7 email deliverability fixes
to keep your emails in the inbox
7 email deliverability fixes I’ve been implementing to keep my emails in the inbox:
Removed all Apollo unverified contacts. In my Apollo account, I have all kinds of contacts from different providers: Amplemarket, Contactout, Muraena, scrapped ones, etc. Most are not verified by Apollo and to keep risk levels down, I’ve only kept the Apollo Verified ones, diminishing my bounce rate chances which ultimately would affect my reputation.
Removed all links from signatures. I’ve been signing off with my full website lately, for “authority” but that’s only been getting me in the spam. The first sign of authority is not getting in the spam :P Keeping my signatures simple.
Removed all links from the first emails. I’ve been cocky lately and started some of my emails with links to my ai outreach training. I wanted to have people follow my training and get value from the get-go, but this mostly kept me in the spam. Turned this emails with links into “can I send you the link?” call to action type of emails instead.
Warming up mailboxes again. Apollo has a warmup feature (shown over) I’ve disregarded for a while. They deployed it and removed it various times, and it seemed like an uncertain feature. They’ve kept it as of late, realizing it was useful to keep your sending score up. Any mailbox of mine with a score under 60% gets “warmed up”. Turning this on means my mailbox won’t send any outreach, but I’m willing to make the sacrifice for 2 weeks for my mailboxes to get healthy again.
Podcast invite campaigns only. Now 90% of my campaigns are sending podcast invitations as it’s the safest “lead gen” way to not get flagged as spam.
Not targeting prospect of a 1000+ employees org. Big companies have the fanciest spam filters. To avoid getting blacklisted and contributing to a cascading reputation, I won’t be sending it to them. I get very few responses from these CEOs anyway.
Sendgrid Dedicated IP. I suspect someone messed up the reputation of my shared IP. I’m sharing my main sending IP with a bunch of strangers and it just takes 1 bad actor to ruin it, so I decided to switch to a Dedicated Fresh IP to start from scratch. It’s more expensive but at least I can a blank start and can fully own my IP reputation.
BONUS: AB testing Mailgun. I’m AB testing Mailgun again just to see the kind of results I can get from it. Mailgun is a Sendgrid competitor, it’s been clunky but SendGrid has sort of been stagnating as of late. I’ll revert and let you know how’s the deliverability with it but so far, so good.
