The Cold Email Deliverability Checklist
Table of contents
Introduction
When cold emailing, there are hundreds of different data points that Google, Outlook, and other email service providers use to determine if an email should end up in spam.
We’ll be covering everything you need to know to ensure your emails are delivered to the primary inbox and not the spam folder.
Crafting The Perfect Email Copy
Email copy is one of the most overlooked aspects of deliverability. This determines how likely the receiver is to report the email to spam, respond, and even open the email.
Here’s how you craft a great cold email.
Keep it short
It’s tempting to write out your entire pitch to customers but do your best to avoid this. If you can’t fit your email into 4 compact sentences, you’re doing something wrong.
End with a Call to Action
If you have no CTA at the end of your email, the odds you receive a response drop by about 60%. Why would anyone respond to a statement from someone they don’t know? They wouldn’t. So, be sure you’re leaving the email with a question that they can respond to.
Minimize HTML
Emails with rows and rows of HTML are generally used for marketing and promotional purposes. So, before setting a cold email campaign live, ensure your email signature is simple and doesn’t contain a lot of HTML.
An email signature with an awesome design can actually hurt your campaign because email service providers may incorrectly interpret the email as a promotional email.
Great Email Copy = No (Less) Spam
Great email copy is the first step to staying out of the spam folder. By receiving more replies, fewer spam reports, and better user engagement overall, you’re sending signals that your email is being well received and therefore should not go to spam.
Follow Ups
Follow ups are an amazing way to send a gentle reminder to your prospects, but it should really end there, as a gentle reminder. As soon as you send one too many email reminders, your emails are spam and will likely be treated as such.
Contrary to what you’ll read online from “experts”, never send more than 3 total emails in an outbound email campaign. Yes, sending 7 follow ups will yield a higher response rate but it will reduce the overall health of your campaign and risk you landing in the spam folder, killing your campaign entirely. In cold email, it’s better to think about longevity than to think about what yields the best response rate.
List Building
The audience you contact has more to do with the results of your email campaign than almost anything else we’ve discussed in this article. This is why list building is so important. Even with the best email copy in the world, a bad list will yield little or no results.
Building a great list takes time, expertise, and a proven strategy. LeadLoft provides this to every single customer, feel free to contact a growth expert if you’re interested in learning more.
Technical Deliverability
The deliverability of emails relies on a ton of different aspects, but the technical aspects are the bare bones of what is expected. With no technical deliverability checks, your entire campaign can be wasted.
Technical deliverability focuses on one thing, ensuring emails can’t be sent from your domain without your explicit permission. You may have heard people refer to this as email spoofing.
SPF
SPF, or Sender Policy Framework, is a security feature that email services use to authenticate a domain to verify that the email actually came from the owners of the domain. This ensures the email can be trusted and it also protects your domain reputation by blocking most spoof emails.
To ensure this is set up correctly, you can test your domain for the proper records.
How to setup SPF TXT records:
Setup SPF for Outlook/ Office 365
DKIM
DKIM stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail and much like SPF, it’s a way to authenticate emails.
DKIM is made up of two parts, a public and private key. Every time you send an email the receiver's email service provider will attempt to decrypt the signature and further authenticate the email and reduce spoofing.
It’s possible your web admin has already setup DKIM, so we recommend testing your domain for DKIM before trying to set it up.
If you’d like to set up DKIM, here are tutorials for the most popular email service providers:
Setup DKIM for Outlook/ Office 365
Wrapping Up
Cold emailing is something that takes years of experience and testing to run correctly. If you’re reading this and getting overwhelmed, we recommend hiring an expert. Here at LeadLoft, we actually set up everything for you and ensure that all the technical checks and best practices are implemented correctly across the board.
If you’d like some help, feel free to get in touch with our team.
