Table of contents
When conducting a prospecting campaign, our biggest challenge, even before optimizing the response rate, is making sure that our prospects receive our emails and messages.
This is what we mean by deliverability, as opposed to the delivery; Delivery rate deals with bounce rates and all, meaning whether the email has even reached your recipient. Deliverability, on the other hand, deals with whether your recipient has seen and/or read your message or not.
Basically, if I manage to increase my deliverability rate, it naturally leads to higher reply rates because more people have seen my message(s)!
Example 🔍
The deliverability rate significantly impacts your business. When this rate is as low as 5% or 10%, or when your open rate is just 60%, it’s far from ideal.
That’s 4 out of 10 emails that go unopened!
When a person sends you an email, the expectation is that you’ll at least open it, even if you don’t respond.
This means deliverability, at least in sales automation, has to be above 80%!
Anything less than 80% means that my email hasn’t been delivered. So let’s talk about optimizing this deliverability!
In this article, we’ll dive into everything related to email deliverability, and overall campaign deliverability;
- Technical elements; to make sure your email arrives properly.
- Sales copywriting; And how to adapt it in order to avoid the dreaded Spam or Promotions folders.
- The messaging accounts used in and of themselves; So as to not get blocked by the email provider from day one!
Not only that, but we’ll also show you how La Growth Machine is the optimal solution to bypass and enhance your campaign deliverability!
The technical elements behind campaign deliverability:
Let’s start with the technical elements. Here’s what we’ll discuss:
- SPF
- DKIM
- DMARC
- Custom Domain
- And one more that isn’t talked about enough: Email (and account) warmup.
1) SPF – DKIM – DMARC:
Let’s begin with the most complicated, or at least what sounds like the most complicated.
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are three ways to authenticate sent emails.
Example 🔍
It’s easier to illustrate with an example:
Currently, anyone can send an email on behalf of [email protected]. I’d even say it’s extremely easy to do so.
That said, on the recipient’s end, they will indeed receive an email from [email protected].
However it will be marked in red because when Gmail (or the recipient’s ESP) checks who the sender is, it will quickly figure out that it is indeed not Emmanuel from Elisee.fr and mark it as spam.
Email is very archaic which makes falsifying emails really simple. So these SPF, DKIM, and DMARC procedures are there to guarantee and validate the ownership of the email you’re sending.
In Simpler Terms 🙌
Think of it this way:
- SPF validates the sender’s IP address.
- DKIM validates the domain and email content integrity.
- DMARC verifies that the sender aligns with the domain authenticated through SPF or DKIM.
The good thing about La Growth Machine is that it allows you to configure SPF and DKIM, here’s how:
On the identities tab, once you connect your email to LGM, you can see the DKIM, SPF, and DMARC that haven’t been checked yet, but you can do so with just a click. and we’ll take care of all the configuration for you.
You’re all set now!
However, if you don’t have a Gmail configuration and are using an SMTP system, we won’t be able to do it automatically for you. So we’ll ask you to configure the elements manually:
You might ask: Is this what makes some emails go directly to the Spam folder?
The short answer is Yes… But not just. 😅 It also has to do with emails being categorized as promotional.
The Promotions tab is also a major enemy.
Spam usually doesn’t make up a significant portion of your emails, at best 5%. But the Promotions tab does. Think of how many emails are left unread over there.
So, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are three different methods for ESPs to validate not only the ownership of the sender’s email but also its category.
2) The Custom Email Domain:
There’s a fourth technical element, let’s talk about Custom Domains.
So, what’s my workaround? I insert a link that directs to a specific domain, let’s call it domain X (not Twitter 🙃), which belongs to me.
How does it work? 🤔
When you (the recipient) click on this link, you won’t be directed to the intended URL (say Google.com). Instead, you’ll be taken to X, a domain that I own where I can register that the link has been clicked, and then I redirect you to the intended destination.
By doing this, I can tell that you’ve clicked on this link.
However, also by doing this, I’ve put a link in my email to mailtracker.com (the X domain), whereas I’m sending a ton of emails from amine@gmail.com.
Google (or any other ESP) easily finds out about this and will take it as a sign that you’re doing mass emailing because you’ve been essentially sending 100 emails in a day with a link that’s not yours.
That’s the equivalent of email marketing and it allows Google to put your in the Promotions tab or Spam folder 😱… Big no-no!
So we’ve proven that you really really shouldn’t track email links with no custom domain!
But what is the custom domain?
The custom domains basically hide the email tracker behind your own domain.
So, what you do is provide specific parameters to configure on your domain, such as naming it ‘T’ for tracking.google.com. The link then directs to T.google.com, which effectively belongs to you, where you can monitor the click activity before redirecting to the intended link.
In essence, instead of using a universal email tracker, each user employs their unique domain in conjunction with the tracker.
Activating the custom domain will enable you to track clicks while keeping a low profile. In other words, it removes this technical component that poses a threat to deliverability.
And how do you do it on LGM?
Never been easier! You simply go to your LGM account’s settings and choose Custom Tracking Domain:
Then:
- Step 1: Specify whether you want this domain for All identities or only one.
- Step 2: Enter your domain URL.
- Step 3: Generate your Custom Domain.
For the in-depth tutorial on how to set it up, check out this article right here!
3) Email Warm-Up:
The last thing we’ll talk about regarding technical elements is the sending frequency.
Example 🔍
Picture this:
If you send zero emails today and 5,000 tomorrow, what happens?
You’re signaling to your ESP that you’re probably sending a promotional or spam campaign.
(Let’s posit that a spam is, in fact, promotional mail that’s gone wrong)
So you’re ostensibly telling Google that you’re only using this email account for promotional campaigns, which will effectively put you in the Promotions tab… No-no!
So rather than going from sending 0 to 5000, what you need to do is go slowly; 20… 40… 60… 80… 100, etc. and gradually build up your account so that sending those 5000 emails will never be a problem in the long run.
You need to get Sender and Receiver servers used to your domain as a substantial communicator, this is called warming up your email account.
And this is where LGM comes in quite handy! You see, we limit the number of emails (and by extension all messages) you send per day to a certain number and regulate the maximum number of sends ourselves:
Now you can always regulate this yourself, but do so at your own risk. 🙄
4) Sales Automation vs. Marketing Automation:
One last point. Understand that when you work on deliverability, you want to ensure that your email is never considered a broadcast or mass email.
How can you ensure that if you’re actually sending in bulk?
Well, there are many ways to do it:
First, don’t send 5,000 emails all at once; instead, warm up your email account, send a few emails. Then, wait. Then, send a few more. Then wait. So on and so forth.
This is the idea behind Sales Automation tools versus Marketing Automation tools. It’s the difference between La Growth Machine and MailChimp.
Example 🔍
With MailChimp, you might have a 35% open rate, but you can send 5,000 emails a day, in one click. With LGM, you’ll have an 80% open rate, but you can only send 300 emails a day.
The second way to do it is when you send promotions or broadcast emails, you often include a lot of images and HTML. When you do Sales Automation, you don’t do that. You don’t include images, you don’t use HTML.
You send emails that look like what you would see if you wrote them yourself, manually. If you look at your email stats, no one sends images in all their emails. You might send a couple in like 5-15% of them at most, never more!
Tools that promise to create personalized images in your email are very dangerous for your deliverability. We, at LGM, have deliberately chosen not to allow adding images because it would harm your deliverability.
There are many other elements related to technical aspects, but we’ll stop at these, which are the most important ones. Let’s move on to the copywriting elements.
Copywriting elements that affect your campaign deliverability:
In copywriting, we’ll focus on two specific points:
- The choice of words in your copywriting
- And the similarity between sent messages.
Let’s dive in!
1- Spam and Promotional Words:
First, let’s tackle the words you choose.
You can probably guess that words like ‘Bomb,’ ‘Pentagon,’ ‘Viagra,’ ‘Poker,’ etc., and similar terms will trigger Gmail’s spam filters. These words raise red flags, and emails containing them are likely to be marked as spam.
To a lesser extent, if you use ‘Promotion,’ ‘20% off,’ ‘Free,’ or ‘Special offer,’ it’s the same. Gmail sniffs them out and detects that it’s promotional content.
Expert Tip 🧠
Remember, the aim of sales automation tools like LGM is to simulate personalized, human-like email communication, not to push promotions. In such emails, we don’t sprinkle in phrases like ‘promo,’ ‘20% off,’ or ‘discount.’
Instead, we foster discussions and genuine conversations.
Now, it’s entirely logical for a human to offer promotions in a newsletter. We’re not saying you’re spamming people. What we’re pointing out is the ESP’s behavior:
Gmail, for instance, segregates emails into different tabs: Primary, Promotions, and Social. These categorizations are automatic based on the content -unless the reader specifies otherwise.
And so as we said, images and HTML-heavy emails usually find themselves in the ‘Promotions’ tab, which is, again, the enemy! ❌
Now, here’s the kicker. Most people, including myself, ignore emails in the ‘Promotions’ tab. You click through them quickly and never look at them again. This is exactly what significantly lowers your email deliverability, dropping you from an 80% success rate to 35-45%.
Disclaimer ⚠️
Everyone loves to talk about the big bad Spam Words, but we never mention or think about Promotional Words. These can do serious harm to your deliverability.
2- Similarity of Sent Messages:
Let’s dive into the second aspect that impacts your deliverability, from a copywriting point of view.
Here’s the deal: if you receive emails with the same text over and over, Gmail will quickly catch on. These ESPs are getting smarter by the second!
It won’t take long for it to realize that I’m constantly using the same text. As a result, my deliverability will suffer. And it won’t take an immediate hit! No, no, Google is smart, it slowly chips away at it, dropping from 80% to 78%, 76%, 75%, 74%, etc. 😰
To avoid this, the best method we recommend at LGM is to employ a technique called SPIN.
What is SPIN, you ask?
It’s about personalizing your messages in a way that each one is unique. It’s easier with an example:
Example 🔍
In your automated sequences, you usually type in a single message that you broadcast to the whole audience. That’s what we advise against!
So, instead of just saying ‘Hey Amine,’ you might go for:
- Hello 👋
- Hey there Amine
- Hi Mr. Ghorbel
Each of these is a completely different message — as far as Gmail is concerned.
P.S.: Make sure to add a {{firstname}} variable to add even more personalization! 😉
These variations with what we call pipes (|) and enclosing them in parameters ({…}) like this:
When you click ‘save and preview,’ you’ll see that each time the message changes:
You can play with this throughout your message, you don’t have to use SPIN for greetings only, you can use it in your closers as well: {Let me know what you think| You know where to find me! | Feel free!| I’m available to talk about it} etc.
III. Accounts Used for Sending and Warmup:
The final point concerns the email accounts themselves, and more broadly LinkedIn accounts. Basically. any account you use for your outreach strategy.
The first aspect, and this ties in beautifully with what we were saying earlier, is when you send your messages.
Example 🔍
We’re based in France, and for our outreach campaigns, sending emails round the clock is not at all natural, that’s just odd.
Stick to normal, working hours like most human beings⏲️
If you’d like to learn the Best times to send your email, click here!
You also want to limit the number of daily sends. We have even gone above and beyond, done the legwork, and classified what’s risky, what’s fast, and what’s safe on the platform:
What’s this based on? 🤔
In one word: Experience. Our own and our clients’.
We’ve observed that if you keep it around 150 emails, you’re in a good spot. When you go beyond 150, that’s a bit hasty. Over 300, well, you’re moving into risky territory.
The same principle applies to the number of LinkedIn messages sent.
However, there’s a crucial caveat to take into account here: the account age.
For legitimate accounts that are a couple of years old, they can send more emails than an account created just yesterday.
This applies to both emails and LinkedIn accounts.
Account seniority significantly impacts the sending frequency and speed.
You need to be extra cautious with brand-new accounts and basically divide all the values above by 10.
Example 🔍
If we create an email and start sending 150 emails per day from day 1, it’ll get blocked in a heartbeat. Even on the first day, hitting 40 emails will potentially trigger it.
For 15-45 days, we’re not sure exactly, Google puts you in what we call a ‘sandbox,’ where they monitor your activity closely.
The same principle applies to LinkedIn. For newly created accounts, LinkedIn also scrutinizes your actions until you have about 500 connections. It watches and restricts what you can do.
Instead, we’ll start by sending 15 emails a day at the beginning and gradually increase it weekly to reach 150.
This is what we call email warm-up. Essentially, the idea is to gradually warm up your emails and send them out in increasing numbers – 15, 30, 40, 50.
You can do this manually. but of course, we wouldn’t let you do that! There are warm-up tools and we usually recommend using Mailreach.
New Feature Teaser 🎉
Something big is brewing for LinkedIn within LGM!
It’s set to be officially unveiled in January. Keep an eye out for more details!
Final Thoughts:
By defining and understanding the elements behind deliverability, you understand how you can make your messages reach more of your audience.
After all, if you have an awesome product but no one knows about it, it helps no one!
That’s why deliverability rate takes priority over something like reply rate for instance. It’s easier to ensure that 100% of our emails are delivered than to significantly increase our response rate to these emails.
That said, you don’t need to worry about any of the technical elements with LGM because as we outlined throughout this article, we’ve thought it all through!
When you use our tool, you’ll find that we preset all the technical elements to a safe standard so that you can have more time to focus on creating connections with your leads!
So what are you waiting for? Sign up now and start crushing deals! 💪
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