How To Set Up Sales Emails (The Right Way)
I’ve been advising lots of start-ups who are using email as part of their sales strategy, but are doing it all wrong. Getting like 60% bounce rates, running the campaign out of Google, etc…
It’s important that you set up your campaigns properly so that you preserve your “domain reputation” aka the thing that tells e-mail servers whether you are a spammer or not. If you’re “domain reputation” is bad, or if you’d landed on a spam black list, you will hurt your email deliverability and can, in the worst case, totally burn your domain name. So I thought it would be useful to share some resources to help you get started the right way.
First, read this article. It's the best 101 guide to getting started and will walk you through how to set your email up properly, warm up your email, check your sender reputation, etc...
A few more articles to read:
Keeping your email reputation clean.
Spam traps and how to avoid them.
The Zero Bounce blog is pretty good.
Tools:
Google MX checker - see if your domain is set up right for good email deliverability.
Get Prospect - upload a list with names and domain name and it will give you the work email
Never Bounce or Zero Bounce - these are list cleaners. Upload your email lists and it will tell you which ones are bad so you can control your bounce rate (keep your bounce rate under 20%, under 6% is best).
Send Grid - this is an email server, signing up for one and hooking it up to whatever tool you send mass emails from will protect you because you can send out MORE emails without triggering spam alerts. Sending too many from, say, Gmail servers will get you marked as a spammer. Think about whether you want a dedicated server here (it costs more, but if you share a server your email reputation is tied to everyone else on your server. We had to switch to a dedicated server because someone on our server was on some spam black lists and we were having trouble with email deliverability).
Here is my complete list of sales tools. We used to use the LinkedIn Sales Navigator/Get Prospect/Zero Bounce method, but now we just use one tool, Apollo.io, which does all that for you.