Deliverability and Spam are complicated topics that are almost impossible to master. But there are some best practices you can use to reduce the amount of spam issues you have and increase your overall deliverability.
So here are some cold email best practices that you can do make sure you are getting the best results possible:
Note: Don’t use your work/business email for cold emailing. Your personal and business emails should only be used to send emails to people who you already have contact with
1. If you’re using a google account for your email account, create a proper SPF record in your domain. Follow the steps here to create your SPF record.
2. If you are using a newly created account. Make sure to “warm up” your email accounts:
First, you can sign up to some newsletters to generate some inbound activity on your newly created accounts. You can find some resources to do that here.
Second, on new accounts you should always warm up your emails by gradually increasing the amount of mail that it sends over a few weeks. For example, start with 100 emails per day limit. You can control this from your email settings by setting the daily limit per email address. Also start with a higher drip rate at 30s. Over time you can increase the daily limit for the email and lower the drip rate to around 20s.
3. If you are using a custom domain for your emails, or your gsuite account is tied to a custom domain (i.e. yourname@yourdomain.com). You should also set up a DKIM record for your domain. You can use this article to generate a DKIM record:
>>>https://support.google.com/a/answer/174126?hl=en
4. If you have been using your email and notice that you are having deliverability issues already. First make sure that your domain is not blacklisted. To check if your custom domain is on a blacklist, you can use this tool:
>>> https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
If you find your domain is listed, you can go to the individual sites to try to get your domain removed. However, it may be easier and faster to just create a new domain and email account.
5. You should monitor your bounce rates in your email settings. You always want to keep your bounce rates at a minimum (ideally below 5%). If your account starts to get to 10% or more you should replace your email account. To ensure your bounce rates stay low, see point
6. Use 3rd party email verification to check for incorrect or dead emails. If you are using Lead Kahuna for your lead generation, you can use the integrated email verification tools to validate your leads. Avoid sending to any email that comes back as invalid.
If you already have a list of leads, you can still run your list through these tools by importing them via CSV file directly on those sites. If you need to sign up for one of these services you can do so here:
NeverBounce
7. If you have tried the above steps, you can also try a service such as https://www.mail-tester.com/ to test your email. Just enter the email address they provide on a new contract in Prospect Rocket and add the contact to a campaign. You will get feedback once they receive the email. This feedback will provide feedback on your setup of not only the above steps, but also your email subject line and content.
If you get high scores on this report, you can send in the information via ticket to us for review. Please make sure to send a link to the report or a screenshot of the results for investigation.