Best Practices for Email Deliverability in 2023

Good email deliverability is the keystone of your outbound email campaigns.

Every email that misses an inbox and lands in the spam folder is one less click, one less potential customer, one less sale. If you want to connect with your target audience and generate revenue from cold email, you need to make sure you are following the best practices to reach prospects inboxes.

What is email deliverability?

Email deliverability measures the percentage of your outbound emails that are reaching your prospects' inboxes.

Poor email deliverability can start a bad cycle of your domain being flagged as spam, lowering your reputation score and raising the likelihood that even more of your emails end up in spam. With enough spam complaints, email service providers will block your email account or domain from sending emails.

We want to make sure we are connecting with our leads, and there are a few best practices we can follow to ensure domain health and world class open rates:

Email and Domain Setup

The foundation of a successful b2b email marketing campaign is a well set up and maintained sending domain.

This relates to the back end authentication of your domain and refers to the SPF, DKIM and DMARC settings. These are a form of authentication and identification, letting email providers it is really you who is sending emails.

Check out our article here for tips on how to best set up your sending records for outbound success.

Email Warmup

Once you have your email accounts configured, you can’t just start sending 60+ emails a day. A brand new G-Suite account that starts sending a high volume of cold emails straight away will look suspicious to ESPs and you risk being flagged as sending mass spam, even if this isn’t the case.

It is crucial to warm up domains and sending accounts. We like to warm up our email addresses for at least two weeks before we start doing cold outreach.

Email warm-up is the process of gradually ramping up your email sending and having a high reply rate, showing email providers that you are a real account and not a bot or spam account.

There are a lot of great resources for warming up email accounts. A free one that is easy to set up is GMass.

What these email warmup tools do is use AI to automatically send “real” emails back and forth from your email account to other accounts in their network. This process slowly but surely builds your reputation as an email sender and helps to guarantee we are hitting inboxes!

We suggest not starting your outreach campaign efforts till email inboxes have been warming up for at least 2 weeks.

Prospecting List Hygiene

Once your email accounts are properly set up and warmed up, we can turn our attention to the fun stuff - actually sending cold emails to potential prospects!

The first step in this process? List building. Who are we actually going to sell to?

While most sales teams will (rightly) focus on building out an ideal customer profile and searching for prospect profiles that are a good match - there are some important technical aspects to consider to ensure good performance.

Maintaining good deliverability is all about sending the relevant message to the right prospect. You only want to be sending emails to valid email addresses. Use an email list validator tool like Webbula to clean your data lists - get rid of any invalid emails and spam traps before enrolling contacts into an email campaign.

Following these tips will help to ensure that your outbound campaigns are hitting prospects inboxes, and help you to supercharge your pipeline.