Email deliverability in your Cold Outreach [New Findings]

Cold Email deliverability is not a new topic in the sales automation department. And that is simply because the cold outreach’s ground base significantly influences its success.

To cover the basics, email deliverability is crucial in cold outreach because it determines whether or not your emails actually reach your intended recipients’ inboxes. If your emails are not delivered, your outreach efforts are wasted. Poor deliverability can result in your emails being sent to spam folders or not being delivered at all. And all that means… your outreach sequences won’t see the light of day.

Email Deliverability Developments

Email deliverability is not only important for the initial outreach, but for the appointment scheduling and negotiation stage of the sales process as well. And we all know that email providers tend to “follow trends”, and change algorithms, spam filters, and triggers all of the time, to keep up with the developments within email communication. In most cases, they are also the ones that will set the “trends” and implement general rules that users should follow to maintain a good and professional level of email communication.

Just to give a brief example, a decade ago, adding emojis to your subject line would immediately trigger some filter at your email provider, as emojis were not standardized at that time and caused a lot of issues for different browsers, email providers, text readers, etc.

And, we usually don’t expect an email without an emoji in the subject line, especially for marketing.

For business communication and sales, it is a bit different, but other examples showcase how the rules and trends of email providers dictate email deliverability.

In the past, a sales email consisted of an introduction and a sales pitch, directly presenting to the recipient a piece of information. We’ve seen emails with bullet points, links to product pages, large PDF attachments with prices and offerings and even giving the offer directly in the body of the email, mentioning prices, some FOMO, etc.

Now, you would need to give up on any sort of attachments, landing pages, or links if you want your cold email to pass the spam gates. Even some sort of words can now trigger the spam filters, so you would need to pay attention to your pitch strategy and avoid direct sales phrases in your first email (let’s also not forget that not only email providers but also GRPR are regulating the cold outreach these days).

These are only a couple of factors that contribute to the cold email deliverability rates of your outreach and email communication in general, so we need to dive into what can be done to maintain good deliverability for sustainable outreach.

What causes emails to go to spam?

Our latest insights show that there are way more factors to consider when it comes to the question of what causes emails to go to spam. If you google the question, the first thing popping up is spam trigger words, next to no unsubscribe link, no email authentication, inaccurate sender information, recipients marking you as a spammer… and so on.

However, these are factors that have been contributing in the past years to email deliverability and are most probably well-known for teams that are doing cold outreach.

If you are not familiar with them, here is a short walkthrough of what you need to do before you start your outreach.

Besides all of the known factors, we have a couple of discoveries that might help you maintain a good email-sending reputation.

1. Special signs in email subject lines

Similar to the emoji craze, we’ve seen a trend of incorporating different signs in subject lines to catch the attention of the recipient. Although it might not be the main factor, and it’s still an unproven theory, adding too many unrecognized special characters and signs to your email subject line might be the cause for your emails to land in spam.

The reason behind this is that email providers encourage natural, human email communication and aren’t very keen on bots and automated mass emailing. So, adding additional signs that are not used for the usual written communication might not be the best way to go.

We’ve tested a couple of outreach campaigns in a span of 6 months, where we’ve included signs like a plus + or <> in the subject lines, targeting the same segment of the audience. The results have shown that the same email content used for a campaign now and 6 months ago doesn’t perform the same in terms of open rates, which indicates that either their inbox is already oversaturated, or that the emails are landing up in their spam folder.

2. Total links and images in your email body

Having too many links in your emails is never a good idea. And this is a known rule for quite some time now. However, we were always looking into the body of the email and know many links we’ve incorporated there, but always neglected additional links we always include for example in our signatures, images, and the unsubscribe links.

According to the regulations, the latter is a must, so we can’t cut on the unsubscribe link just to make sure we have fewer links in your cold emails.

Email signatures and additional personalization elements, on the other hand, should be examined closely for any external links that are included and optimized to not be heavy on the email reputation.

For example, it is a good practice to display your images for your signature with a URL, instead of uploading a large size image to the server of the email provider, however, this URL needs to be from a trusted source and domain.

The same goes for images you incorporate in your email body. If you want to showcase your product or service with an image, don’t just take a snapped screenshot and paste it into your email. This will significantly influence the deliverability of the email because a large file will be detected by the email spam filters and your email will be sent straight to the spam folder. Instead, insert your image with a URL or compress the image and optimize it to not exceed 200KB, which was the preferred browser loading size for years.

3. Not using CNAMEs for cold outreach

Speaking of links, there is more to them, than meets the eye. Email providers are all about reputation, and lately, we’ve seen a pattern of behavior that indicates that you need to keep up with your brand reputation.

What does this mean? We’ve mentioned that email providers are not keen on email automation and try to do anything to prevent emails from being automatically sent in bulk. So now email providers can tell if you are sending your emails automated just by the included links you have in your email body.

Any good email automation service should provide the option for you to include an unsubscribe link, that will be connected to the email campaigns you are sending. Also, every outreach tool would like to keep you informed on the performance of your email campaigns with tracking of opens, clicks, and replies to your emails.

To do this, email automation tools use links from their domains to be able to track back the performance, and these links are added to your email content. The downside of this is that there are now at least 2 different domains connected to your email sending address, one is your domain, where the email is hosted, and the other one is the domain of the email automation tool for the tracking.

And of course, email providers recognize there is another domain involved in your emails that can’t immediately be recognized as a trusted source and can be a cause for marking your email as spam.

To avoid this, the best solution is for you to add a CNAME to your domain that will point to the domain of your campaign tool. This way it’ll look like you are adding links from your domain premises, but still be able to use automated outreach, and make it into the inbox.

source: Cloudflare

We’ve seen that this has significantly impacted cold email deliverability as of late, so this is why you now have the option to add a CNAME to your Sales.Rocks campaigns.

To wrap up email deliverability trends

To ensure high deliverability rates, it is important to follow the basic rules and best practices such as using a reputable email service provider, regularly cleaning your email list, personalizing your emails, avoiding spam trigger words, and monitoring your sender’s reputation,

However, following the latest trends is also important to keep up with solid email deliverability for cold outreach. Among other new factors, we’ve seen an impact from using special signs in email subject lines, which can cause emails to be marked as spam. Another spotted factor is the number of links and images in the email body, as having too many can also trigger spam filters. Finally, one of the most significant factors for cold email outreach is not using CNAMEs for cold outreach, which can negatively impact brand reputation and automated email sending.