Best Practices for Sending Cold Emails
According to Chief Marketer B2B Outlook survey 2020, email marketing continues to top the channels that produce B2B leads with the highest ROI. When done right, cold emails can effectively generate sales leads and drive conversions. In this post, you will learn cold email best practices such as how to craft emails and send emails, sticking to can spam regulations, and how to get your email domain out of the blacklist. Keep reading to know how to ace cold email marketing techniques.
How to craft and send cold emails:
As an email marketer, you might spend several hours of your time drafting a perfect cold email template. An attractive subject line, short email content, and a cool email signature. But a cold email template is effective only when it reaches your recipient’s inbox, isn’t it? Today there are more strict laws and increasing smart spam filters that prevent your email from ever reaching someone’s inbox.
According to a marketers guide to getting past email spam filters, some of the KEY things that you should never do in email marketing for successful message delivery and the best practices for cold emails to increase your rate of email deliverability are:
Avoid sending emails to people who have bounced repeatedly: Hard bounces are the result of an invalid, closed, or non-existent email address, and these emails will never be successfully delivered.
Avoid including attachments to your email: don’t attach the file to the email — otherwise, your email could get blocked by spam filters
Avoid the use of spam trigger words: One of the easiest ways to avoid spam filters is by carefully choosing the words you use in your email’s subject line. A good rule of thumb is this: If it sounds like something a used car salesman would say, it’s probably a spam trigger word.
Monitor the reputation of your sender’s IP address: Your emails’ deliverability depends largely on your IP address’ reputation. If you’re sending emails from an IP address with a poor reputation, your emails are far less likely to be successfully delivered to senders’ inboxes.
Test email deliverability:
Free email deliverability tools include
CAN-SPAM regulations:
The CAN-SPAM Act, a law that sets the rules for commercial email, establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have you stop emailing them, and spells out tough penalties for violations.
The main requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act are:
- Avoid using false or misleading header information: Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” domain name and email address must be accurate.
- Don’t use deceptive subject lines: The subject line must be relevant to the content of the email.
- Identify the message as an ad: Disclose to your audience that your message is an advertisement.
- Tell recipients where you’re located: You must include your valid physical postal address
- Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you: Include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future.
- Act on opt-out requests promptly: You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days and any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message.
How to get out of the situation, if blacklisted:
An email blacklist is a real-time database that helps decide which emails should be considered spam. Essentially, it is a filter that can determine whether or not an email makes it to its intended inbox destination.
In spite of following all the rules, sometimes one might get into an email blacklist – the most common cause of email delivery issues.
Here are Simple steps by pepipost that you usually have to take for delisting of your IP / Domain address.
- Lookup into the DNRBL or MULTIRBL site for your Domain / IP address. Or you can use an IP blacklist checker, which will do the lookup for you.
- If your IP/domain is listed, navigate to the corresponding RBL/Multi RBL site and check their recommended course of action for delisting.
- Fix the issue that was the cause of your listing in the email blacklist.
- Request a delisting through a Delisting Form or through a direct email to the listing service.
Read more to learn how to get your email domain or IP address delisted.
Note: Continuing to send cold emails with a blacklisted domain may result in reduced email delivery rates and affect your reputation.
