Mastering Cold Email & Follow-Up Email Deliverability in 2023

Sending cold emails is easy, but only if they’re not getting sent to the spam folder or blocked by your recipient’s filters. If you want to start seeing results from your email marketing efforts, you need to master email deliverability.

Sending cold emails that aren’t blocked or filtered can be challenging for businesses of all sizes. That’s why it’s important to get in the habit of paying attention to the best practices and tactics to improve the chances of your emails getting delivered to your prospect’s inbox.

Keep reading to see how to improve email deliverability.

What Is Email Deliverability?

For cold email marketing to be successful, you need to know how to best deliver your messages. The process of deliverability has a significant effect on the success of your cold email campaigns.

Email deliverability is the ability of your emails to be received by the intended recipients. In order for a message to be received, it must get delivered to the inbox and not the spam folder.

There are a variety of factors that can affect your email deliverability, such as how you built your email list, your email software, and the size of your email list. Some of the factors you can control, while others you can’t.

Having an overall deliverability of at least 95 percent is critical to email success. Anything below that threshold is not good. So, keep reading to learn how to improve email deliverability to make sure your emails land in your prospects’ primary inbox, where they’ll read them and reply back.

Factors Determining Email Deliverability: Best Practices

There are a number of factors that determine your email’s deliverability, but these are the most important ones. If you get this wrong, you’ll see your email deliverability rate drop.

1. Begin Sending at a Low Volume

If you just purchased a brand new domain and begin sending hundreds of emails instantly, you’ll get flagged as a spammer and the email address will be useless. This is because the email send volume is the main reason for low email deliverability, and it’s usually overlooked.

To begin warming up your email address, you should send fewer emails at first and then gradually increase them.

If you want to send lots of cold emails, you may want to consider using various email accounts. Just be sure each email address you send from is properly warmed up. Even if your account has been warmed up, you still have to be attentive of your sending amounts and limits.

2. Refrain From Using Email Marketing Software and Use Cold Email Marketing Software Instead

Personal outreach software like Mailchimp is not created for cold email marketing. While Mailchimp does not explicitly encourage personal outreach, uploading prospects who have not opted in to your list is against their terms of service.

If you are sending cold outreach campaigns and get reported, your emails will be classified as spam and you will quickly get banned from using Mailchimp. The same applies to other email marketing software companies such as ConvertKit, GetResponse and Aweber.

Instead, opt for a platform that is exclusively created for cold email marketing. Cold email marketing platforms have different features that emphasize communication, such as replies over clicks and a plain text editor instead of an HTML one. These platforms also cater to you being able to email prospects without them having to opt onto your list.

3. Have Informative Email Content

Email content affects your email deliverability rate.

Are your recipients interacting with your emails? Are they clicking your links? Are the people on your list replying to you?

All of these factors affect how ESPs view your email activity, which is why it’s so important to send cold emails that are genuinely informative, useful, and geared towards building relationships. To improve your cold email deliverability, ensure your emails are high in quality.

4. Get a Cold Email Domain

Whether your email is good or bad, there’s always going to be the possibility of your domain being blacklisted. Your domain will lose all of its value if this happens. You won’t be able to communicate with prospects or current clients.

What does this mean exactly? You must function your domain with the same email account you use for your outreach. For example, if your domain name is facebook.com, you don’t want to send cold emails from that particular domain.

Instead, you should use a different domain and email address for your outreach. For example, use facebook.io, facebook.org, or even a variation of your domain name like tryfacebook.com instead of facebook.com.

If your email is deemed as spam by ESPs, your main domain will not get affected if you’re not using your main domain. You can also use a regular Gmail email for your cold email campaigns.

5. Make Your Email Personal

Make sure to personalize every single email in your campaign. By doing this, you’ll send natural emails that show ESPs that you’re using your email in a human way instead of just sending a high volume of emails. Personalize the first line of every email you send, and include people’s names, company names, and other relevant information.

When you create your cold emails, simply add your merge tags and the personalized fields will display. This will ensure your emails get maximum engagement and deliverability, as no one will reply to an email that you’ve sent to hundreds of people.

6. Be Sure to Clean Your Prospect Email List

Sending too many emails to non-existent addresses that bounce or to people that do not respond is one of the main reasons for poor deliverability over time. When you do not send emails to non-existing emails, your long-term deliverability will be high.

Make sure your prospect list is longer and more sophisticated. Every person you send a cold email to should have interest in what you have to say, or at least have a good chance of being interested. This will increase the quality of your sales prospecting process, and will also result in higher-quality campaigns.

The best way to achieve interest from your prospects is to purchase an email list that’s targeted depending on the prospect’s demographics, zip code, profession, age, etc.

Also, make sure your outreach is never contacting out-of-date email addresses. Do not contact someone unless you can verify their email address.

There is software that can validate your email list. Validating your email list is just a fancy way of saying cleaning your email list.

Are You Ready to Start Your Cold Email Marketing Campaign?

Now that you know how to effectively get your cold emails delivered to your targeted prospect’s inbox, it’s time to buy a list of email addresses. Put your email deliverability knowledge into practice by getting an email list from a reliable, reputable company.

An email list can be very inexpensive and easy to acquire. Before purchasing an email list, check to see if the list is validated and highly targeted in order to draw in the prospect of your interest.

Contact us for a validated email list that is highly targeted to your specific market. Get as many emails as you desire from our database that has over 157 million opted-in emails.