Email Deliverability Archives

Your Sales Pipeline Could Be Suffering If You’re Making Any of These 12 Email Mistakes

August 3, 2017 By Heather Leave a Comment

Cold email campaigns are one of the most effective ways a company can begin sales conversations that drive new revenue.

That said, too many businesses fail to recognize that sending cold emails is a bit like playing with fire—it’s easy to hit “send” too soon and get burned. Send out an error-ridden or confusing message and put your reputation at risk. Email an unqualified lead and find yourself caught in a spam filter. Blast a campaign from the wrong email platform and watch your IP address get blacklisted.

Every week, businesses large and small burn sales leads on easily avoidable mistakes. Take note of these common outbound-email errors if you don’t want to fall victim to them:

1. Sending a bulk email campaign without testing

Too often, companies try to scale their cold email campaigns without first understanding what works and what doesn’t. Outbound-email campaigns should be rolled out in incrementally larger batches. Why risk burning an entire list of potential leads with emails that won’t convert? Instead of blasting on a large scale, test your emails on a smaller sample at each stage to see what works. Refine, revise, and test again.

2. Emailing above the decision maker

There are a number of so-called sales gurus who will tell you to always go straight to the top and get referred down to the decision maker. But why waste time on unnecessary steps?

Sure, you probably don’t want to speak with every entry-level rep at the company, but it’s also a waste of time to ask the CEO about, say, who you should pitch your job-application-tracking software to. Rather than aiming for the biggest title, reach out to the most relevant decision maker—the head of human resources, in this case. This is especially important when selling into larger organizations.

3. Chasing the wrong leads

Just because someone responds to your emails or takes your meeting doesn’t mean you’re making progress toward closing a deal. Talking to the wrong people—like gatekeepers or buyers without budget—is a waste of everyone’s time. By better qualifying your leads up front, you can make sure you’re speaking with someone who has the interest and the decision-making power to purchase your product or service.

4. Embracing automation too soon

There are tons of amazing sales tools out there, but even they won’t make you or your company bulletproof against basic human error. In fact, where mistakes exist in your campaign strategy (such as missing campaign details or product-market mismatches), an efficient tool will only make you fail faster.

Don’t just subscribe to expensive platforms that try to automate everything. Instead, make sure you’re selling your product to people who are open to buying it. Build your campaigns around real sales conversations and apply the knowledge you’ve gained from past closed deals.

5. Sending emails one by one

Having your sales team manually send emails one at a time is a drain on resources, and there’s no reason that interesting, personalized emails can’t be produced on a larger scale. Where you’ve had success with one-off emails, try to “reverse-engineer” them into email templates you can send out in bulk. Not only will you save on human resources, you’ll also have a more concrete sense of how your individual email campaigns are performing.

6. Sending lazy or untargeted emails

Don’t use impersonal, canned email templates. What may have worked five years ago will now be easily recognized as overplayed and underwhelming. If you want to get responses, you have to write for a specific buyer persona, targeting your messaging and personalizing your cold emails with custom inserts.

7. Forgetting to proofread your emails

Error-ridden sales emails will instantly kill your credibility. Before sending, reread your emails aloud to check for obvious spelling and grammar mistakes. Never send a mail merge without first test-emailing it to yourself to make sure all merge tags work correctly and that the formatting doesn’t look weird.

8. Failing to pre-screen your data

Nothing scares a potential customer away faster than referring to their company—or them—by the wrong name. A company’s legal name may be listed as “Eastman Kodak Company,” for instance, but if you called them that in an email—instead of simply “Kodak”—you’d give your message away as a poorly-screened mail merge.

Don’t ruin the personalized impact of your carefully worded email. Check and clean the contact info on your mailing list before sending out a campaign, especially if the list is built with software or purchased outright.

9. Overlooking gaps in your data

There’s nothing better than a highly personalized email template, but you need to be sure that you actually have the personal information your email includes.

Let’s say you write a mail merge template that references a company’s client with {!Client}, but you don’t have that information accounted for in your list database. The minute you send, your email template will be revealed. Sure, it’s not the most damaging error, but it definitely defeats the time you spent personalizing your campaign. And you’ll look, not to mention feel, foolish.

To avoid this, have a backup at hand for any customized fields. For the example above, you could include code that would substitute the words “your client” wherever there’s data missing in your list database. That way, you can keep personalizing without putting your campaigns at risk.

10. Sending boring follow-up emails

Sending a series of bland and boring emails that repeat the same things over and over does not qualify as following up. In fact, it’s a surefire way to get your emails marked as spam. If you want to send follow-up emails that get results, make sure you add unique value and new information to each email you address.

11. Giving up too soon

Thirty-three percent of all responses come from emails five through eight in an eight-touch campaign. In other words, don’t give up if the first one doesn’t get a response. Unless you’ve already had contact with your prospective customer, you should plan on sending the full eight emails. Persistence pays off when you have the courage to keep at it.

12. Hitting a dead end… and still going

Yes, persistence pays off, but you don’t want to become an obnoxious e-stalker. If your target hasn’t responded after eight emails, or if they ask you not to contact them again, it’s okay to throw in the towel. Shift your attention to new prospects, and don’t forget to apply what you’ve learned when you next reach out.

Do you have other questions about best practices for cold emails or outbound sales? If so, just write them in the comments below, and I’ll try to answer the best I can (if they’re complicated, I might just turn them into another article!).

6 Things You Should Never Confuse Between Sales and Marketing Emails

July 18, 2017 By Heather Leave a Comment

Sales emails are not marketing emails. This sounds simple enough, but you wouldn’t believe how many sales emails I see in my inbox that resemble long-winded marketing newsletters. And I’m guessing they’re also in yours

So what’s the difference between the two?

Cold emails, as the name suggests, are sales emails sent without any prior connection or context in the hopes of starting a conversation with a potential customer. By contrast, most marketing emails—often referred to as “drip nurture emails” or “warm emails”—are meant to educate their audience while building awareness and rapport over a longer period of time.

For cold emails to even have the slightest chance of working, you need to understand some key ways they differ from marketing newsletters. Pay attention to these 6 cold-email tenets if you want to succeed with your outbound sales goals:

1. Nobody opts into cold emails.

People generally opt in to receive marketing newsletters, but no one chooses to get cold emails. This simple fact is one of the most important differences between the two.

2. Cold emails arrive without context.

Since you opted into marketing emails, you generally expect to receive information. Whether you attended a webinar or signed up to receive a company’s latest best practices, you already have some context as to who this company is. People sending sales emails don’t have this advantage. In many cases, a cold email might be the first time the recipient is ever hearing about you or your company. Likewise, you haven’t yet earned their trust or attention yet.

3. The best cold emails lead to offline relationships.

While marketing emails sometimes focus on upcoming events and conferences, for the most part, involvement with them remains on the computer screen. In contrast, great cold emails capture their recipients’ attention and build a “virtual rapport” that leads to offline conversations—phone calls, coffee meetings, dinners. In that way, everything about your cold email should take this long-term goal into account.

4. Cold emails don’t brag.

A line like, “Our groundbreaking new software will change your employee’s lives” is acceptable in a marketing email. In a cold email, it will make you look really obnoxious and self-promotional to a stranger. Instead, collect interesting statistics and testimonials about your offering, and let them do the talking for you. When you have a truly compelling pitch, you don’t need to dress it up with bragging.

5. Cold emails are designed for individual recipients.

Your recipient doesn’t want to feel like they’re one of 1000 people getting the same email. Given that, your cold email should include a field for their first name, at the bare minimum. That way, when Josh at ACME sees his name instead of “Dear Sir” at the top of the message, he’ll feel a greater sense of connection to you and be more likely to read on.

6. Simple design speaks volumes in cold email.

Email newsletters tend to include graphics, bright colors, bullet-point lists, lots of links, and unusual fonts. Avoid all of these things when sending cold emails, as they’ll only distract the recipient from the main message—how you can help solve their business problems. Not to mention, they signal to recipients that your email to them is completely mass.

Your parents would probably be pretty skeptical that you wrote them a personal message if you sent them a crazy colorful HTML email asking how their week was. Your prospects are the same, so don’t do that to them either.

How do you keep your sales emails from turning into marketing? Please share your tips and tricks below!

Why Your Marketo Emails Don’t Get Opens or Responses

December 8, 2015 By Heather 2 Comments

Does your team send cold emails or sales prospecting emails through Marketo or other marketing automation software?

Do you know that this simple decision could be decreasing your open rates and response rates by 5x or more?

I’ve already written 2 different blog posts about how to avoid going to spam and why mail merges have better email deliverability than Marketo. However, based on recent conversations I’ve had, I still don’t think everyone completely understands the different nuances and psychologies behind cold emails (outbound emails) versus drip marketing emails (inbound emails).

While marketing emails usually aim to educate, inform, and persuade a large audience, sales emails are the start of a conversation.

The Technical Differences Between Marketo & Mail Merges

Although it somewhat depends on how your recipients’ mail servers are configured, about 97% of the time Marketo emails will say “sent via Marketo.”

The same is true for MailChimp and others.

To savvy prospects this phrase is a red flag that the email they just received was mass and not personal.

Why does this matter?

It’s all about managing expectations with your audience.

When people sign up for your newsletter or a webinar, they expect to receive mass drip marketing emails from you. Unless they’re living in the 70’s, they probably don’t believe that your HTML-ridden Marketo newsletter full of bright and shiny images is being sent to them, and only them alone.

Why Cold Emails Have Different Expectations Than Marketing Emails

Why on earth would you ever take the time from your busy day to respond to an impersonal email that looks like it was written by a robot and sent to one million other people?

In order for outbound emails (AKA “cold emails”) to be effective, they should look like “one-off emails,” even if they’re actually mass.

Yes, many cynical people who work in sales and marketing regularly assume that most of the cold emails they receive are mass, but you usually can’t know for sure.

The best and most effective cold emails are the ones that you don’t even think twice about. These are the emails that put a smile on your face, make you laugh, and make you excited to respond. These are the emails that feel like the beginning of a new conversation with an unexpected stranger who might actually add value to you or your business in one way or another.

Even if you’re sending cold emails via mass templates to hundreds of thousands of people, your recipients should feel like they’re getting a personalized one-on-one email if you’re doing it right. You can do this with personalization by using various custom inserts like “first name,” “company,” “location,” “competitor,” “industry,” etc. Writing in a personal and conversational tone to a highly targeted audience also helps. (You can use this guide to learn tricks and strategies to personalize your cold emails at scale.)

The Goals of Sales And Marketing Emails Are Just Not The Same

Whenever Salesforce or Zenpayroll send me a mass marketing email with HTML through their marketing automation software, I usually don’t respond.

And I’m assuming you probably don’t either. …Hopefully…

Generally speaking, no marketer expects or wants their readers to respond to their newsletters or other mass drip emails either. Occasionally there might be some kind of weird call to action to respond and give your opinion or share your thoughts, especially if it’s from my favorite “Kopywriter,” Neville, or some small startup with an inbound email list.

Instead, the goal of most “marketing emails” is to have the readers click on some kind of link, and that’s what their call to action is centered around.

However, in the case of cold emails that are sent for business development, sales development, or other relationship-building purposes, you almost always want the recipient to respond.

There are some cases in which outbound email is used by self-service SaaS companies that just want their prospects to click a link and enter their sales and marketing funnel to be nurtured. Usually, this is because their price point is too low to have sales reps talking to every individual prospect. However, for products and services with higher price points, especially those that are higher than $10,000 a year, the goal is always to solicit a response that will ideally lead to an appointment with a sales person.

So the question becomes, Why would anyone want to take the time to respond to an email that seems like it’s been sent to thousands of other people?!

Everyone wants to feel special, and high-level executives want to spend their time engaging with intelligent people who seem like they are capable of adding value to them.

A C-suite executive at a Fortune 1000 might click a link on a marketing email to sign up for an interesting webinar or read a thought-provoking white paper, but it’s highly unlikely that they will ever respond to a mass email that’s covered in HTML.

Likewise, Marketo and other marketing automation tools often by default only send an HTML version of their emails. Not having a plain text version of an email is a red flag to many mail servers, and will also decrease your deliverability. (You can read this previous post for more information on how email deliverability and reputation differs between Marketo and mail merges.)

A Final Word About Outbound Email Prospecting: Don’t Be Lazy, Or Just Don’t Send Emails!

Organizations that rely on sending mass emails through Marketo and other email marketing tools do so because they don’t want to invest the time or effort into a more thoughtful and targeted approach. They don’t want to risk getting their own mail server IPs blacklisted or risk complaints from google. However, that fear is only a reality if you haven’t done your homework and have zero understanding of who you’re targeting, and what messages do and don’t work.

Companies that have this “volume-driven” mentality are short-sighted and will run into an increasing number of problems at they attempt to scale.

All you have to do is look at the failures of startups like Living Social and Fab, who tried to combine volume with scattershot sales and marketing tactics, and you can see that blind spamming does not ever scale cost-effectively.

So, if you’re not willing to invest in more thoughtful approaches to outbound email, please save everyone’s inbox the spam, and just don’t send email. You won’t be successful and you’ll probably just get your IP blacklisted.

But if you’re struggling with getting good response rates from qualified leads, read this guide and learn how to create highly effective email campaigns at scale. And if you’re serious about your inside sales efforts, and would like help starting more thoughtful conversations with qualified leads, just drop us a line, and we’ll audit your existing email templates.

Why Mail Merges Are 5x Better Than Marketo

December 3, 2015 By Heather 2 Comments

What if you could get your outbound sales emails seen by 5x more people just by making one simple change?

If you’re sending your (cold, not “opted-in”) prospecting emails using marketing automation software like Marketo, simply sending those emails with a mail merge via Gmail might increase your open rate by 5x.

One of my email consulting clients was sending their cold sales emails using Marketo, and had an open rate of about 8% when we started. Before we created the copy for their new email campaign, I insisted that they switched to sending their sales emails through mail merges instead of Marketo. They soon saw their open rates shoot up to 53-66% on average.

While I often tell people to not obsess too much about open rates and optimizing their subject lines, having open rates below 35% is a strong indicator of deliverability issues that needs to be immediately fixed. It is important to have a highly targeted email list with low bounce rates and have thoughtful subject lines. However, just changing how you’re sending your emails can dramatically increase open rates, and therefore also increase response rates by getting your message in front of more eyeballs.

I recently wrote a blog post explaining the basics of email deliverability and how to avoid going to spam. Following that post, I had some questions about switching out dirty mail server IPs for new “clean ones,” as well as other questions about services like SendGrid, and so I decided to write another post to explain more about deliverability.

Why You Never Want to “Go Cheap” With Your Mail Servers

No one wants their alcoholic uncle to embarrass them in front of their colleagues at the company Christmas party by getting plastered and making a huge scene. The reputation of your mail server’s IP is even more fragile than your own, and each time an email that’s sent from your IP bounces or gets marked as spam, your IP’s reputation and trust decreases.

If you’re trying to cut costs and send emails from an undedicated mail server IP, you’re running the risk of having your IP tarnished by any “drunk uncle” that goes on a spamming spree using your shared IP. Most users of Marketo and other marketing automation software share their IPs with the lowest common denominator of spammers. This means your good emails get to pay for their sins, and no matter how many good emails you send, that IP’s trust can be destroyed by their crummy spam.

The same goes for those who are using the cheap, basic version of SendGrid.

Notice the difference in pricing between “Essentials” and the “Pro” version?

You can send 100,000 emails with SendGrid for only $19.95 a month with no dedicated IP, or you pay $79.95 for the same volume of emails, but with your own private IPs.

The price difference is 4x higher for a dedicated IP, but your deliverability might be 5x higher or more with a dedicated IP to send from.

Why Just Buying A New “Clean” IP Won’t Fix Deliverability Problems

So you can just buy a new “clean” IP from a service like SendGrid, and you don’t have to worry about email reputation or deliverability problems anymore, right?

Wrong.

Every new mail server IP starts out with a neutral reputation of zero. So, even if you decide to set up your own mail server, that new server’s reputation will be much lower than if you used Gmail. This decreases your chances of inboxing.

If you are highly competent with mail servers and email reputation, you could spend months “warming up” your mail server’s trust and reputation by sending out thousands and thousands of emails that don’t bounce or get marked as spam.

So either you buy and manage your own dedicated mail server with zero reputation or you’re stuck sharing a dirty mail server with terrible reputation. In both scenarios, you won’t be able to inbox as well as Gmail can.

Because Gmail’s mail servers have an amazing reputation, sending your emails directly through a mail merge in Google Apps (or some other sales automation software that plugs into Gmail and automates this process for you) has the highest deliverability. Google does limit how many emails you can send each day through one account, but this is because they want to protect their own mail servers’ trust.

Important Information: It’s important to recognize that your reputation is NOT based on your email address’ domain, since that can easily be changed. The only thing that affects reputation is what email server you’re sending from.

Gmail Mail Merges Are The Easiest Solution And Have the Best Email Deliverability

While you might not be able to blast out thousands of emails a day through a single Gmail account, using mail merge with Gmail is the easiest way to achieve high email deliverability.

If you’re doing your outbound prospecting correctly, it should be targeted enough to get somewhere between a 10-35% response rate from your outbound campaign. When each of your salespeople gets that kind of response rate, you don’t need to do crazy volume of outbound emails in order to get a response rate.

Almost every time an organization tells me that they can’t send enough volume through Gmail to meet their sales quota, I know they’re probably doing a lot of things wrong. You shouldn’t need to send 10,000 emails in order to get 11 responses from your leads. I can send an email campaign to a list of 100 leads and easily get 20-40 responses. So in sending 1/100 of the same volume as that company, I can get 2-4x their response rate.

Part of this is deliverability, part of this is effective targeting, and part of this is having great copy in my cold emails.

What it really comes down to is taking a more careful and thoughtful approach to doing outbound sales prospecting, rather than taking a careless scattershot approach, and praying that brute-force somehow magically works. And if you’re not willing to invest the time and attention to create a thoughtful approach to outbound sales, please just do everyone a favor and stop sending email. You won’t be successful and you’ll probably just get your IP blacklisted.
For more advice on creating highly targeted cold email campaigns from email campaigns that have made fast growing SaaS companies millions of dollars in sales revenue, please check out this free guide to learn how to create highly targeted email campaigns. And if you’re serious about inside sales and would like some extra help with your cold emails, just drop us a line, and we’ll audit your existing email templates.

Why You Should Never Send Sales Emails With Marketo

December 1, 2015 By Heather 12 Comments

I still can’t believe how many times people ask me why they shouldn’t send “outbound emails” (or cold emails) with Marketo, Hubspot, Mailchimp, Pardot or some other email marketing automation software.

This shouldn’t even be a question or a discussion for experienced sales and marketing professionals at this point.

Marketing automation software was created for the sole purpose of nurturing inbound leads to become qualified opportunities; not to send unsolicited cold emails.

I love leveraging marketing automation software to warm up and nurture my leads to grow a loyal and highly engaged audience. We use Mailchimp to send our audience thoughtful and actionable content they can actually use, and usually see about a 58% open rate with 12-18% click rates. At the same time, I’ve created highly successful outbound email campaigns to scale my customer base and also help my SaaS clients 3x their sales revenue by increasing their responses from qualified leads. I do think that sales and marketing should better align their messaging and efforts to be more effective, but I would never try to use marketing automation software over mail merges to run my own or my clients’ outbound campaigns.

How to Trash Your Email Reputation & Deliverability

Marketo, Hubspot, Act-On and Pardot were all created for you to nurture your inbound email list with targeted content. Their mail servers were not made to handle their users blasting out untargeted email campaigns to an unsolicited large list.

Your email’s ability to get inside someone’s inbox depends on the continued good reputation of your mail server IPs. Just like a drunk uncle won’t get invited to more weddings if he makes a big mess at one party, your mail server won’t be able to get into the inbox if it sends spammy or untargeted emails that people mark as spam. Every new mail server starts out with a neutral reputation of zero. That reputation increases over time with continued good behavior. However, events like bounces, or getting your emails marked as spam, can quickly decrease that reputation. If this happens frequently and repeatedly with enough severity, you’ll get your IP blacklisted.

Email services like MailChimp are careful to protect their IPs and will quickly shut your account down if they catch you spamming. They even scan your emails for keywords that may indicate you’re doing outbound, and will flag those emails for review and then decide whether they will shut you down or not.

Why Marketo’s Mail Server’s IPs Are Dirty & Not Trustworthy

Unlike Marketo, MailChimp is strict with their usage because they want to protect the trust of their mail server IPs. They don’t want spam complaints and deliverability issues to make their IPs dirty. MailChimp has some of the most trusted IPs and best deliverability because they always crack down hard on abuse.

Mail servers are a lot like a public park. When someone is littering in that park, it’s ruined for everyone. Similarly, if you’re not running your own dedicated mail servers, and you’re sending with Marketo, you’re sending your emails on the same IP as everyone else who’s using Marketo. Even if you’re not spamming, you can be penalized for other people’s spam. All it takes is one really aggressive to kill the reputation of the IP you and many others are using.

Because Marketo does not have the same kind of strict policies to curb and deter spamming like MailChimp, their IPs are frequently abused by spammers. This is why Marketo’s mail servers have some of the lowest reputation, which means sending through their IPs increases your odds of ending up in spam instead of the inbox.

How to Get More of Your Emails into the Inbox

So how do you get more emails to go into the inbox and not spam?

Just switching from Marketo or other marketing automation tools and sending through Gmail with some kind of mail merge is a big step in the right direction. The mail server IPs of Gmail have much higher trust than anything you’ll get from Marketo or even SendGrid.

One of my SaaS clients was sending through Marketo and had an average open rate of about 8%. When we started our engagement I insisted that they switch to sending their emails through a software that enabled them to do mail merges. After working with them to improve their targeting and messaging, their open rates ranged from 53-66%. Part of that was because of better targeting and improving list quality, but we could not have achieved the same results if they kept using Marketo to send their emails.

It’s definitely better to have your own dedicated IP than sharing with others who could destroy your reputation by spamming, but acquiring a new IP with zero reputation will still have lower deliverability than Gmail.

You can send mail merges through Google Apps or one of the many tools that help you automate outbound emails campaigns for sales prospecting.

You might be worried that this could jeopardize your Gmail account, but if you’re not willing to take outbound prospecting seriously and create relevant messaging for a targeted list, you shouldn’t be sending outbound emails at all.

I’ll be writing more posts to explain email servers, deliverability, and ways to increase deliverability and open rates soon.

In the meanwhile, for more tips on creating laser-focused cold email campaigns that scale and generate millions of dollars in sales revenue, check out the Human’s Guide to Cold Email. If you need extra help with your cold emails, drop us a line and we’ll audit your existing email templates.

Your Sales Pipeline Could Be Suffering If You’re Making Any of These 12 Email Mistakes