Best Practices: Email Deliverability and Spam
Dindo Fernandez
Last Update één jaar geleden
Cleansing your Lead List
Always clean your prospecting list before adding contacts to your sales engagement platform or starting to send them emails.
- You can use Regie's Email Verification Feature to make sure the emails you have are good and don't bounce before starting any new campaigns.
Include Unsubscribe Links
To avoid impacting your reply rates, be sure to use an unsubscribe link. (Prospects who do not have the option to opt-out but want to remove themselves from your emails will have to reply directly to you and request an opt-out, which will count as a reply).
In addition, the FTC's CAN-SPAM Act requires companies to "include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future."
- For Outreach users, please refer to these help articles:
- For Salesloft users, please refer to these help articles:
- Salesloft: Global Opt-Out
Content Best Practices to avoid Spam filters
- Review your email content and make sure your emails look human (avoid too many buzzwords).
- For cold outreach, avoid including images or links (particularly in the first email). If you must include a link, try to wait until email 3 or 4, and only include 1 link (2 maximum).
- Don't use ALL CAPS in your subject line
- Don't use more than 1 exclamation point!!!!
- Don't use video, Flash, or JavaScript within your email
- Don't send files as attachments
- Don't embed forms in your emails
- Avoid spam trigger words and phishing phrases (ex. Free!, DISCOUNT, COST, WIN etc.) as these words can be caught by spam filters
- Please refer to HubSpot's The Ultimate List of 394 Email Spam Trigger Words to Avoid in 2021 for a list of 394 email spam trigger words.
- Maintain a good text-to-image ratio (don't use huge images or an overwhelming number of images)
- Avoid Click Tracking unless you know that you're whitelisted
- You can use this site to check your email content for a spam score.
Ongoing Domain Health Recommendations & Blacklist Checker
Continuously clean your lead lists, but you should also be consistently checking on your Domain Health and how it is trending over time.
You can check the health score of your domain using this free tool, MX Toolbox.
Tip: Utilize Google Postmaster Tools to monitor your sending reputation.
- While this is data is specific to Gmail, it gives you a good idea how your overall domain/IP reputation is doing.
If you notice that your score has been decreasing, it is important to do a content and process audit to determine what may have impacted your score and why.
TIP: Positive responses can help boost your inbox placement, so in the event that your score dips, send some emails to internal users - both company and personal emails if possible - and have them send a response in the affirmative (ex: "Nice to hear from you! Yes" or even just "Yes!")
Create a Custom Tracking Domain
Custom tracking domains ensure your links in the body of emails are wrapped with your tracking domain. This avoids 3rd party links, which can cause spam filters to flag your email. To setup a custom tracking domain for your team, follow these steps:
1. Decide what subdomain you would like to use. The format for subdomains follows this pattern: "text.yourdomain.com".
2. Once you have decided your subdomain, contact the support center for your sales engagement platform so their support agents can set up the custom tracking domain.
3. Support will provide you with a CNAME reference using the subdomain you choose.
4. After you have your CNAME, reach out to your IT team or administrator to add the CNAME reference to your DNS record.
5. Once that is completed, inform the support team. Support will add the subdomain in your sales engagement platform.
6. Send emails with your own domain and drastically decrease the potential of your messages going to spam.
Throttle Limits
If you are seeing issues with deliverability you should temporarily decrease your daily send limits.
- Outreach recommends configuring Org-Level email limits. Outreach has a sending limit of 5,000 emails per week (or 1,000 emails per day).
- Salesloft recommends setting the daily send limit to 250, although settings can accommodate allowing users to send up to 1,000 emails each day.
Additional Resources:
Outreach
Salesloft
HubSpot