Email deliverability is impacting your prospecting

In today's video, I'm going to share one of the biggest reasons that your emails aren't getting replied to. And it's probably not what you think. We've actually sent over 125,000 prospecting emails for our clients over the last few months. And there's a number of different things when it comes to email deliverability that you need to know. One of the most important parts of email deliverability is your email infrastructure. And this is something that is highly overlooked, especially by individual sales reps. Oftentimes we think that the reason our message isn't getting replied to is because our message is wrong, or maybe we targeted the wrong people. While, yes, that is a big component of getting replies, one of the most important pieces is your email deliverability. And when I define email deliverability, it's defined as the likelihood that your email is going to land in the primary inbox of the recipient. And the primary inbox is the main inbox where all of your messages land. It's not the promotions tab, it's not quarantine, it's not the spam folder. And it's really hard to know if your messages are actually landing in that primary inbox. But what you can do is leverage all of the best practices to give your email the best chance of actually landing in the primary inbox. And so I'm going to talk about a few different things that we see other people mess up that you can do today to actually help ensure that your emails are landing in that primary inbox. The challenges that we have today are that spam filters and mail servers like Gmail and Outlook are making it harder and harder for your emails to actually reach the primary inbox. There's all sorts of keywords that they're looking out for, your domain reputation, your inbox reputation. There's so many different components that go into figuring out, should I actually put this email in front of this user? Google and Outlook are really trying to protect their users inboxes because they know how much spam is being sent on a regular basis. And so the challenge is that if you can't actually get your email to land in the primary inbox, the chances of it getting read drop to near zero. And that's just not good. You can't get a reply to your email if it actually never gets read. If you think about the law of attrition when it comes to doing prospecting campaigns, the first thing that has to happen is your message has to be delivered and then it has to be read. And when it comes to the two kind of most important things that you can think about for email deliverability is it's your domain reputation and your sender reputation. So your domain reputation is saying, hey, everybody, that's sending emails from this particular domain, what is the reputation of those emails? Are they getting replied to? Are they being opened? Are they being looked at, Are they getting reported as spam? And so it's taking sort of all of that information from your domain level and the same thing from your individual inbox that you're sending from. And so those two components play a really big role in your email deliverability. Now, one of the issues that can occur is if you're sending cold emails from your primary domain. For example, if I was sending emails from Succession Bio and I get a bunch of emails marked as spam, that's going to actually impact my emails from being delivered to customers, right? Because if I'm using the same email, the same domain to send emails out to cold prospects, and a lot of them are getting marked as spam, my domain reputation is going to go down, my inbox reputation is going to go down. And so when I try and interact with clients or customers that could be impacted because those emails might automatically get triggered and sent into spam. And this is something we absolutely want to avoid. And so to order to get around that, the way that you can build your email infrastructure is to create different domains that you use for outbound email. I might use Join Succession Bio or Succession bio. Com as separate domains that are different from my main Succession Bio domain. That way I can use them in order to only send cold email from. And that way if one of them gets burned for whatever reason, then my main domain is not impacted by the results of that cold outbound campaign. And so then what you do is you set up a bunch of different or a few different inboxes, I would say, per domain that you create. So I might have a HarrisonUccessionBio.com and a Harrison WadeUccessionBio.com and those are now my emails that I would be sending cold emails from that particular domain. Another sort of trigger that can happen if you're sending a lot of cold emails but they're not getting replies, that sends a signal to these different mail servers that your message isn't relevant. So if I send a bunch of emails and nobody's replying to them, that's, that's not how normal communication over email occurs. And so that might send a signal to Gmail or Outlook that says, wow, okay, this is spam these are relevant inboxes. And then what's even more messed up is they can actually see that type of text or the text that was used and that was marked as spam, or that wasn't getting replied to and see that, hey, any other messages that look like this across all of our different customers, we're actually going to automatically move those to spam or move those into the promotions tab. And so this is where it's really important to make sure that you are varying the copy so the actual words that you're using in your emails so you're not just sending templates to a thousand people. And you know if you don't get responses, that same template sent later is going to end up in spam. So that's why it's important that you personalize these emails. These emails are different. Or you can use spintax, which is the ability to use hi, hey, hello, first name instead of just hi, first name. Or you can use it for different calls to action where you can have it choose between alternatives like, is this worth a quick discussion? Are you interested in seeing the data? Do you think this is interesting for your team? You could have basically different calls to action or different value props that you spin tax into these messages that don't really change the overall structure or the point of the message that you're trying to get across. And so that's a way that you can vary the copy so it doesn't look the exact same for every single email that's being sent out. And so touching on that same note is that if you're also sending a bunch of emails per day per inbox, that's not something maybe a human would do. So if you're sending hundreds of emails every single day, that's not normal interactions that a human would do on a regular basis. Like, we're not all just manually sending out and personalizing hundreds of emails. And so what they'll do is they'll start to throttle your deliverability. And this is actually on your end, right? If you're using Google or Outlook will actually start to throttle the deliverability because they're going to, they're going to say that, hey, this is likely spam because you're sending out a lot of these emails all at once. And so the way you can avoid that is actually limit the number of emails that you're sending out per day. You know, there's a lot of people out there that say 50 is the ideal limit. If you can get by with less, that's totally Fine as well. And so when you combine these different things that we're talking about here is you want to create different domains and different inboxes, and you want to limit the number of emails per inbox to say 40, 50 emails per day. So if you want to actually scale up from a volume perspective, it's not saying I'm going to send a hundred emails, 200 emails per each inbox. What you do is you create more domains and you create more inboxes in order to send out the volume that you might need. Another area we see people make a mistake is where they identify a list or they pull a list of emails. Maybe they download a list of emails from some other tool, some other location, but they don't verify them with a tool like neverbounce before they send. And so what ends up happening is a lot of these emails then are invalid. And so you end up with a high bounce rate. And when you end up with a high bounce rate, you can imagine what is Google and what are Outlook and Google going to do is that's going to tell them that, hey, you're probably sending a bunch of spam because these aren't real email addresses and you clearly aren't sending them to people that. And so that can also then affect further deliverability issues that you might have. And so what I always recommend you do is anytime you get a list of emails, this is the same if you pull them from Apollo or any other tool. Anytime you get an email address that you've located somewhere, run it through a tool like Neverbounce Million Verifier. There's a number of these email verification tools out there. You can either do it, take a CSV, upload it to them, whatever it is. You know, it's relatively cheap to actually go through this process. But what it'll do is it'll tell you a couple of things. It'll tell you, are these emails valid? Meaning that they ping the server and it says, yes, this is a valid email, this is real, and so you are safe to send to this person. Or it'll mark it as what's called a catch all email. And so what that means is some mail servers are designed to say anytime I, you know, ping the server to say, is this a real mailbox? It's always going to say yes. So these are designated as catch all emails. And unfortunately there isn't a great way to validate catch all emails in automated way. There are services that you can use. One is called Scrubby as an example where you take all of your catchalls, upload them to Scrubby and what they do is they actually email them through their email infrastructure. They determine what the if they get a bounce or if they get an auto response for whatever reason, they'll notify you of that and then only deliver you the ones that actually were delivered to that individual. So that's a way to clean up your catchalls because if you leave all of those catchalls in, there's no way to know if I send that email to them, if it will bounce or not until they actually send it. So you're better off in a safe bet saying I'm only going to send valid emails or if I want to go above and beyond and try and validate my catch all emails, you can also do that as well. It's just a little bit more expensive each time you want to go about and send these emails out, but really important that you clean the list nevertheless. So if you want to be extra safe, only send to the valid emails. And if you want to be a little more risky, you can send a catch alls. But I would recommend doing an additional validation on those catchalls before you actually send out your emails. This way you're going to limit the bounce rate. You really want your bounce rate to stay under the 2 to 3% range. If it goes above that, you should really stop your campaign, go and download those, the list of people again, validate those emails and then re upload them to actually send out later. Now there's a couple other I think really important things when it comes to deliverability, especially when you set up new domains and new inboxes. So let's go back and think about if I'm a human being, what would I do if I set up a new domain and I set up an email? If I'm a normal person that's not doing cold email, I might send a couple emails a day here or there. I'm not going to on day one just start mass emailing a bunch of people or start sending 50 emails every single day. And so what you want to do is you want to warm up these inboxes over a period of time to make them look human. And there are lots of tools out there that you can use that can help with this warmup process. Things like instantly smartly AI, there's one called salesforge. There's a number of these different tools that exist out there that create these warmup networks and what a warmup network really is. It's a bunch of Email addresses, all sending emails to each other and replying to each other at certain reply rates to make it look like you have this network of humans all interacting together and all talking about whatever it might be, just random stuff. And this is all automated. So this all happens in the background. After you set up these emails, you put them into these warmup networks and they're able to now send out all of these emails in a more human like way. And so what this does as well is if you keep this warmup sending going on a regular basis where you're getting say 50% reply rate to the emails that you're sending in this warmup outreach, what that does is that makes it look like the overall number of emails that you're sending is getting a reply to it. And so that way when you have cold email, say getting a 5% reply rate and you have your more months getting 50% reply rate, it looks more human where it looks more like a 30% reply rate aggregated across all of the emails that you're sending out. So these tools are going to be really important to help your domain reputation, your inbox reputation look real and natural to Google and Outlook. So we've talked a lot about the email infrastructure side of things, but now I want to talk about the actual email message itself and why that's so important. Your prospects aren't sitting around all day waiting to hear about your features and your capabilities. They are dealing with their problems in their day to day life. They have issues that they're dealing with. So if your email comes into their inbox and it's just bombarded with, with a whole slew of features and capabilities, it's this long email and it's not relevant to them. They don't have time to go through and read that. They're just going to hit it, mark as spam and move on, or they're just not going to reply. Both things are ultimately going to impact your deliverability. But if you can create short, impactful messaging, that's going to actually resonate with them, where you're focusing on a unique problem that they might have, talking about the impact if they don't solve it, and how you can uniquely solve that particular problem, that's going to be something that's more likely to catch their attention, stand out from all of the other noise out there and actually get them to respond. And so it's really important that you look at your messaging as a whole to say, is this really, would I actually respond to this? Is this something that is Going to grab somebody's attention with all of the other noise that's going on out there. And the other thing that you have to consider when you're doing this is that you're not using like spam related words. So if you're using like dollar signs or you're using words like free or free trial or any sort of these sort of like buzzwords, hey, you want to jump on a call, these sort of buzzwords are going to be more likely to get your message caught up in spam. And so there's a couple tools out there, you can just google them like called spam checker, something like that. And all you do is copy your message, you paste it in there and you want to remove every single spam word that it flags. So it'll flag certain words that you're using in your messaging to say, hey, you shouldn't use this because it's more likely to get caught into a spam folder. So if you can write compelling messaging, make sure you're not using those spam words, then your message is more likely to actually generate a reply from the person that you're sending it to. And the more replies you get, the better your inbox reputation is going to be and the more likely that your messages are going to be able to land in the primary inbox. Now I want to talk about another common misconception we see is the need to track opens and clicks. When you track an email open, the way it works is every time you send an email it puts a little pixel. So there's one by one pixel that's included in that email. And when that email is then opened by the recipient's inbox, that pixel is loaded, right? So the image is tried to load and once it loads, it sends a trigger back to your sending provider that says this is this email was opened, right? So this pixel was triggered and this email was opened. The issue that occurs with that is that open tracking nowadays is not accurate. You have a lot of these spam filters that will actually open every single email that comes through. And so by them automatically opening every email that comes through, you're getting invalid metrics for open rate. The other thing that happened is Apple recently released a feature where if you use the mail app on their phone, that every single email is going to be open from that perspective. But then you also, on the flip side have people that don't allow any images to be downloaded in their emails and so they give a negative signal. So you might have seen at some point in time Somebody hasn't opened an email, but they've responded to it. And that's a situation where that occurs, where they're not allowed to actually download any images or those pixels don't get triggered. And so you don't actually see the open rate. And what nowadays you're seeing in a lot of these spam filters or with the promotions tab for Google as an example, is that when you send these emails and they have this pixel, it's just naturally going to put them in a promotions tab. It's a really quick and easy way to say, this is a marketing email. This is an email that's being tracked. It's not sent as plain text like a normal email would be. And so with these two things in mind, you would say, okay, if I can't get accurate open rate metrics and it increases the likelihood that my message ends up in spam, why should I actually even track open rates? And so I think this is a valid question that you should ask yourself, is it even relevant for me to track open rates at all? And I would recommend you actually don't track open rates for those simple reasons. Now, same thing is also occurring with click tracking. So if you use a link in your message and you're trying to track when somebody clicks it, what ends up happening is it adds a whole, like, extra section to the end of the link automatically when you send it out. And so when somebody clicks that, that unique identifier that was automatically added at the end of the link will, will let you know that this person was the one that clicked and opened that email. But again, these spam filters and things are set up to detect this. And so when they see that link tracking, their, the flags go up and they say, oh, okay, this is probably spam because they're tracking this email link. So I'm going to go move into promotions, move it into spam, that's less likely to be delivered to that primary inbox. So again, the thing that we're trying to do here is maximize the opportunity to get our email read. And so that means we want to be sending emails as plain text. That means no open tracking, no click tracking, no links. You want to send that first email as plain text and make sure that it is delivered in the best possible way. So I know a lot of the topics we've talked about aren't realistic for many of you that are in a sales role, maybe at a larger company where you don't have the ability to just go buy different domains and set up a bunch of inboxes. What are the things that you can do to give yourself the best chance of actually getting your message delivered? The first one would be limit the amount of emails that you're sending per day. The second one would be change up your copy. Make sure it's personalized. Make sure the wording is different for each of the emails. This could also be from AB testing different messaging. So you could have four different variations of the email that you want to send. Testing out different problem statements, different value props. Because each of those is a different message, it's not going to look the exact same to Google every time you send them. So limit the number of emails you send. Change up your copy. Make sure that you clean up and verify all of the emails before you actually hit send. Turn off your open and click tracking. And then lastly, make sure that your messaging actually resonates with your target customer, so that way you get more replies to those emails. All right, that's all we have for this particular video. If you have questions, as I'm sure you might, after all of the technical stuff that we talked about here, just reach out to me. My email is Harrison at Succession Bio. Happy to answer more questions. And also if you want us as a company to help set up this infrastructure for you and maybe run some of these outbound campaigns on your behalf, we can also do that as well. So reach on out harrisonuccession Bio and we'll see you in the next video.