10 Steps to Improve Cold Email Deliverability + PDF Checklist

Here's all the tips and tricks you need to know to boost your cold email deliverability. You also can use our PDF checklist for best results!

Matthew McQuinnMatthew McQuinn·

Steps to Improve Cold Email Deliverability

Cold email is our #1 favorite way to find clients online, especially if you’re building a digital agency. It’s fast, it’s effective, and you can pivot quicker than just about any other strategy.

However, you’ve got to nail the infrastructure of your cold emailing system or your deliverability will suffer. If you’re not landing in inboxes, you won’t achieve the results that you’re looking for.

Before founding Coldlytics, I worked in M&A (mergers & acquisition) deal origination. Through cold email, I was responsible for adding hundreds of millions of dollars in pipeline value and generated $20 million dollar deals that started from a single email.

In my career, I’ve sent 3,000,000+ cold emails and helped many others grow their businesses through cold emails.

Based on my experience, I’ve put together a checklist of the most important email deliverability factors that most people overlook.

It might surprise you to know that we recommend sending at most 30 emails per day from each account, or that we never send cold emails with links in them!

You can download the checklist here and refer to it every time you start a new campaign

It’s helpful to note that platforms exist to simplify setting up many of the items discussed in the PDF.

For example:

  • Woodpecker.co can help auto-configure your DNS settings for any domains purchased through their platform, making it much simpler to set up your cold email campaign.
  • Instantly.ai allows you to set up unlimited domains and email accounts, and then automatically rotates through those accounts with each email send.

Even with the use of platforms designed for cold email, you’ll still need to understand deliverability basics. 

With that, let’s dive into the 10 most foundational deliverability strategies anyone sending cold email must know!

Send From Multiple Domains

This is going #1 on the list because it’s the backbone of getting your cold emails delivered. 

Emails sent from reputable brands have fewer issues with deliverability because they have a track record of their emails being delivered and interacted with in a normal manner. Their sender reputation in the eyes of inbox providers is impeccable, meaning their emails won’t be blocked or sent to the dreaded spam folder (or worse, blacklisted).

The question then becomes: 

How do you keep a strong sender reputation when sending cold emails to people who’ve never heard of you?

By using multiple domains, you can keep your volume low with each account, which appears less spammy. Also, if one of your sending addresses takes a hit to the reputation, you still have others in the rotation to keep the momentum going.

Let’s use Coldlytics as an example. We wouldn’t want to send a bunch of cold emails from our main domain in case we hurt our sender reputation. But, we could buy several related domains, such as “trycoldlytics.com” or “getcoldlytics.com.”

Then, you can set up a couple of different email addresses with each one, such as “matt@trycoldlytics.com” and “matt.m@trycoldlytics.com.”

We recommend no more than 30 emails sent from each account per day. If you want to send 300 emails per day, then you’ll need 10 accounts. 

Disable Open Tracking

Disable Open tracking

Cold email platforms like Instantly AI automatically track open rates by including a single pixel in your message. When the recipient opens an email, it fires the pixel and records an open event.

However, emails with the pixel added can hurt deliverability because they look more like marketing campaigns, which attracts more scrutiny from the email service providers (ESPs). You can still track the effectiveness of your campaign by the replies—which are much more important than opens, anyway.

Remove Images

Spammy emails tend to have images in them. If you’re a reputable email sender, there used to be nothing to worry about here—Pizza Hut isn’t about to stop putting pictures of mouthwatering pizza in their emails, are they?

Maybe so. Google recently rolled out an anti-spam effort that flags all emails with images, even from known contacts, as potential spam or fraud, and blurs the images inside the Gmail interface/

Sending images can hurt your deliverability pretty quickly as it’s now easier than ever to mark an email as spam.

All of this aside, B2B emails are far more effective when they look like an actual real person fired off that custom email to them. Pretty rare that you’d send an image in an initial email correspondence, right? Just don’t. Better safe than sorry.

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For all the same reasons as removing images, links are a great way to get flagged as spam pretty quickly. In order to comply with CAN-SPAM I always add a clear opt out instruction at the end of my email as most of my cold emails happen in the US.

Configure DNS

There are three main “email authentication methods” (fancy jargon for saying all that boring tech stuff most of us understand when we’re buy new domains). You’ll want to figure these three parts out though in order to prevent being flagged as phishing, spoofing, or spammy emails in general.

They are known as:

  • DKIM
  • SPF
  • DMARC

These are critical for your cold campaigns because it tells inbox providers that you have permission to send from your domain and aren’t spoofing as a potential fraudster (and don’t worry if that didn’t make much sense to you. The important part is that you check these boxes off before  you get started with sending your cold emails).

You’re a real person who’s gone through the steps to authenticate your domain, and that is a necessity if you’re going to have any ROI on your campaigns.

If you purchased your new domain and hosting from the same company, they’ll often set these up automatically. If not, work with their support—it’s a relatively quick process. 

You can verify that these are set up correctly for free with a tool called DMARCLY. I urge you to do so.

Or, if you want to go deeper, you can read everything I previously wrote about email authentication here.

Check Blacklists

There are over 100+ blacklists that store public lists of domains that are known to send malicious emails or spam. As you are working on sending cold emails, it’s likely that you’ll end up on a blacklist at some point if you’re not careful.

First, check here to see if one of your domains has made it onto a blacklist. 

If you find yourself on a blacklist, there’s unfortunately no silver bullet for getting yourself removed from it. It’s much easier to start over with a new domain and email address than it is to recover one previously registered with a blacklist. 

If you send emails through a shared IP (usually through an email marketing platform, like Mailchimp or Klaviyo), it’s on your ESP to handle it. Keep in mind, platforms like Mailchimp will suspend your account if you’re using them for cold emails as they are intended for email marketing. Use platforms like Instantly, or Woodpecker instead.

7. Avoid Spam Trigger Words

One of the quickest ways to get your emails flagged is to continually use words that set you apart as spam. 

There are obvious triggers, such as “free offer” or “$$$,” but also ones that you might think about, like “open” and “solution.” 

Check out this list of words that most frequently get emails marked as spam.

Warm Up Your Emails

Warm Up Your Email

Email warm up is the process of sending out a low number of emails and then gradually increasing the volume over time. This helps you build up a good sender reputation before you’re sending out your full 30 emails per domain.

When first starting out, try sending about 5 emails per day from each of your domains. Over the next 2-3 weeks, you can gradually increase that number until you reach your max of 30.

During this process, keep a close eye on blacklists, spam complaints, and opt-out rates. If you have problems with any of these, you may need to revisit the quality of the contact data or your email copy. As with all marketing advice, testing and iterating is necessary as the deliverability landscape can shift dramatically overnight thanks to the power of major players like Google having a massive share of the ESP market as a whole.

Validate Your Emails

Email validation means that you’re checking to ensure that the emails you’re sending to are legitimate. If you send a high number of emails to fake or unused addresses, inbox providers will determine fairly quickly that you’re sending spam.

To validate your email addresses, you’ll need to use a service such as ZeroBounce (which is who Coldlytics uses to validate every email address we provide).

10. Don’t Send Email Blasts Like It’s 2005

As an added layer of caution, it’s best not to send your emails out from all your domains at the same time. Inbox providers are smart and will detect this behavior right away.

Of course, sending emails out in batches can get tedious, especially when using a few dozen sending accounts. You’ll definitely want to use a tool like Instantly, where you only have to load up your message once, and it automatically rotates between your accounts.

More Cold Email Best Practices

Now that we’ve got the infrastructure and sending protocol nailed down, let’s talk about some other best practices that can help you drastically improve your cold email sends:

  • Personalize the email - Use custom information like the recipient’s name or the name of their company. Subject lines that are personalized are 26% more likely to be opened. some text
    • Go one layer deeper. Find out something specific to the pain point you solve for their business and use that knowledge to start a meaningful conversation. See templates here for inspiration.
  • Provide tremendous value - The more positive responses that your email receives, the more likely you’ll see successful email campaigns in the future due to the fact that ESPs see your emails as normal user behavior. Even those who don’t reply will be less likely to mark you as spam because of the quality of your email copy.
  • Consistently clean your list - After several sends, consider removing those who haven’t opened any or starting a new campaign. This will keep your open rates higher and your unsubscribes/spam complaints lower.

Starting With a Quality List

The more relevant and up-to-date your list of leads is, the better response you’ll get. You’ll have fewer bounced emails and spam complaints because your emails are going to the right people.

At Coldlytics, we build out our lists after you request them, meaning they are fresher than anyone else’s. Create a free account to experience the most efficient ways of growing your business with good data.