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When crafting sales email outreach, we often focus on the quality of our messages—personalization, timing, and unsubscribe options. However, a crucial factor often overlooked is email deliverability. Even with the best content, if your emails aren’t reaching inboxes, your efforts are wasted.
In this sales email guide, we’ll explore factors affecting email deliverability and provide best practices to ensure your emails land in prospects’ inboxes, avoiding technical pitfalls.
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According to SendGrid, email deliverability consists of four components.
Essentially, email deliverability determines the success of your emails reaching inboxes. By improving deliverability, you increase the likelihood of your messages connecting with prospects, leading to higher conversions and win rates (assuming effective sales email strategies).
Any of the issues listed in the table above can negatively impact your sales email deliverability rates. Some of these items are things you can control (e.g., message quality, volume, and frequency); however, with deliverability, some sections are not under your control (in blue).
With CRM email integration, it’s easy for users to minimize the importance of email deliverability. That’s a mistake, as high email deliverability is essential for sales teams.
Why though? Isn’t the deliverability problem a conversation for IT? Nope. Here’s why.
Imagine buying 1,200 leads at $75 per lead. You’ve just spent $90,000, but thanks to poor email deliverability, you can only email 500 of those prospects. That’s an immediate -$52,500 loss, not including lost sales opportunities. Your email deliverability controls your reach and access to customers. Improving email deliverability boosts your reach, automatically increasing your access to the people and organizations that want to hear from you.
If you can only speak to 500 out of 1,200 leads, your cost per lead balloons to a whopping $180 per lead. That’s a problem if you’re trying to maintain any kind of budget constraints. High lead acquisition costs = low profit. Generating more sales revenue amplifies the problem since deliverability has destroyed your profit margin.
Related: What key sales metrics should you track to truly understand your business growth? Start with these 10 sales metrics.
According to the Brevet Group, email is almost 40 times better at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter. Your sales email strategies are useless if your messages aren’t getting through to prospects.
If you can only contact 500 out of 1,200 prospects, it’s going to be an uphill battle for you to achieve any sort of meaningful return on investment. You’ll have to increase your CLTV and/or average order values dramatically to reach a positive return on investment. It’s doable, but it’s a tough sell for your sales team.
Pro tip: Did you know that you can easily discover your CLV by looking at your CRM data? This blog will show you how.
When your emails arrive in a prospect’s inbox, they’re much more likely to open, read, and act on your message. If they get value from your content, they’re primed and eager to receive more content from your organization. The more they consume, the more they’ll consume.
Your sales reps may waste time and company resources attempting to follow up with prospects who never received your initial message. Sales reps often believe they’ve been building a relationship with a prospect who hasn’t heard of them and doesn’t know them—this is, of course, incorrect.
Based on the reasons above, you now know that your email deliverability isn’t simply an IT problem; it’s a sales problem. If you want to improve your sales team’s performance and you want to close more deals, email deliverability is, therefore, supremely important.
Related: Crafting email marketing seems easy, but there are many factors that can influence its effectiveness. Get the foundation of email marketing sorted by following this Email Marketing 101 For Sales Teams.
Email deliverability is a complex subject. It depends on many factors—some of which you control, some you don’t. If you want to improve email deliverability, the first step would be to investigate your technical setup on the organization domain level. You’ll want to pay close attention to Google’s email authentication protocols.
When it comes to email deliverability and marketing campaigns, prioritize these three areas:
Now that you understand the factors that can harm email deliverability and the key areas to focus on for improvement, let’s explore some strategies to enhance your email deliverability.
Google has adopted various email authentication standards in an effort to ensure that users receive trustworthy emails. These authentication standards are as follows:
In addition to the above, Starting on February 1st, 20224, Google requires that all email senders who send emails (less than 5,000 messages per day) to Gmail accounts must meet the following requirements:
Now, if you send more than 5,000 messages per day to Gmail accounts, you’ll need to meet the following requirements.
Google’s strict requirements, while challenging, are designed to prevent malicious email activities. They’ve stated that “Authenticated messages help to protect recipients from malicious messages, such as spoofing and phishing messages. They help to protect you and your organization from being impersonated. Finally, authenticated messages are less likely to be rejected or marked as spam by Gmail.
Ignoring these requirements can lead to severe consequences, as Google may mark your messages as spam or reject them with a 5.7.26 error, resulting in a significant setback.
A cold email warm-up involves sending bulk emails in small, segmented batches. Consider this a gradual introduction, slowly familiarizing your email address with Gmail’s algorithm. Take your time.
A gradual introduction allows you to establish a good sending reputation with email clients over time. A cold email warm-up means your message is far more likely to end up in their inbox vs. the promotions or spam folders. You’re showing email clients that (a.) you’re a legitimate and trustworthy sender, and (b.) you get the chance to test and refine your email marketing campaigns, gauging Google’s response over time. It’s a win-win-win.
Furthermore, you’ll get the following benefits:
Consider this essential hygiene for your email list. The more organized your emails and accurate the recipient addresses, the more likely you’ll achieve high email deliverability rates.
Only send content to subscribers who want to be on your list. If a large portion of your list never opens your messages or engages with your content, you’ll want to remove them. Keeping these inactive subscribers on your email list means delivery rates will suffer. Disengaged subscribers are much more likely to flag your email messages as spam. For inactive subscribers, win them back via a win-back campaign or remove them from your email list if they’re still unresponsive.
Pro tip: Use the following cold email templates, crafted to help you reconnect inactive subscribers.
Your competitor has a customer who wants to unsubscribe. They decide to hide (remove) their unsubscribe link. What does their customer do? Mark their emails as spam.
Imagine asking someone for their phone number only to receive a fake number that’s been disconnected. That’s a bounced email. Bounced emails hurt your delivery rate and your reputation. If you’re going to add people to your list, make sure that their emails are legitimate.
Email service providers like Mailchimp, Sendgrid, and Convert Kit aren’t built for email list acquisition. If you want to run a cold email marketing campaign, it’s best to work with tools and providers like Apollo.io, Reply.io, and other outbound tools. These providers have the know-how and expertise needed for cold email outreach while keeping deliverability rates high.
Use pre-deployment tools, inbox placement, and A/B split testing tools to verify that your emails are ready for prime time. Using these tools, you’ll be able to see what your messages will look like on various devices and apps. With the right toolset, these best practices are simple to do and easy to maintain.
Do you use spammy subject lines and excessive stop words in your content? Are you employing spam trigger words that email clients might flag as spam? Examples of trigger words include: 100% free, be your own boss, consolidate your debt, free gift, and fast cash. Refer to this list for more examples of trigger words.
Additionally, there are lots of words that, if used inappropriately, will get your email messages sent to the spam folder. If you want to keep your content out of the promotions and spam folders here are some helpful tips you can follow.
Focus your attention on creating content that conveys value. Your content should be personalized, relevant, and valuable to your subscribers. The better you are at creating high-value content for your subscribers, the easier it will be to keep them happy and on board with you.
Your email deliverability rates are paramount. Poor deliverability rates mean your hard work is wasted if prospects never see your emails. To improve win rates, focus on enhancing sales email deliverability.
With powerful CRM email integrations, it’s easy to overlook the importance of deliverability, but it’s a critical factor for sales teams. Prioritize deliverability, and you’ll discover a hidden lever for boosting sales revenue and profits on demand.
If you want to adopt sales CRM software with powerful email functions, check out Pipeline CRM. Our email marketing solution allows you to set up automated email drip campaigns, send targeted bulk emails, and craft personalized messages effortlessly using our built-in AI writing assistant. Give Pipeline CRM a try, and tell us what you think!
Looking for more guides to improve your email marketing performance? These guides and email templates may interest you:
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