Mastering the art of sending relevant and effective cold emails is crucial for any sales team that wants to convert new customers. The email deliverability landscape, however, can be overwhelming, with hundreds of strategies to consider amidst a constantly changing set of rules and red flags. In this post, we'll share our 21 best tips to help you land cold emails in prospects’ inboxes and acquire customers in 2023. Our guide includes mastering the basics, like setting up essential authentications, cleaning lists, and following sending limits, as well as creative techniques like how to use personalizations and spin taxes. No matter what the tip is, our overall philosophy is simple: whatever spammers do, try to do the opposite. 

Don’t send marketing emails and cold sales emails from the same inboxes 

It's essential to send your marketing and cold sales emails from separate inboxes. This ensures that any spam reports sparked by your cold emails do not tank the deliverability of your marketing emails. 

Remember, marketing emails are for people who've opted in to your email list and given you permission to contact them. Cold emails, on the other hand, are for people who haven't given you permission to contact them. No matter how great your cold emails are, some people will mark them as spam. Send from separate inboxes to avoid spreading the negative effects of these spam reports.

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Set up your MX, DKIM, SPF, or DMARC records

To ensure your cold emails reach the right inboxes, you need to set up MX, DKIM, SPF, and DMARC authentications. These acronyms sound obtuse, but they’re critical: they tell email service providers that you're a valid sender from your domain. 

These authentications are often overlooked but simple to set up. When you buy a domain, Google how to set up a DMARC record on your provider (GoDaddy, for example) and follow the instructions. If you buy your domain and inboxes from the same provider, they will set up the MX, DKIM, and SPF for you—all you have to do is buy a DMARC. (This applies to you if you have a Google domain with Google workspace inboxes, for example). When you’re done setting up your authentications, check that you did everything right using tools like Mailgenius or Mailtester.

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Send cold emails from multiple inboxes and domains

It’s best practice to send cold emails from a variety of inboxes that are tied to different domains than your main domain. This is known as inbox rotation. 

Salesforce’s main domain, for example, is Salesforce.com. This domain enjoys a great SEO reputation, domain authority, and sender reputation. Any marketing emails sent from this domain are set up for success. 

If a Salesforce team were to send cold emails, however, we’d advise them to use satellite domains like “gosalesforce.com,” “getsalesforce.com,” or “trysalesforce.com.” Salespeople could set up two inboxes per domain, like “eric@gosalesforce.com” and “eric.n@gosalesforce.com.” This way, any one inbox getting marked as spam will not affect the deliverability of the others.

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Warm up your email lists

If you are unsatisfied with your domain reputation, you may want to try warming up your email lists. Email warming tools, such as Instantly.ai, Smartlead.ai, or Uptics.ai, can assist you in this process, which typically takes 3-4 weeks.

When you use an email warming tool, you’ll be added to a pool of email users who’ve opted in to sending and receiving each other’s emails for mutual benefit. You’ll agree not to mark them as spam and reply to them, and they’ll reciprocate—boosting both parties’ domain reputations. 

We’d suggest starting with any of the tools above and warming up to fifty emails per day. The platforms will gradually increase the number of emails sent over the course of several weeks, sending 3-5 emails per day to the others in your pool to get you a ~33% response rate.

If you don't have the time to warm up your lists and want to start sending emails right away, we recommend setting up twice as many inboxes as you need, using half of them immediately, and letting the others warm up over time. Remember to start with a low sending volume. Warming up your lists is crucial for long-term success in email marketing, so make sure to incorporate this process in your email strategy.

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Follow daily sending limits

In general, it’s good practice to send 30-60 emails per day per inbox, excluding any warm-up emails. If you want to reach out to 250 people per day and average 50 daily emails per inbox, you’ll need at least 250/50 = 5 inboxes—though we’d advise setting up a few extra. For best results, spread your inboxes across several domains.

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Track open rates with custom domain tracking

When you’re first setting up an email campaign, it’s important to track open rates to check that your emails aren’t going to spam. If your open rates are above 35%, for example, you’re probably landing in the inbox. 

Email management platforms will help you track open rates by including an invisible pixel in each of your emails. When the email gets loaded, the pixel will fire to record that it was opened. 

Most platforms use a shared pixel across several senders to track email opens. This means that other senders’ poor campaigns can contaminate your reputation. For example, if you use a shared pixel from a platform like Hubspot, you'll likely be sharing it with a large pool of other users, including spammers. If Google sees that your email includes a pixel that has been associated with spam, they may move your email to spam as well.

To avoid this, consider using custom domain tracking which allows you to control your own independent reputation. Instantly, Smartlead, and Uptics all have guides on how to set it up. You’ll need your CNAME set up to track opens effectively.

A word of caution: Open rates are heavily inflated and not always reliable. For example, if someone has their email account connected with their iOS mail app, the open pixel is triggered as soon as the email comes in—not necessarily when it’s opened. If it looks like someone is opening your emails 40-50 times, the open rate is likely inflated by some other factor.

Once you’ve verified that a campaign is working, it might be time to turn off tracking. Including open tracking pixels make email providers more likely to flag you as promotional or spam. 

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Send plain text emails only: avoid images and links

Sending plain text emails is a simple way to improve your email deliverability. As a basic security measure, you should never click on links from unknown senders; don’t make your prospects do so either. Avoid using images or links in your first email, as they can slow down loading times and make it more likely for email providers to mark you as spam.

Once your first email has been delivered and possibly even replied to, you'll have a better chance of getting your subsequent emails delivered. You can add necessary images or links in your second, third or fourth email in a sequence, but never in the first. This will help increase the chances of your emails reaching the inbox.

Instantly and Smartlead have features that allow you to send completely plain text emails, turning off all the HTML.

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Don’t use spam words

Many words immediately trigger spam filters (mention Jesus, Bitcoin, or Viagra and you’re putting yourself in trouble!) It’s good practice to sanity check your emails to avoid words on spam lists. Hubspot has a great list broken down by industry that includes phrases including “eliminate credit,” “increase your sales,” “remove wrinkles,” and more.

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Personalize your emails

Personalizing emails to your recipient’s background, profile, or location can make them more likely to engage with you. Using the recipient’s first name is a basic step, but your emails will really stand out if they convey that you’ve taken the time to look at someone’s LinkedIn profile and done research on them. 

One common personalization that we like utilizes your recipient’s job title, company name, and start date in the email, like this: Hey [first name], I’ve noticed you've been the CEO at [company name] since [join date]. These kinds of personalizations stand out, because marketing tools like Seamless or Apollo can’t scrape details like a CEO’s start date. (If you want to easily run hundreds of these personalizations, check out Clay!) Another quick hack is to look up a top restaurant in their location and add that into your email as a “P.S.” line. 

Relevance and product messaging matter much more than personalizations for the overall success of your campaign. However, personalizations can help you draw your recipients' attention and garner more replies. In a previous campaign, one of our teammates reached out to business owners who wanted to sell their business. The emails personalized with start date and a local restaurant generated 5x more responses than the emails with just first name/company name.

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Cleaning lists / bounce rate

Make sure you only send emails to valid accounts. Emails that bounce to invalid email addresses will hurt your deliverability and domain reputation. Before you send a campaign, clean your email list. There are several tools that can help. ZeroBounce is the highest quality and highest cost tool on the market. Other tools like Debounce are more affordable and have gotten us similar results. If you have a pre-validated list, you can clean them up using a lifetime deal with a service like Appsumo. 

In addition, we recommend that you avoid sending emails to catch-all domains. A catch-all domain accepts all incoming email messages, regardless of whether the email address is valid. Sending emails to catch-all domains can result in a high rate of undelivered or bounced emails, which can negatively impact your email reputation and the ability to reach recipients' inboxes. When validating email lists, catch-all domains will not be able to confirm if an email address is valid or invalid, making it difficult to ensure the quality of the list and the effectiveness of the campaign. There are ways to overcome this, like using Google Sheets to validate email addresses that are connected to a Google account.

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Control your sending velocity

Spammers send many emails at once; thoughtful marketers avoid this behavior. An ideal sending velocity is close to one email every 8-15 minutes. The tools we’ve recommended above make this easy to set up.

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Send emails at a consistent pace

Keep the same sending level across your inboxes. Avoid sending fifty emails one day, none the next, and one hundred the third day. Increase or decrease your email sending volume slowly.

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Turn off tracking pixels

Once you’re satisfied that your emails aren’t going to spam, you should turn off your tracking pixels, even if you have a custom CNAME. Having tracking pixels in your emails makes it more likely for email providers to mark you as a marketer or promotional sender. This applies to both link tracking and open-rate tracking.

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Track blacklists

If you notice that your open rate or email reply rate is tanking, make sure that you aren’t on any email blacklists. Organizations that maintain blacklists (e.g. Spamrats) often partner with email providers like Google to help fight spam. Getting off a blacklist sometimes requires a fee, but other times, it only takes an inquiry. Tools like MXToolbox, Glock apps, or Gmass can help you see if your IP address or domain is listed on any blacklists and help you get off them.

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Turn off bad campaigns ASAP

As soon as you notice a bad campaign, turn it off. (You’ll know what’s “bad” when you hear it—look for angry replies or mass instances of people asking to get off your list.) Don’t risk your domain reputation by attempting to save a languishing campaign. Take a step back to re-evaluate your copy, product positioning, and email strategy. This will increase your odds of future success and prevent you from getting extra spam reports or unsubscriptions.

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Use a global do-not-contact list

Sending an email to someone who has unsubscribed from your list is a surefire way to generate irritation and land in spam folders. To prevent this, it's important to maintain and adhere to a global unsubscribe list. A common error is to use separate lists for different campaigns, which can make it difficult for recipients to unsubscribe and increases the likelihood that you violate their unsubscription requests. Smartlead and Instantly make it easy to maintain global unsubscribe lists.

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Choose between opt-outs and unsubscribe links

Some geographies like California mandate that you include unsubscribe links in emails. Unfortunately, unsubscribe links may lower deliverability because (a) they are links, (b) they mark you as more likely to be spam or promotional, and (c) they usually flag to users that they’re part of an automated email sequence. When possible, we like to use lines like “if this is not relevant to you, let me know” to let email recipients opt out of a sequence without having to click a link.

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Use spintax to generate variations of your emails

Spintax is a technique you can use to generate multiple variations of any given text in an email. It uses a specific syntax, where curly braces {} and pipes | are used to indicate different options for a given word or phrase. A subject line using spintax could be "{Don't miss out|Don't let this opportunity slip by|Don't miss your chance} to save 10% on your purchase" — which will result in three different subject lines to send to a recipient.

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Using spintax to generate multiple variations of email subject lines and content can increase your odds of landing in the inbox. Providers are more likely to mark you as spam if you send templated emails to many people, changing only minor variables like “first name.” There are many ways to generate multiple synonymous variations of an email. You can rotate through different headings (“hey [first name] versus “hello [first name]”), use Google Docs or Grammarly to find synonyms, or even rotate a variation of motivational quotes through your signature. You can use tools like sp1in.me to set these up quickly.

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Aim for a reply, not a click

It’s much better to ask someone to reply to your email with interest than to use Calendly links. Remember: stay away from links in cold emails! One of our favorite calls to action is “if we could solve [insert problem here], would that be useful to you?” To respect recipients’ time, we also sometimes include lines like “No need for a call right now—could I send you an under four minute Loom video explaining how we do this?” 

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Be as relevant as possible 

Crafting a relevant message for your target audience is one of the most important things you can do to ensure a response. The more specifically you connect your tool to your recipient’s problems, the better. 

For example, a relevant cold email to a MailChimp user that aims to market an alternative platform might say something like this: “I noticed you're using MailChimp to send 12,136 emails every month. Using our tool, you’d save $800/month.” The more specific and numerical information you can get (e.g. by scraping your recipient’s website to learn how many emails they're sending) the better. 

It helps to make your target audience as specific as possible. “Chief marketing officers of companies with 50 to 100 employees” is a very general target. “CMOs of companies with 50 to 100 employees, who’ve been at the company for less than a year, are hiring for copywriters, and don't post on LinkedIn” is much better. 

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Use MX matching to send from the same domain as your recipients

MX matching is one of the newest features of the email deliverability landscape in 2023. This is the process of sending emails using the same domain as your recipients—sending from Google inboxes to Google inboxes, from Outlook to Outlook, and so on.

How can MX matching help you land more cold emails into inboxes? Email providers like Google and Outlook generally track their own domain reputation information and don’t fully share it with others. When Google receives an email from an Outlook inbox, it needs to trust Outlook’s sender scores on that inbox—and vice versa. Email providers may block some extra accounts from different providers, because they don't completely trust each other.

Email deliverability and strategy is a constantly changing world. We may reach a point in the future where spam filters get even more stringent, personalizations are more creative, and newer strategies like spintax become table stakes. We’ll do our best to keep you updated on the latest here—reach out to Eric with any questions!

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