We tend to think about email statistics just from a business perspective. Obviously, we want a 100% open rate and no fewer replies. That would be amazing, wouldn’t it? And if it turned out that the majority of replies were positive, we would win. However, the business advantage of getting high email stats is nigh on impossible without taking proper care of email deliverability.
Keep on reading to learn how the reply rate affects email deliverability.
What differentiates cold emailing from other types of 1-to-1 outbound practices is that a huge chunk of a cold emailing process can be automated. You just come up with an email copy, insert a few snippets, add your prospects, and there you have it. A campaign is ready to be sent. You don’t need to send it manually. Still, outreach by email may quickly backfire when you riddle your copy with words that trigger SPAM filters.
Words such as ‘insurance’, ‘financial’, ‘medicine’, ‘mortgage’ all alarm SPAM filters. But what if that is the vocabulary you use in your profession on a daily basis? How to avoid going to SPAM then?
I’ve seen a lot of cases where an email copy has destroyed a cold email campaign’s deliverability. The scenario usually goes like this. A cold email sender writes an email copy, unintentionally riddled with SPAM words. They purchase an email list online and using an email address that hadn’t been properly warmed up, they click ‘Send’. And thus they are in trouble.
Warming up the domain is a necessary step you need to take before kicking off your first cold email campaign. You can’t speed up the process, nor shorten it. But in the meantime, you can take care of your brand, figure out your campaign objective, build a prospect database, and draft your follow-up sequence to have it all set before your domain is ready for outreach.
Getting a good grasp of email deliverability from the very beginning is essential not only for the future success of your campaigns but also for your domain safety. I’ve conducted some research to find out what cold email senders should pay attention to when they want to increase their cold email deliverability rate. Let’s see what I’ve found out.
Do you have links in your cold emails? I bet you do. We often feel the need to add a link or two – either in the body of our email or in the signature. Moreover, we usually want to know if someone clicked the link or not. Ideally, we would like to know how many people clicked the link and who it was exactly.
There are many tools that allow us to track clicks on links in emails, but all of them use the same mechanism to do that. Unfortunately, the mechanism is not perfect, and it may cause spam alerts if we set up our links wrong. That’s why it’s important to put in the links properly into our message not to get into spam folder. Here’s how to do that.
Have a closer look at your campaign stats. If you notice that the open rate is taking a nosedive and the number of bounces goes sky high, it most likely means that your deliverability rate is at a rock bottom and your messages either end up in the SPAM folder or are not delivered to the recipients at all.
These symptoms may indicate that your domain reputation got seriously damaged or perhaps you even got blacklisted. Don’t worry, though, you can bring your good reputation back. Here’s a step-by-step manual on how to do it.
You have to know this. Especially if you do email outreach. Each email service provider has its own email sending limits. The limits may be daily, hourly, and sometimes also per minute. If you’re sending cold email campaigns without being aware of your email provider’s limits, your email account may get blocked before you know it. In this blog post, you will find information about sending limits of popular email service providers including Gmail, Office 365, GoDaddy and more.
You set up a cold email campaign and everything seems to run smoothly until you have a look at the statistics and notice a very high bounce rate. This may be a sign that you got blacklisted. First of all – don’t panic. Provided you landed on a blacklist unintentionally, it’s not such a big deal to get yourself off it. What costs much more effort, though, is regaining good sending reputation afterward. But first let me explain to you how blacklists work, why you landed on one and what you can do to get your IP removed from it.
Not so long ago, we organized a deliverability webinar, which some of you might have had a chance to watch live. Deliverability plays a crucial role in the effectiveness of cold email campaigns, so no wonder it’s such a hot topic. Our Woodpecker Team Members, Margaret and Mike, talked about three layers of deliverability: technical settings, email copy, and campaign settings in Woodpecker. In today’s blog post, we answer the 8 top deliverability questions that were raised during the webinar.