rejection rate less than 5% should be reasonable.
As well as that, you need to think about multiple metrics when monitoring and improving your deliverability. The main ones to consider are:
– The % of emails delivered (not rejected);
– % of emails landing in the main inbox vs promotions tab;
– And % of emails are classified as spam.
What Factors Affect Email Deliverability?
Getting your email messages delivered to subscribers’ inboxes can be a challenge. Unsolicited emails from companies or individuals you don’t know, or messages that contain suspicious content, will find their way into many email service providers (ESPs) spam filters and block lists.
There are a variety of factors that affect email deliverability. So, what steps can you take to improve your results? Let’s start at the top – these are the basics– if you get them wrong, you’ll see poor deliverability rates and struggle to get into the inbox:
1. Email List Management: It all starts with how up-to-date your list is; check email addresses for accuracy and make sure they’re not bouncing nor featuring in any abuse reports.
2. Domain Reputation: Having a good domain reputation is essential and depends on both how much great content your senders have put out over time as well as ensuring the response rate is low.
3. Sender Score: You need to manage your sender score which means keeping unsubscribe requests low, investigating any reports of abuse, and sending welcoming emails that comply with CANSPAM regulations among other considerations.
4. Subject Lines: Why not give it a casual human touch? Personalized subject lines went through A/B testing by several companies and proved result oriented at getting more clicks on their emails
Cold Email Deliverability Best Practices
Successful email marketers understand the importance of abiding by cold email deliverability best practices to ensure their message reaches the inbox of potential customers. If you’re planning on using cold email for the long term, you’ll need to know the best practices to ensure long-term success. This includes understanding how content, send frequency, and other factors affect your deliverability rate.
In this article, we’ll cover several of these key principles so that your emails don’t get blocked, or sent to spam folders before they can reach their intended recipients:
• Understand email authentication protocols;
• Monitor IP ratings and sender scores.
• Require double opt-in from leads.
• Send relevant content with attractive subject lines.
• Avoid spam trigger words and write in natural language.
• Practice high segmentation rates with clean lists.
1. Use Cold Email Software, Not Email Marketing Software
Cold email and email marketing are two very different beasts, but those who are unfamiliar with the process may not realize the difference between cold email software and email marketing tools like Mailchimp. Whereas email marketing and opt-in forms focus on sending campaigns to contacts that have already opted into your list, cold emailing involves personal outreach with prospects who never opted in to be marketed to. Additionally, many of these platforms do not like users uploading prospects they did not explicitly opt in — doing so is against their terms of service.
If you’re sending cold outreach campaigns with a tool like Mailchimp or ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign or MailerLite and someone reports your campaign as spam, not only will you land in spam folders, you’ll quickly get banned from using any of these services for cold outreach purposes. Therefore it’s important to choose a platform specifically designed for cold emails.
2. Use a Cold Email Domain
To succeed with cold emails and actually start getting responses from prospects, you have to take steps to protect your domain. Even if you craft the perfect email and follow all the best practices, there’s always a risk of your domain being blacklisted. When that happens, it won’t just be those emails that get blocked; your whole business will be affected.
So, what does this mean in practical terms? When setting up your domain name for cold emails, you should use a different domain from the one used for normal day-to-day communication within the organization. This way you can still keep sending emails even if other domains in your company are blacklisted. For example, if your website is google.com, you shouldn’t be sending cold emails from it directly; instead, buy a similar domain such as goog1e.com or googleemailservices.com, and send them through that address instead to reduce risks of blacklisting.
3. Mix Up Your Sending Times
If you are sending emails to a large number of prospects, you may need to adjust your email-sending times and the frequency of your automated outreach campaigns. If you send 50 emails every morning at 9 am, it will look suspicious and might get flagged by the recipient’s mail provider as malicious activity. To ensure your account looks natural and doesn’t get flagged for suspicious activity, you should spread out your emails over different times of day with varying numbers of recipients.
Fortunately, this input is easy to do once you set up a schedule in QuickMail. Try starting your email sending at different times every day, with a various number of prospects. This allows the emails to reach recipients in their own timezone so they are more likely to open them and interact with them in the way that you intended when crafting the message. By spreading out your emails like this, you can easily maximize engagement rates on automated emails with minimal effort required from you.
4. Check Your Sender Score
If you think your emails aren’t being delivered, one of the first things you should do is check your Sender Score. Sender Score is a metric by Return Path that looks at indicators of how good your email reputation is behind the scenes. This score is based on several criteria, such as:
– Whether your emails are being marked as spam or if users are actively unsubscribing
– How engaged are your recipients are
– If you’re on email blacklists and if any of the IPs that you’re sending from have been flagged for suspicious activity
Sender Score isn’t a perfect way to improve your deliverability but it’ll show you where there are improvements and fixes that need to be made. A higher score will guarantee better deliverability and ultimately more people receiving your emails.
5. Emails per day
If you usually send 500,000 emails daily and suddenly send 700,000 one day, those extra 200,000 messages might be labeled as soft-bounced.
Simple rule
Stay persistent and some of these features may eventually lead you to the perfect personal productivity system, either a comprehensive workflow or just a few guidelines on how to stay organized.
Tools to Check and Improve Email Deliverability
With billions of emails sent and received every day, you want to make sure your emails are hitting the right inboxes. Improving your email deliverability can be done easily with some free tools. Below is a short list of free tools that will help keep your emails out of spam folders and in front of the eyes of your prospects.
For a more complete list of both paid and free tools, check out this article from Email Uplers. This comprehensive guide will provide detailed descriptions of which metrics to watch for, best practices for email authentications, as well as different reporting options – everything you need to ensure successful campaigns and maximum ROI for your business goals.
QuickMail Auto-Warmer
If you’re sending cold emails, you need a well-warmed-up email address. Cold emails are much more likely to land in an inbox if they come from a reliable account. If the email comes off too sales-y right away, it’s highly likely to get blacklisted and filtered out by inbox providers.
QuickMail introduces its new automated email warming service – Auto-Warmer. This tool will send emails to other people every day, simulating real exchanges between accounts. We take spam seriously, so there’s no worry about interacting with filthy accounts being flagged for spammy activity.
Auto-warmer is available for all plans, and even better – try it out Risk-Free with our free trial!
Mail-tester
– The Tool You Need to Check Your Email Deliverability Health
Cold emailing is a powerful marketing tool, but you don’t want your messages to end up in someone’s spam folder, or bounce back entirely.
To make sure your cold emails have the best chance of making it through to prospects’ inboxes, you need to check the deliverability score of your emails, before sending them out. This is where the mail tester comes in.
Mail-tester is an incredibly useful and simple tool for checking the overall deliverability health of your cold email templates before launching a campaign.
To use it, send your cold email template to the unique email address it gives you – no need to worry about giving out your own email address! Mail-tester will then run a check on the email, looking for spam triggers, unnecessary links, and images, and check for technical issues associated with your account from misspelled words or bad formatting.
Postmaster Tools
Postmaster Tools is a valuable tool for teams that send high volumes of emails. It gives you a comprehensive report on the health and performance of your email account, such as:
– Spam Rate
– IP Reputation
– Sender Reputation
– Delivery Errors
It also provides helpful insights into how users are engaging with your emails, such as which ones they’re opening, clicking on links, or deleting without reading. With this knowledge in hand, you can make better decisions when it comes to crafting successful campaigns. And since Postmaster Tools is integrated with most major email service providers (ESPs) like MailChimp and SendGrid, set up takes no time at all.
Digital signature
SPF (Sender Policy Framework) provides an encryption key and digital signature that verifies that your email message was not altered by a third party on the way to your subscriber’s inbox.
Conclusion
Cold email success starts with one crucial factor: deliverability. If you want to see results from your campaigns, you need to make sure as many of them as possible are actually landing in the inboxes of your prospects. It doesn’t matter how interesting, original or compelling your emails are if a large percentage of them aren’t even arriving in the first place!
To solve this problem for yourself and get on your way to success with cold emails, follow as many of the steps we have discussed here as you can before launching campaigns. Use them as a checklist and refer back any time you suspect there may be problems with deliverability. And while it’s a cliche, always focus on quality over quantity: fewer emails that land and more opportunities they create is the only real goal. Good luck!
