Harsh title? Prospecting is harsh, get over it! 😀

It’s a jungle out there!

You get rejected, refused, ignored and maybe even insulted.

I can’t change that (maybe the messaging) but I can help you make sure you land in your prospect's inbox.

So let’s focus this edition on deliverability, AKA the silent killer of your cold outreach.

If you struggle to get a reply rate above 5%, this edition is for you.

In this week’s edition, we’ll cover:

1. 4 settings you must implement properly before anything.

2. What drives email deliverability, a breakdown.

3. Some best practice for landing in the inbox.

4. Tips to perform

Relevant tools:

Taplio: Your prospect will check your LinkedIn. Building your personal brand on LinkedIn with better content, scheduling your posts at the right time, building new relationships and monitoring all your results could boost your credibility. Give Taplio a try with a free 7-day trial.

Lavender: writing cold emails sucks. It’s a nifty Chrome extension that coaches you to do better! It gives you tips on what needs to change to hit the coveted Lavender score of 100 (the perfect outreach email).

Waalaxy: the outreach tool I use. My primary outreach is done through LinkedIn yet I want to add email touchpoints as well. This does the trick (20% off by using this link). Other similar tools are Smartlead, Reply and Lemlist.

Note: some are affiliate links and provide a commission to me. The price stays the same or offers a discount (never more). I’ve used them before personally (some I still do like Taplio, Waalaxy and Lavender).

Now back to our main topic!

4 Settings You Must Implement

Before pressing the “Send” button, it’s important to set up your domain… don’t skip this. 🛑

The consequence is you could “burn” your domain name. You don’t want that.

Imagine you’re company’s domain name stopped working. No more emails. Your website stops working… etc…

Pain!

Below we’ll explore these different elements and how to make sure you’ve tweaked them properly:

1. DKIM

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) verifies who’s sending the email and guarantees that your emails are not changed after they’re sent.

This is probably the most important. Why?

Because if you don’t have it, emails will most likely go straight to spam because servers will view your domain as unprotected.

2. SPF

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) guarantees that your emails are sent from your domain.

Bit of an old way of doing things that are related to security. You still need to check it and turn it on.

3. DMARC

Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) is a reporting mechanism that checks how deliverability is going.

It prevents your email from being forged by someone else.

If it’s not turned on, servers will view it as you not taking things seriously and being too loose with your settings.

4. MX Record

Mail Exchanger Record (MX Record) lets email providers know what servers accept your domain’s emails.

Or which server can send an email for you, and where incoming emails should be routed to.

The above four elements allow for verifying the authenticity of each email sent. The more you’re set up, the better another server will trust you, enhancing your deliverability.

Bonus. CTD

Setting up your Custom Tracking Domain (CTD) allows you to:

• Track your campaigns' click rate. without a CTD, you won't get any click rate stats. 🤷

• Boost your deliverability since using a custom domain, and not a "shared domain", will protect your domain reputation.

You can only improve what you measure 📈

Every prospecting platform will have instructions on how to input your CTD.

What Drives Email Deliverability

Here’s how to think about email deliverability.

Let’s use a car analogy.

The above elements I described (DMARC, DKIM, SPF and MX) are the engine. You need them to move. But once you’re moving, an email strategy is your GPS. Without it, you could be driving in completely the wrong direction.

You need both, working in tandem, to reach the coveted primary inbox (and get replies, of course).

With that in mind here are some email strategies and best practices.

My Personal Best Practice

1. Primary domain. Don’t use your company’s primary domain for outbound. In case something goes wrong the last thing you want is for your entire domain to suffer. Remember the CTD mentioned above!

2. Low volume. Only send 50 to 75 emails per day per user per domain. A portion of those being the “warm up” emails. Open up multiple domains or have multiple emails per person if you need to send more volume.

3. Plain Text and Disable Tracking. Yeah, I know, how can you track opens or clicks then? You can’t but reply rates will increase substantially. Plain text is always best, with no images and no signature area (should be minimal and part of the body of the email)

4. Add “PS. remove me”. Remove the unsubscribe link and make people reply to be taken out of the sequence. Cheeky, I know. I like using this from email #2 onwards. Don’t underestimate the power of using PS for other things too.

5. Email verification. Use an email verification tool like Bouncer to validate all emails before sending. You want the least possible amount of bounces.

6. 3 week warmup. Run a 3-week email warm (50 emails per day) before you start outbound with a new domain. Use tools like MailToaster (Reply.io give you 5 free seats with a Pro plan)

7. 4 to 5 emails in your cadence. You don’t need more than that in my opinion.

My Biggest Tip

I suggest you reduce your number of emails per cadence to around 4.

Two pain points, two threads, two emails per thread (main email + reply).

Add some LinkedIn touches in the mix as well but stick to 4.

The more touchpoints per cadence the more likely you are to send more than 50 emails per day and get marked as SPAM by the prospect (domain killer).If you fear doing that simply check your stats. Am I wrong to think that your reply rates drop significantly after email 4 anyways (open rates don’t matter)?

Seen on LinkedIn

I had to feature this great tip from Ryan. He specialises in Cold Outreach and this one hit the mark for me. Such a classic.

I’m making this edition slightly shorter as I touched upon all aspects of Prospecting in prior publications which you can explore here.

Hope this was useful, do let me know in the comments if you have more tips you’d like to share!

Wish you a great week ahead.

See you in 2 weeks

Cedric