In many organizations, Cold Email campaigns are an integral part of the sales process and in many instances sending cold emails is the first step toward closing a deal. The use of a good email automation tool makes a lot of sense as the best cold email software can offer many features such as auto pause on missing merge tags, campaign soft start email personalization, and more. The challenge arises when emails go direct to SPAM. According to experts, more than 22% of cold emails fail to reach the receiver’s inbox. This normally happens when you’re using a new email account or your domain is fairly new. In such cases, your email account should be properly configured and warmed up before the start or set-up of any cold email campaign. This process helps you to increase the chances of delivering more emails to the recipient’s inbox and not to the spam folder.
Introduction
Though the term “Campaign Soft Start” may sound strange, this process is essential to help build your email’s credibility and boost your inbox delivery rate. You start with sending a small number of emails and gradually increase the number of emails sent each day. Without Campaign Soft Start, there may be a high chance of your email landing in a spam folder.
When you are setting up a cold email outreach campaign from a fairly new email ID, you have a high chance of facing email deliverability issues unless there’s a Soft Start process in place. If you have a huge volume of emails to be sent, soft starting your campaign plays a very important role in making your cold email outreach campaign effective and result-oriented by increasing deliverability.
Use of a good email automation tool is quite a simple process, some of the steps required to set it up may need you to have more technical know-how as compared to utilizing other automation tools.
Points to Remember while Campaign Soft Start
Set up of Email Account
Make sure you set up an email account that will meet your sending requirements and having a custom domain is a key to better deliverability. In case you do not have a custom domain than keep in mind that while selecting a domain name, choose one that describes your business. Once done, your email account can be something like [email protected], it would look more genuine than an email from a generic account. You also have the option of setting up a G-Suite for your domain. This is Google’s email-sending platform.
The daily email-sending limits vary for different email providers, however, a newly created email ID can’t use that limit entirely from day one. For example, Google provides a sending limit of 2000 emails per day from G Suite but to use it all, you will have to start with a small number of sends each day and then increase the number gradually.
It’s important to note that the process of effectively setting up your cold email marketing process depends on the reputation of the domain you use, the higher the reputation, the lower the time taken to ramp up the cold emailing process. If you set up a new email ID on an existing domain with a strong reputation, you can start sending cold emails in large volumes as soon as 2 to 8 weeks.
Authentication of Email Account:-
Once you have your new email account for cold email outreach, the first thing required is account authentication. Authentication guards your account against SPAM filters and delivers your emails directly to prospects’ inboxes.
SPF
SPF (Sender Policy Framework) Record is a record added to your DNS records to authenticate your email account and guard you against the SPAM filters. On adding the SPF record, it lists down all the servers that are authorized to send emails on behalf of a domain. Whenever the recipient’s ESP finds an SPF Authentication from the sender side, it provides a clean chit to the sender’s domain.
DKIM
DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) is a technical standard that prevents email spamming, spoofing, or phishing and makes your email reach the right place.
It is highly important to be authentic while choosing your profile/user name, you cannot choose a fake or misappropriate user name, doing so can lead to a lower conversion rate of emails reaching the inbox of the subscriber. Create an email signature that can help to validate your authenticity as a user. Ensure that details such as your name, Job Title, Company Name, Address, Phone Number, Email, and Website Address are part of your email signature.
Sending Individual Emails
During the first few weeks after setting up your email, it is advisable to first maintain correspondence with close family, friends, and colleagues. This will help build credibility and authenticity to your email profile. The opening of emails sent to Inbox, getting replies from them, forwarding of emails, or not marking them as Spam; are all these actions that create a positive engagement with your new email id. Such positive engagements will help you build a good sending reputation.
Ensure that you are sending emails to reputed domains and receiving replies in your new Inbox, this will help to create positive engagement. One way out is sending emails from other email accounts and replying to them using your new account. Things work well when you have regular conversations.
Sending emails to different mail providers such as Yahoo, Gmail, GoDaddy SSL, AOL, etc. can help you build a good domain reputation with all the top email provider’s spam filters. You can also partially automate this process by creating a sequence and uploading warm qualified leads there. You will also find many tools or software that would assist with email warm-ups but we do not recommend the usage of such warm-up software.
Register and Subscribe to Newsletters from various Brands or Services
This will help you receive emails from different senders. A newsletter subscription is surely not new to you, subscribing to 20 to 25 newsletters will help you validate your account with different email senders. When you opt-in for newsletters, you have to confirm each one by accepting the confirmation email. It helps you validate your account with different email senders and increase the inflow of emails to your account. Receiving emails consistently is equally important as sending them.
Importance of slowly Building Pace and Maintaining Intervals between Emails
It is important to keep a sufficient gap between sending two emails, if the same is not done, it may severely impact the reputation of the domain you are using. As well as the backend algorithm of certain domains may immediately recognize you as a “Bot Account” for sending a high volume of emails. Ideally, if you build up the pace of sending out emails in a steady manner, with a sufficient gap between two emails then by day 20 of the soft start process you could approximately send 200 emails a day. The apt or suggested interval between two emails should be between 60-67 secs.
Your email address will start building more credibility and look more authentic, and slowly your daily email-sending limit will increase. You can set daily limits and then gradually increase the number of emails sent per day. For example Day 1 could be 10 emails sent, Day 2 could be 15 to 20 and Day 3 could be 40 emails sent. This sort of approach will ensure that the soft start process becomes more effective and at the same time increase the chances of reaching the recipient’s inbox.
Other Best Practices to Avoid Being Marked as Spam
It is very important to understand that your mailbox activity may be monitored, thus sending high volumes of email at one go, improper personalization of email, and misappropriate user names may lead you to lose your credibility, as well as your domain, and could lose its reputation. It is also important to focus on the content being sent out in the email. The content has to be concise, and personalized if possible, and should not include a lot of images or photographs. These best practices will definitely help you better your campaign conversion ratios.
Conclusion
The above-mentioned key points and a good cold email automation tool shall ensure an effective campaign-starting process. A tool will also help create proper timelines and detailed process flows.
Using an Automation Tool like SmartReach will ensure that you accurately pace your campaigns. SmartReach is well-equipped with tech-based solutions to avoid being identified as Spam by the respective domain spam filter. SmartReach.io is one of the most cost-effective sales email automation tools available for all your cold email outreach needs. It ensures enhanced email deliverability thereby increasing the effectiveness of their cold email campaign.
