Improve Your Cold Email Deliverability Rates With a Few Effective Tips from Folderly

Brief description of cold emails and their benefits

If you are new to the industry, the notion of a cold email may sound alien to you. To put it simply, a cold email is a message you send to a recipient with whom you have no previous relationship. The main aim is to spread the word about your product or services, get a business connection going, and help the user convert – aka make a purchase as a final step.

Vital perks of cold emails

As it’s been mentioned, cold email campaigns are all the rage, and you need to know why before you proceed with slightly more complex matters.

• They reach users – most people spend a lot of time online, and checking their inbox is on the list too. Thus, the chances that a user will miss your offer are slim.
• They are personal – if you manage to run a success-programmed campaign, you will end up with personalized emails that catch clients’ attention and trigger their interest.
• They are informative – quality cold email copies carry a lot of necessary information that may convince a reader to convert. Don’t forget that you can coat such messages with various media content, including images, presentations, and videos.
• They enhance brand awareness – even if a recipient does not convert immediately, they will know that your brand exists. Thus, they can refer other people toward you or convert a bit later themselves.
• They can be analyzed – the best way to improve your marketing scores is to track and analyze current trends. That is yet another advantage that cold emailing has to offer.

Why does email deliverability matter?

Since you are aware that cold emails may play a crucial part in your marketing campaign, you may want to focus on crafting as perfect a copy as possible. However, you need to realize that there will be little use from your well-crafted message if it doesn’t reach the recipient.

Should the message get in the Spam folder or in the Promotions box, the chances that a user will read it decrease significantly. That is where email deliverability comes into play.

Countless email deliverability services can help you analyze the campaign so that you can update and improve it. Some known factors can interfere with a reasonable email deliverability rate. They would be the following:

• Technical qualifications
• Sending volume
• Content quality

Effective cold email deliverability practices

Now that you know the essential part that email deliverability should play in your success-oriented cold emailing campaign, you may want to learn about some strategic steps to take to improve your deliverability rates.

Avoid email marketing software

Some people mistake email marketing software for a cold emailing one. The two differ tremendously, although it may not be that obvious from the start. Once you start using email marketing software and get reported multiple times, chances are that the service in use will block you.

At the same time, when you start using software designed for cold emailing that prioritizes replies over clicks and has numerous additional features to benefit from, you may not need to worry about such a potentially harmful outcome.

Use a dedicated domain

Various aspects can affect your domain reputation. However, once the domain gets blacklisted, the outcome is always the same. Among the lost opportunities, you won’t be able to communicate with potential and existing clients, not to mention the drop in reputation.

Cold email campaigns may add up to disruption of the domain’s reputation if composed and delivered poorly. So, to avoid the worst outcome, cold email experts suggest that you create an additional domain on the base of your primary one.

The extra domain will be used exclusively for the purpose of cold emailing. Even if it gets blocked, your primary domain’s rep won’t suffer the consequences.

Work on your sending times

There is a known saying that consistency is the key to success. While that can be applied to many fields and areas – cold emailing seems not to fit the description well. The thing is, if you are sending 100 emails every day at 9 am sharp – the activity will be flagged as suspicious.

The best way to avoid spam flags is to send different portions of emails at different times of the day. While the task may look a bit effort-consuming, it will pay off in the long run. Besides, there are tons of services that will do that automatically for you – all it takes is to tune up the settings.

Work on the sender score

There is a fair share of analytical data to pay increased attention to when you are working on perfect email deliverability for your cold emailing campaigns. The sender score is one of the metrics that can define your email reputation.

In the majority of cases, the following parameters are evaluated:

• If your emails are flagged as spam
• How many recipients engage with your emails
• Whether your email address is added to any known blacklists

After you get such a report, you will be able to determine which direction to push to improve the score. Let’s say the engagement rates are low. In case you don’t know, the recipients’ engagement indicates how many people click and open your emails, add them to contact lists, and so on.

If the mentioned rates are low, you can alter the way to reach out to the users. Enhancing the content is a primary step to take, but there are no limits, per se.

Check and minimise the bounce rate

Bounces define a failed attempt to deliver an email. There are a few main reasons why an email can be bounced:

• Overloaded inbox
• Server’s down
• Email is too big
• Outdated and inactive contact list
• Purchased email list

While the first three reasons aren’t as deadly, the latter three can ruin your reputation.

So, any email that is not delivered will affect the number of bounces – the more bounces you get, the more your reputation will suffer. It is a wise approach to monitor the bounce statistics on a regular basis.

If you spot any issues with the bounce rate, you can try to improve it immediately by reviewing if the contact list you are sending out to is up-to-date.

Try to personalize each email

Since it is cold emailing we are talking about, many companies make the same mistake of creating a single template and sending it to each and every user on the list.

You should remember the simple fact that personalized emails sell better. While it may seem a bit effort and time-consuming to perfect every email, the conversion results will pleasantly surprise you.

The truth is that people feel drawn to messages that seem personal. You can work on just the first line of the message and watch the rates spike. It takes a user’s name mentioned to trigger interest. Also, you can include some information about yourself as a defined member of the company.

A first-name basis will be a little inappropriate when it comes to cold emails, but a friendly tone is precisely what you need.

Polish your CTAs

Generic marketing CTAs are bound to fail. You should better remember that once and for all. These days, people feel annoyed by the sales-y call-to-action parts and may react to the message quite negatively and mark it as spam or report it.

Thus, you need to spend some time working on CTAs that actually inspire the reader to take another step toward fruitful cooperation with you.

Inspect the prospect list

While countless factors can negatively affect your email deliverability rates, the prospect list is often the aspect that is left out. The truth is that many brands try to get ahead of the competition, and they choose to purchase email lists from untrustworthy third-party vendors.

As a result, their efforts reach out to a client base that is not initially interested in the offered services. Even if you compile your prospect lists on your own, you need to ensure that the recipient will be potentially curious about the industry you represent.

Another popular scenario is sending cold emails to ‘dead’ emails. There are countless inactive emails that you may be reaching out to. The sold-out prospect lists contain vast numbers of such addresses, by the way.

To avoid unfavourable outcomes, it is advised to inspect your prospect lists regularly. The task is anything but impossible since there are specific tools designed to filter out inactive addresses from your list.

Test your messages

Once you personalize your emails, you may feel like you can call it a day and wait for the result. While that is a strategy that some brands use, you may want to make a little extra effort to improve your score.

The fact is that if you keep sending the same template for too long, spam filters will get alerted eventually. Thus, industry professionals suggest that you keep testing your copies regularly. You can experiment with subject lines, bodies, CTAs, and visual aid.

Such an approach will bring in more prospects and help you detect ineffective parts of your content.

Don’t forget the Unsubscribe link

Very often, brands and companies skip on the Unsubscribe link added to their cold emails. While that may seem like an insignificant alteration added to the email, it can help you escape the unfavourable spam reports.

When a user doesn’t want to receive further emails from you because they are out of their interest field, they should be able to unsubscribe from you. If you don’t offer the opportunity, the only other way to do that would be to report you.

Final words

Cold emails are a great way to expand your horizons and preach to a new audience. However, there is little use of those emails when they get past the Primary inbox.

To ensure that each cold message you send reaches the recipient’s attention, you should work on your deliverability rates. With the secrets disclosed in the article, it won’t take long for you to taste the sweet fruit of success!