Email Deliverability Best Practices

​I stole this from Mike Gallardo and his newsletter.

Mike is a Senior Sales Leader for Deel, the fastest growing startup in SaaS ever from $1M to $100M.

​Here’s how he thinks about email deliverability.
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DMARC, DKIM and SPF are the engine to your car. You need them to move.

But once you’re moving, email strategy is the GPS of your journey. Without it you could be driving in completely the wrong direction.
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You need both to get into the primary inbox and get replies.

DMARC

(1) Reporting mechanism for seeing how deliverability is going. If it’s not turned on then servers will view it as you not taking things seriously and being too loose with your settings.

DKIM

(1) This is the most important one. Related to security in the sense that there’s a certain key / token for your domain that makes it impossible to “spoof” or copy.

(2) If you don’t have it, emails will most likely go straight to spam because servers will view your domain as unprotected.

SPF

(1) This is the old way of doing things, related to security, but it still needs to be checked and turned on.
With that in mind here are some email strategies and best practices

1. Primary domain. Don’t use your companies primary domain for outbound. In case something goes wrong the last thing you want is for your entire domain to suffer.
2. Low volume. Only send 50 to 75 emails per day per user per domain. A portion of those being warm up emails. Open up multiple domains or have multiple emails per person if you need to send more volume.
3. Plain Text and Disable Tracking. You won’t be able to track opens or clicks but reply rates will increase substantially. Plain text is always best.
4. Add “PS remove me”. Remove unsubscribe links (when it makes sense) and drive people to reply to unsubscribe. Personally, I like using this on email #2. Example below.
5. Email verification. Use an email verification tool to validate all emails before sending. You want as little of bounces as possible.
6. 3 week warmup. Run email warm up for 3 weeks (50 emails per day) before you start outbounding with a new domain.
7. 4 to 5 emails in your cadence. You really don’t need more than that. Please see below.

Email 1

The first email is focused on the most likely problem, building interest and most importantly starting a conversation.

Email 2

The second email is focused on getting a reply.
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First, you tease a quick video showing how you help with the problem. Second, you add a PS asking the customer to reply if they don’t want to hear from you again.

That’s it.