Cold e-mail outreach is commonly used by many businesses to generate more leads. As the term suggests, cold e-mail outreach points to e-mails that were created to connect with other businesses not related to their field. This strategy is used to catch the attention of prospective clients in hopes of considering their offers and services and establish a partnership with them in the future.
Cold e-mail outreach both has advantages and disadvantages. But their main edge is they provide a new perspective of their company to other businesses. It gives them the chance to showcase a different idea to other industries of what they could offer.
Each day, there are billions of e-mails being sent that do not go directly to people’s inboxes but are rather marked as spam. Apparently, 40% of these spam messages are advertisements that were not able to land in actual inboxes. This just goes to say that these businesses failed to reach out to a wider market.
In line with this, cold e-mail was introduced as a tool to increase the chances of contact with a potential customer. Significantly, a cold e-mail campaign is an essential step towards lead generation – or more commonly called ‘cold leads generation. Cold e-mail basically targets a specific individual who has no idea about the brand but could possibly engage with it in the future.
Unlike the traditional advertising materials sent through mails, cold e-mail is more tailored and reserved. It is intended to create a private conversation with an individual regarding business (which is the opposite of mass marketing) instead of promoting to a wide variety of audiences at one time publicly.
However, as cold e-mail outreach has been vital for most marketers, it has become more difficult and challenging to do due to the intense competition and stricter filtering updates imposed by Google. In 2019, Google has come up with a sneaky update of increasing more spams on each day that passes. Since then, Google has set off a more sensitive design when it comes to spam recognition, making it more difficult for marketers to host their services.
Effectively warming up your cold e-mail list is an important aspect of developing your business. Maybe you haven’t been consistent in delivering your e-mails for weeks now or you haven’t had good click-through rates recently. Whatever the cause is, these factors can affect your engagement with your audience and the last thing you want is to intimidate them with your flagged spam e-mails.
Thus, to prevent this, you need to come up with warm-up email strategies to help make your e-mail account look more legitimate to Google – which also means that you can deliver your e-mails directly to your subscribers for more chances of business partnership. These ideas are proven effective for almost all types of business industry so make sure that you take note of each of the following steps.
1. E-mail Setup
Before anything else, you need to make sure that you have set up a business e-mail by buying a domain from Google only if your company doesn’t have one yet. Make sure that your e-mail address is directed to a business website. Websites make a business account look more legitimate and having this helps you establish a good domain reputation for your audience.
2. Account Personalization & Configuration
One of the reasons why Google may be filtering your account as spam is because you may not appear as real. Start warming up your e-mail by personalizing your account. This includes setting up a business profile picture and filling out important details and information like business name, address, contact list, e-mail address, and website.
3. Account Usage
After setting up your business account, you need to simply sign in and start using it. You need to show that you are not a robot by basically creating interactions with your new account.
Create other ways where you could expand your connection like social media accounts and then link them with your e-mail address. You may also want to collect a list of addresses of some personal contacts like friends, relatives, colleagues, and business partners that you would like to connect with.
You can also join various mailing lists and sign up to relevant platforms to add to your connections. By confirming to each of these accounts, you are signaling Google that your e-mail address is active and real. This is a simple and effective strategy that small to large-scale businesses use to warm up their accounts.
4. Setting Up a Test Campaign
If your domain is fresh, wait at least twelve weeks before using your account. Technically, it takes a minimum of four weeks before you can warm up your domain properly.
Once you finish warming up your address, prepare for your first test campaign. By setting up a programmed one, you are enriching your prospect base and IP reputation at the same time allowing yourself to learn more about Google spam filters.
Significantly, the test campaign will allow you to engage with your contacts and be able to reply to their queries. This will then indicate that your company e-mails are appropriate and interactive to recipients, and thus, are not spam.
5. Campaign Launching
At last, you have reached the best time to launch your e-mail campaign. But remember that even though you have already warmed up your e-mails successfully, that doesn’t mean that you can rush sending all your e-mails all at the same time.
Note that Google still monitors your mailbox activity and failing to have a good sending reputation not only messes your account with Google but also with your prospective business partners and clients.
Always check Google’s update on their sending limit regulations to keep you posted on the maximum deliverability and also to avoid getting flagged as spam.
Although cold e-mail tools can help you do the overall automation process from creating mailing lists to automatically sending cold e-mails and follow-ups, you still have to personalize your account and act human. Whether your purpose is to just warm up your account or lead a cold e-mail outreach, you should always keep your content simple and relevant. If you don’t have a spam filter on your e-mail warm up tool, do your best to avoid using spammy words.
Effectively warming up your e-mail for cold outreach campaigns can promote long-term gains and increased sales to your company, which is why as early as now, it is important that you are able to ensure good email deliverability to your target recipients.
