The effectiveness of every email outreach campaign comes down to 3 things, in reverse order, effective copy, effective targeting and deliverability. No matter how great your copy or how specific you target your ideal clients, without getting your messages in their inboxes, you won’t have a chance to meet your growth goals.
So what can you do to maximize your deliverability? Today, I’m going to discuss several things we focus on when building a new campaign for our clients or ourselves, internally.
Technical Set-up
The first step is to set up authentication measures like DKIM, DMARC, and SPF.
These settings signal that you are trusted sender that you have the authority to send on the domain and server that you’re using and will result in your messages being delivered to the inbox more often.
Warming Up New Email Addresses
Next, you have to go through the warm-up process with any new email addresses or new email servers that you’re using to make sure that the recipients will not see suspicious activity and will know that the email is being used properly.
A good example of how to do this would be to get a shortlist of people that you know and will respond, send messages, have conversations for a period of a couple of weeks. And also go sign up for newsletters or anything that would require you to do a verification process. This indicates that you are a real person using this email address.
List Accuracy
Critically to any email outreach campaign, you have to focus on building a very specific and accurate list. Your data is very important for deliverability and sending to email addresses that are not in use, that will lead to bounces will be the biggest negative impact on your delivery rates.
Make sure that you are really targeted and specific when building your list and then use a verification service to make sure that the email addresses are valid and currently in use.
SPAM-free Copy
Once you have a clean list, you have to make sure your copy is written in such a way that it will not be picked up by spam filters. Certain words related to “Discounts”, “Cheap Prices”, “Guarantees”, “Legal Issues” will be immediately flagged by spam filters on almost any email platform and it would end up with your message directly in the inbox.
You want to run your messages through spam checkers and just use general principles of trying to start a conversation not make the close through email outreach campaign and you should be good.
Monitor Engagement Metrics
Finally, once your campaign is launched and running, you want to keep a close eye on engagement metrics. Obviously, tracking things like responses and bounces and clickthroughs but also you could use tools like Glock Apps to track and see if you’re being delivered to the inbox or spam folder. if you’re getting a lot of bounces, check your list quality.
If you’re ending up in the spam folder a lot, make sure that it’s not a copy issue or that you have something in your signature such as additional unnecessary links or large image files which could be causing you to end up in the spam folder.
Keep a close eye on these 6 issues and your next email outreach campaign will be a success.
