Tips for cold email deliverability

Setting up your email infrastructure for cold outreach can be a challenge.

Email providers do not like cold outreach and will block your accounts if they detect you’re doing (too much of) it.

Below are a few tips / checklist for setting up cold email outreach.

Be considerate and don’t overdo it

• Nobody likes spam. Reach out with purpose and add value to your audience
• Warm outreach is always better than cold outreach. Leverage your marketing leads and intelligence such as intent data to reach out to people for whom your message is most likely relevant

Setup your domain properly

• Set up separate domains for cold outreach, so if providers block them you won’t block your business’ main email setup
• Use aged domains (better if 30+ days)
• Use full-priced domains. Gsuite basic if you send mostly to Google addresses, Microsoft Basic if you send mostly to MS addresses
• Use good spelling. If your main domain is company.com, use domains like trycompany.com or send.company.com, but NOT tryc0mp4ny.com
• Heavily correlate domains to your content, so usually to your primary domain. If you mention “company.com” in your email, use testcompany.com but not mysalesdomain.com
• Use subdomains (send.company.com) for marketing emails, but do NOT use them for cold sales emails. Bad reputation on a subdomain will affect your main domain’s reputation
• Use proper authentication. Set up SPF, DMARC, and DKIM for every domain you use. Not having one of these is like showing up at the border without your passport

Warmup your domain before using

• Use manual warmup: target your best audiences trying to keep a 90% reply rate
• Use artificial warmup: leverage tools providing private pools of receivers whose inbox is automated to mark your emails as non-spam (warmupinbox.com, smartlead.ai, instantly, etc)
• Minimum warmup should be 2-4 weeks
• Ramp up by 3 emails a day with 60% reply rate up to 40 emails a day
• Warm up completely fresh accounts before starting outreach emails
• Warmup for 2 weeks
• Total max emails per day: 40
• Daily Rampup: 3-5
• Randomise number of emails: 25 - 40
• Reply Rate: 45%
• Warm up accounts coming from other warmup tools
• For first 1.5 weeks
• Total max emails per day: 15
• Daily Rampup: 2-3
• Randomise number of emails: 5 - 15
• Reply Rate: 30%
• Afterwards
• Total max emails per day: 40
• Daily Rampup: 4
• Randomise number of emails: 30 - 40
• Reply Rate: 40%
• Once initial warm up is completed and you start using an account for an active campaign, keep warm up active
• Email account setting
• Messages per day: 40 (preferred) - 60
• Custom domain tracking: <your custom domain> (verify your CNAME)
• Warmup settings:
• Randomise: 25-30
• Reply rate: 45%

Stay within daily sending limits

• 1 Domain - 2 Email accounts
• The number of daily emails you use for warmup COUNTS against your suggested daily sending limit (see below)
• Goal is to keep TOTAL warm up + active campaign emails set to 50 - 70 per day and aim for a 1:1 - 1:0.7 ratio between cold emails and warmups
• For example, each of the 2 email accounts should set a limit of 25-30 outreach emails with 20 emails as warmup at 90% reply rate
• No sudden increase in volumes, increase slowly

Use good email copy

• Direct links only, no redirects
• No links to Google Drive or similar
• Info-rich signature but not heavy
• Avoid spam keywords like $$$, ALL CAPS, “Click here”, etc

Follow these domain recovery guidelines

• Have multiple domains ready and warmed up
• If you can, don’t use all your domains for outreach, leave some in warm up
• If deliverability drops on one domain (i.e. account is marked as spam), rotate out the damaged domain and send it to warm up for a few weeks, or ideally months
• If you have a domain ready and warmed up, not actively used for campaigns, rotate it in
• Scale up slowly on the new domain (25 add’l sends per day)
• Cleanup leads/sequences to avoid reaching out to people who most likely flagged you as spam and would do it again