Sending cold emails to unknown contacts could be a tiring task. But not with the strategies that we have discussed here. Check out the following best practices to improve your cold emails and their deliverability.

Get a domain dedicated to your outbound efforts. It's best practice to keep your business domain completely separate from any prospecting.

For example, in Salesgear, if the target audience is small-medium, we send emails using salesgear.io. If the target audience is large, we use a different domain.

2. Choose Top-level domains carefully

Keep your top-level domains fairly neutral. The following domains are ideal to consider:

Avoid top-level domains like .fun, .deal, etc. because they can make your organization less credible.

3. Set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC

SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are a set of email authentication methods to prove to ISPs and mail services that senders are truly authorized to send email from a particular domain.

Therefore, it’s crucial to set up these to avoid SPAM blocked emails, improve deliverability and ISP reputation. The below table has links to how to set them up in Gmail and Outlook:

4. Domain reputation audit

If you want your emails to make it to the inbox, you need a good domain reputation. While many factors can influence your deliverability, domain reputation is a vital component for ISPs deciding if they trust you.

5. Warm up your domain

Start slow. Set a random interval between two emails. If you are sending hyper-personalized emails, then limit your emails/day to 5-10 in the initial week. Moving on, you can gradually increase based on the volume of emails you are sending.

6. Set up custom URL

Make use of custom domain URLs to define domain reputation and boost email deliverability. This also gives your email recipients the belief that your links are safe to click.

7. Use the right subject lines

Stick to medium-length subject lines around 36-50 characters because they get better open rates. Less than 36 characters may not convey your message and more than 50 characters may be too descriptive and get cut off by inboxes like Gmail.

8. Be mindful of your HTML content size

Limit the HTML content of email messages to a maximum size of 100 KB. This size limit includes all HTML text, styles, comments, and embedded graphics.

Certain email providers like Gmail tend to truncate email messages and include a link to view the entire email. This gives the impression that your email is large and the spam filters might scrutinize your email more intensely.

9. Avoid using spam keywords

Spam trigger words are phrases that email providers flag as fraudulent and malicious. These are some of the words you may have to avoid using in your emails -

10. Don’t include more links

One link per email is highly recommended. If you include more than one, your email might either end up in the promotions tab or the spam folder.

Therefore, limit your links to one or maybe two in the worst case.

11. Sending window

Always run your email sequences based on timezones.

In general, Tuesday and Thursday are the best days with the highest open rates and revenue per recipient.

Mornings between 9-11 am is the best time to send your emails for better deliverability. Sending emails from 1 pm to 2 pm is also a great alternative if you don’t want to target your audience during the morning hours.

The worst time to deliver emails is usually from 6 pm to 5 am. Avoid sending follow ups during weekends, late nights and public holidays.

12. Handling email sequences

You need to have 8-10 stages in an email sequence to get responses from your prospects. Allow a gap of 2-4 days between each stage.

Don’t just stick to emails. Make use of other communication channels, such as LinkedIn, phone calls, etc. because they are more accessible than emails.

These hacks work best for sending B2B cold emails. Try them out and let us know how it worked for you.