Maximizing Cold Email Deliverability in 2024: Essential Strategies and Insights
As we step into 2024, the art of sending cold emails has become increasingly sophisticated. With about 80% of consumers favoring email as their primary channel for business communication, the importance of optimizing cold email deliverability can't be overstated. Gone are the days when generic templates could cut it. Today, a successful cold email strategy hinges on personalization, creativity, and strategic thinking.
The Email Deliverability Challenge
Email deliverability is facing some serious new challenges in 2024. Mainly, enhanced predictive models and spam filters. Users now expect a more refined email experience, leading to a need for email marketers to deeply understand user preferences. Platforms like Slack and Teams have shifted communication norms, but email remains vital due to its protocol nature. The sophistication of spam filters means marketers must now work harder to avoid the dreaded spam folder.
Strategies for Email Deliverability
- IP Warm-Up: Gradually increasing email volume helps establish a reputable sender profile. You can use companies like Instantly.ai or Smartlead.ai to warm up email inboxes before you send. We recommend at least 14 days of warm-up at the default daily volume before you start sending cold emails.
- Authentication Protocols: Implementing SPF, DKIM, and DMARC is critical for sender legitimacy. These will be practically non-negotiable in 2024 & they'll act as a differentiator from other spammers.
- Avoid Purchased Lists: Using third-party email lists often leads to high spam rates and poor engagement. Tools like Openbase by Response AI triple-verify B2B leads & have enough in the pool for everyone. This is a much better approach than buying a list from Fiverr or Upwork.
- Maintain Email List Hygiene: Regularly clean your email list with tools like BulkEmailChecker & MillionVerifier so that you don't get high bounce rates. High bounce rates flag your account for spam & bad list hygiene, which is fatal to deliverability.
The recent block of GMass and similar services by Google underscores the evolving landscape of email marketing. This change has significant implications for cold email strategies, forcing marketers to find new methods for warming up their email accounts and ensuring deliverability. Gmail are doing the same in 2024 with their new changes that reduces the scale you can achieve with spammy cold emails.
Exploring Alternative Email Deliverability Methods
With the changing dynamics, marketers must look beyond traditional practices. This includes focusing on email content and engagement, rather than just the technical aspects of email delivery. Engaging content that resonates with the recipient is more likely to be opened and responded to, thereby improving deliverability metrics. This is where cold email personalization comes in as a 'best-friend' of deliverability: the more personalized your cold email is, the better it will deliver. Using spintax & cleaning your list will be 100% crucial in 2024 for cold email deliverability that lasts.
The Role of Personalization at Scale
Personalization is key in 2024's cold email strategies. Every single person who runs a 1-client agency & their dog KNOWS how to send cold emails at scale. So if you're using the same templates as everyone else (and skipping personalization) you have a net-zero advantage over any other company.
However, it's crucial to balance personalization with scalability. Over-personalization or "fake" personalization can be detrimental, leading to a decrease in the perceived value of your emails. Authenticity and relevance should guide the personalization strategy. What we mean by this is: calling someone by First Name, Last Name, Role, Company & Location inside a Cold Email is NOT true personalization. It's just meaningless spam.
True Personalization is understanding recent news about the prospect, mentioning a blog post their company wrote that caught your attention, recent funding rounds & more. More on Cold Email Personalization here.
Cold Email Spintax explained in detail
Spintax is a neat trick to automatically replace words in your emails, like using different greetings. CETs like Instantly.ai will help you do this super easy. Don't get discouraged by new concepts if you haven't heard of Spintax. It takes like 3 seconds to set it up.
Here's how spintax works like magic...
"{{ What's up | Hi | Hello }} John,
Hope you had a good time at the networking event."
Notice the two curly brackets at the start, & the walls in between the words? Basically, if you send the above email to 30 people, 10 of them will read the first line as:
What's up John...and 10 others will read it as:
Hi John...
and finally, the last 10 will read it as: Hello John....
With spintax, you can send 1 million emails & none of them will ever be the same. Which helps with deliverability (your emails landing in the inbox of your prospects) because Google, Outlook & Yahoo etc. will see that every Cold Email you send is unique.
In other words, the best way to get sent to Spam Jail is to copy-paste the same email template & send it thousands of times.
And remember, you can add 'spintax' (the curly brackets + walls) to ANY sentence to mix them up & make them unique:
‘{{ What's up | Hi | Hello }} John,
Hope you had a {{good | great | awesome}} time at the networking {{event | meet-up | summit}}.
{{See you soon | Speak to you soon | Take care}}
Olly"
The above email now has 81 mathematical possibilities. That's how Response AI's team made $500K+ sending cold mails without going to spam, even when we were sending 1,000s per day.
Truly Perfect Cold Email Deliverability
Limiting Cold Email Volume Per Address:
It's crucial to maintain a human-like sending behavior. Limiting your cold emails to a maximum of 20 per day, sending address is key. when using tools like Instantly or Smartlead. People make this mistake all the time: they think they can squeeze hundreds of emails per day out of each inbox.
Then, they complain they're going to spam! Wonder why? The number 20 is derived from extensive testing we've done at Response AI and ensures a balance between reach and risk. The goal is to foster engagement – emails that are opened, replied to, and lead to revenue. Anything else is noise. Do NOT burn your inboxes by sending hundreds per day.
Diversifying Cold Email Domains:
A common mistake is to use multiple sending addresses on a single domain. This approach increases the risk of being marked as spam and can lead to a domino effect where all addresses under the domain are flagged. To mitigate this, it's advisable to set up one sending address per domain, thereby reducing the risk of spam contamination and maintaining your deliverability.
Example: you have a domain, which is example.com.
You could technically set up five inboxes on this domain, like:
john@example.com
johnny@example.com, etc.
The concern here is this: if example.com gets flagged for spam by Gmail or Outlook, you're out of luck. Because both of those inboxes, john & johnny, will suffer.
Instead, we recommend setting up 2 domains instead of 1.
Example 2: you now have 2 domains, which are example.com & getexample.com. And you have john@example.com & john@getexample.com.
Now, if one of the domains gets flagged, you're safe to use the other one!
What to do now
As we navigate the complexities of email marketing in 2024, it's clear that the game has changed. Deliverability now hinges on a deep understanding of the technical setup behind cold email campaigns. We need to craft messages that actually resonate with the prospect, or else a spam flag is likely. And with the new spam rules coming into play on behalf of Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook & more: spam flags will be detrimental to domain health. No more second chances.
If you want to guarantee cold email replies & meetings & revenue...just sign up to Response AI. We help you scale your campaigns to the high heavens , aiming for 20-30 meetings per month by leveraging AI Video, AI icebreakers & AI automation. Head over to Response AI to get started.