For cold email campaigns, deliverability will make or break your success. Every email-sending domain has a reputation; if your reputation falls too low, it will cause long-lasting impacts on your company’s communications. Throughout Bandalier’s experiences building outsourced inside sales teams, we’ve tested a wide variety of strategies to help our clients maintain their email deliverability. These 4 make the most dramatic impact.
Start Slow
To maintain your cold email deliverability, starting slowly is essential. Launching a high-volume campaign can be tempting when your team needs quick wins. However, sending too many emails too quickly will negatively impact your domain’s reputation.
To preserve your deliverability, start your outreach slowly. Speak with your team to understand how many emails they typically send, receive, and reply to each day.
If your organization primarily sends internal emails, you’ll need to slowly increase your outbound efforts. Start by sending 5 outbound emails each day, and increase the number incrementally until you reach your outbound email target. If your team has a high volume of inbound and outbound communication, you can ramp up your cold email outreach faster.
Decide on a Domain
Once your domain’s reputation is damaged, it’s hard to repair it. If that happens to your organization’s primary domain, you’ll end up in everyone’s SPAM box. Then you’ll be looking at months of effort to repair your domain’s reputation. Instead, consider using a subdomain for your new cold email campaign.
Subdomains separate online content – and each subdomain receives a separate deliverability score. Creating a new subdomain and using it for your sales outreach will preserve the reputation of your primary domain. However, you’ll need to move slowly when you’re using a new domain. Any actions that negatively impact your sending reputation will have more dramatic impacts on a new domain. Make sure to start your outbound messaging slowly. You can also work with your team to create a balance of inbound and outbound messaging.
Messaging Matters
When it comes to cold email deliverability, messaging is one of the most important factors to consider. Templated messaging is the easiest way to launch high-volume campaigns, but it’s also the easiest way to damage your deliverability.
Make each message unique. We’ve covered the importance of personalization before, but it bears repeating. At minimum, include variables, such as the recipient’s name or their company’s name, in each template. Ideally, you should coach your team to spend a few minutes personalizing up to 20% of each email. Personalized messaging is more likely to help you engage with prospects, and less likely to be reported as spam. Both will positively impact your domain’s reputation over time.
Check Your Content
Once you’re happy with your messaging, review the collateral that your team is including in their emails. The first email in your sequence should be text only. Unsolicited links, images, and attachments will negatively impact your cold email deliverability.
Save your high-quality content for the later steps in your outreach sequence. It’s safe to include a link in your second email, but we recommend waiting until your third or fourth email before sending any images or attachments. Once you’ve received a reply, you can share as much collateral as the prospect requests.
Learn With the Best
If your team needs to ramp up fast while preserving your cold email deliverability, contact Bandalier today – we’d love to share our tips, tricks, and techniques.
