Closed Won: Email Deliverability Best Practices

Hello, everyone. Good morning or good afternoon, depending on where you are joining us from. Thank you so much for joining today's, webinar on email deliverability best practices. We have a lot of great information to share with you today, and I'm gonna introduce you to our host in just a minute.

Gabe, would you mind sharing your, screen when you get a chance so I can kick us off with our slide deck?

In the meantime, I'll go ahead and introduce myself. So, my name is Mimi Noto. I, am the product education specialist here at SalesLoft, and, I essentially oversee our, our customer programs. I had to move Gabe on stage to share his slide deck, so part of our technical troubles over here.

And so if you wouldn't mind moving to the next slide, Gabe.

I wanted to just kinda introduce today's topics by, in lieu of an agenda, I let I wanna share what the main takeaways from today are gonna be, by covering the learning objectives. So, it's important to understand kind of what you're gonna take away, so that you're able to focus on the right, topics today. So, after today, you should be able to recognize the changing landscape of mailbox providers and the strengthening spam filters. You should also be able to, assess your organization's current state of email deliverability in and out of SalesLoft.

Also, being able to diagnose challenges and prescribing best practice methods that we discussed today.

Establishing a process for regularly auditing your email deliverability on a regular basis.

And finally, identifying the top laws that impact email outreach. We're not gonna cover all of the laws, but kind of those big players in the main spaces that we market to.

If you wouldn't mind moving to the next slide. One more thing before I introduce you, to our host today. So we're gonna be covering a lot of information today, and with, new information comes questions, or maybe you came prepared with questions that you wanted to ask today.

On the right side of your screen, you're gonna see a dedicated q and a box.

Whenever you have a question, as soon as you think of it, please go ahead and submit it in the q and a. We have some folks on the line who are also gonna be hanging out in the background answering but as soon as you think of something, submit it there. And then if anything comes up after today, I'm sure you'll have some time to marinate or maybe you look into your systems and, you know, some questions come up. I'm gonna direct you to an area in our champions hub that you can ask your questions to to get those answered.

And, with that, we'll move on to the next slide, and I'm really excited today to introduce you to today's host. Now I'm not gonna take their spotlight away from them. I'm gonna let them introduce themselves, but, we have some folks from our SalesLoft engineering team, and then we also have Matthew from one of our partners, Email Industries, joining us to share, his wealth of knowledge as well. So I'm gonna hand it over to Matthew, and then, I'm going to take a step back onto the backstage, and I will see you all later when it comes to talking about resources.

Great. Thanks very much, and thanks for inviting me, to speak today. Really excited to, have this conversation.

Just a little background. So I'm the principal email advisor, which means I lead the deliverability services team for email industries.

We work with all kinds of customers, helping get their emails delivered, resolve issues with, list hygiene, as well as, just delivery issues where mail is not actually making it to their intended recipients. So, once again, thanks very much for inviting me, to speak.

Hey, everybody. My name is Gabe Conway. I'm a staff engineer here at SalesLoft on the channel health team. So the channel health team is a team.

We focus on, monitoring, proactively, looking for issues on all of our channels in the SalesLoft product. So that's dialer, SMS, and email. I've been here since twenty nineteen.

So, the channel health team is kind of the internal subject matter experts for all things deliverability, so especially with email, but we also deal with the other channels as well.

So that's a little bit about me. So I'll pass it over to Jeff.

Hey. Nice to meet everyone. Gabe kinda hit it on the nail there. I'm the second member of the China health team, and, I'm here to educate you guys on good email deliverability.

So let's get it rolling.

So, we'll begin with talking about the things that you can do to maintain good email deliverability.

Alright.

Next slide.

So let's kick things off with a common question that we get.

How are emails sent from SalesLoft?

Well, SalesLoft is often confused with a marketing automation platforms that maintain their own mail servers to send emails on behalf of the customer's domain. However, that's not how things work with us. We actually connect connect directly to the customer's Google or Outlook mailbox, meaning there's no need to configure additional DNS records or, it it allows SalesLoft to send e or it allows SalesLoft to send emails on behalf of your domain. It's not how it works.

Basically, think of it this way. You're sitting in the office, and I come over. I sit in your chair, and I and I basically hit the send button for you. That's that's technically how it works without digging too much into it.

All emails that are sent through SalesLoft are sent the same way through Google or Microsoft email servers and inherit this the authentication setup domain itself.

Next slide.

So how to maintain healthy deliverability?

Now before I continue and get into the details, I'm gonna request that you all please, you know, come into this with an open mind. Right? Because, you know, what we found over the years is that sending emails to prospect has it's it's gotten more difficult, to be frank.

Right? Now maintaining good email deliverability requires ongoing effort and adaptability in today's rapidly evolving digital landscape. Right? As we all know, what works one day may not work the next.

Center reputation consistently is being assessed, and mailbox fraud is continually updating best practices to protect users from unwanted emails.

To stay on top of this ever changing landscape, it's essential to actively monitor and test email campaigns, personalize your content to resonate with each recipient. More on this on the next slide.

And to keep track of metrics, key metrics like open rates, click rates, bounce rates, and replies.

Right? Now in the rise of bot clicks, open rates have become they become less reliable metric.

Now, when email is being when when email is being intercepted by a prospect's mail server, they may automatically open the email to scan for potential threats or malware.

This can result in multiple mail servers processing the same email, leading to inflated open rate numbers. Now to combat this, we've implemented a robust, bot clicking suppression technology in our analytics platform to ensure that you're getting a pretty accurate picture of your open rates.

Now to piggyback off that, you know, oftentimes, what we hear when customers migrate from a a a competitor is that, well, our open rates seem a little bit low compared to, well, let's just say outreach. Right? We all know that they're a competitor. And the the reason why is basically because of this technology that we coded into the system. So you're getting a real you're getting a decent accurate picture as to what your open rates look like.

Next slide. Now personalizing emails can make all the difference in achieving meaningful connections with your pro with your prospects.

By tailoring your message, recipient, and timing each individual, you're more likely to capture their attention, reduce spam rate complaints, and increase response rates.

In fact, our customers have seen a significant improvements by maintaining a personalization rate of at least twenty percent.

This level of customization helps ensure that the right message receives the right person and at the right time, resulting in a more genuine and effective communication experience.

By investing in personalization, you can avoid generic outreach strategies that often fall flat, and and instead create a lasting effect on your recipients.

Next slide.

Now when identifying email deliverability issues, you gotta keep an eye out for downward trends and engagement rates. Right? Instead increased email bounces due to spam blocks and whether you're sending domain or IP address that you're sending from is listed on major block lists.

Now what exactly is a spam block? Simply put, it's when an email service provider like Google or Microsoft, they mark an email as spam because it's not trusted, often due to the sender's mutational behavior.

In addition to that, you wanna ensure that your authentication protocols are properly configured by consulting with your email administrator.

Following email best practices can also help protect your reputation and prevent deliverability issues.

Now, in regards to that, you wanna remember that it's it's often a combination of these factors that contribute to problems, which is why we highly recommend to keep a close eye on all of these things.

Now regular auditing is essential to ensure you're reaching your target audience effectively.

By establishing process for auditing emails deliverability on a regular basis, you'll be able to identify potential issues before they impact your bottom line.

This proactive approach will help you stay ahead of the curve in terms of sending reputation, inbox placement, and overall email performance.

With the suggested tools, you know, and services listed here, you can have you have a comprehensive toolkit to monitor and optimize your email deliverability.

Now this is a slide that I I I would hope that no one has to reference. Right? But, you know, let's go ahead and let's talk about it.

So repairing ascending domain reputation requires strategic approach that focuses on correcting underlying behaviors and bad practices rather than simply burning and turning a domain. You don't wanna do that.

It's essential to avoid repeating the same mistakes or worse issues with a new or existing domain. To achieve this, we highly recommend targeting most engaged users in your list to maximize positive, positive signals, which will help improve your sender reputation over time.

In addition to that, leveraging other channels of communication, such as social media or just just hopping on the phone with them. You know, you can utilize our sales loft dialer. Right? So before, you know and before reaching out to an email, assuming before reaching out to a prospect can help reduce spam complaints and improve deliverability rates.

Now in addition to what we just mentioned, if you notice you're getting little to no response from your prospects, then it's probable that your domain is in a red zone, and the path to recovery can be quite painful.

And I'm gonna kick things off to Gabe.

Thanks, Jeff. So Jeff was going into kind of the overall, like, email deliverability and, you know, kind of what our best practices are. So now we're gonna look a a little bit deeper into how the, you know, I guess the mailbox environment has been changing lately.

There's been a lot of posts on LinkedIn. There's a lot of changes that Google has been coming out with and Yahoo. So we wanted to go a little bit deeper into those things that we've been seeing across the, you know, SalesLoft platform, the, you know, I guess, the email universe for lack of a better term.

So, really starting out here, and this is kind of, you know, a lot of what I'm about to say is is kind of an extension of what Jeff, it was saying.

But this is coming directly from Microsoft's documentation when it comes to their best practices and email deliverability.

And this is a very important quote. And essentially, what we wanna hit home here is that when it comes to email deliverability, it's in the court of public opinion. So that being that if you don't think that you're sending spam, but it's being received as spam, it's gonna be categorized as spam and it's gonna affect your email deliverability.

And once your email deliverability is affected that could potentially impact your overall sales process.

So it's critical to implement these best practices here and it's important that we're safeguarding our domains before we get to the point where Jeff was talking about where we may have to potentially, you know, save our reputation. It's much easier to keep it in a trusted, trusted help, I guess, is a good way to put it. And as Jeff said too, SalesLoft is not a mass not an email marketing tool, but it is a sales engagement tool. We're a tool that helps people manage their touches with their prospects. So the recipient ultimately decides what spam is, and, legality does not.

So with that in mind, we are going to talk about a recent trend that we started to see with Microsoft, specifically Microsoft Office three sixty five. So earlier this year, we started to see, mailbox providers increase their scrutiny of emails that were sent across all platforms, which SalesLoft connects to. So, again, we send email through the user's native in back inbox. So that's gonna be Google Workspace or Office three sixty five. We don't really send emails from SalesLoft. So, those are big players, obviously.

So what we started to see is user for reporting that they were getting locked out of their accounts for an anonymous sending patterns or matching spam patterns essentially.

And a critical thing here to note is that the volume of sending didn't seem to make as that much of an impact. But more so, Microsoft and Google were looking critically at the content of the emails.

Another interesting thing that we noticed is that, all the emails after the lockout starts will begin to bounce.

So with the bounce reason of being users suspect suspected of sending spam.

So email admins on their side, they would get alerted of this, and they would need to go and clear the user's inbox for them to start sending again.

So, yeah, that is the main thing coming here. So then this was kind of the symptom that people were seeing.

So what was causing that really is the next thing that we're gonna talk about.

So when mailbox providers are looking for potential spammers, they're looking at all inbound and outbound traffic.

So what you're they're really looking for the similarities in the content of the email and really how quickly are you sending them.

Microsoft does not advertise any sort of magic numbers here or what they're looking for, but the process is kind of simpler. If you're hitting a limit, you should increase personalization or send less or with more distance, until you find a flow that is working for you.

And here's a really critical piece. You could even send twenty low personalized, really bad emails that could be too much of an issue and essentially cause this problem.

Generic templates, with no personalization really are gonna be the driver here. So one of the things we're seeing is that personalization is becoming less of a bat a best practice and more of a requirement.

So I'm gonna move over to the next slide. So this quote, again, was for Microsoft. They didn't give us an exact number. So we can't tell you if you do this exact thing, this is going to prevent it.

But we do have seven elements of success to prevent this issue.

And a lot of these are really gonna be a rehash of what Jeff said.

But these are all kind of, like, in, I guess, level of importance to prevent it.

And one of the biggest things that we've seen, help is increasing email send delay inside of SalesLoft.

So recently, the SalesLoft product has changed. We've increased the max send delay up to three hundred seconds, which is five minutes.

So we recommend setting setting this as high as possible while still reaching the amount of emails you want to send in a day. So let's say we, you know, you want to send a hundred emails a day or five hundred emails a day, choose a send delay that's gonna work best for you in that case.

An important thing to, so what's the lowest we would ever recommend setting this would be sixty in basically all cases.

Anything lower than that is definitely gonna be an issue and really setting it as high as comfortable as you're comfortable with is very important. But there is an important thing to know about SalesLoft is that we add a random amount of time to that send delay. So emails are not gonna be sending directly on the dot when it comes to that delay. There's kind of a randomness factor, there. So this can increase the overall time it take may it may take to send in a in a specific cadence. So just keep that in mind.

Some second, and this is something we talk a lot about here at SalesLoft, And it's not just for email deliverability, but personalization.

It's not just to stay out of the spam box. It's really an important part of the overall sales process and generating more pipeline.

SalesLoft has done a lot of research on this topic, and that magic number of twenty to twenty five percent is the best bang for buck regards to email health, not spending too much time writing emails, and booking more meetings, basically.

Anything over this has diminishing returns, so there's really no benefit of doing more.

Click tracking is actually a hot topic that some people may actually feel negatively affect their domain health, but from what we can tell it actually helps.

We highly recommend that a team configure something called a custom tracking domain, and use that before enabling click tracking or open tracking inside of SalesLoft.

And once this enable is enabled, all links with open tracking or, click tracking enabled should have domain alignment with the sending domain.

So for example, if I was to send an email with the SalesLoft application from salesloft dot com, and we had a custom track domain set up something like salesloft dot salesloft dot com or sl dot salesloft dot com, Links in the email would be wrapped with that custom tracking domain.

So this would look less suspicious to automated systems, and it makes it easier to track user interaction. So it's kind of a win win.

So moving on to something a little bit more interesting.

Domains have reputations beyond what they're just sending.

And this is actually something I recently learned. Simply the age of the domain comes into play here. So a fresh domain absolutely needs to be warmed. But the age of the domain or a guest when it was purchased also comes into play here.

Potentially, even before warming a domain, having if you're gonna have a secondary domain or purchasing a new domain, it's better to just have it there and sitting and not being used than not having one, basically. And the reason why is because spammers often burn and churn domains.

So if you have a domain that's been purchased for a while, that's a good thing.

So you may be wondering, okay. So let's say we do have a new domain.

We're ready to start using it. How do we warm that up?

Well, the the recommended warm up process here is it takes about ninety days.

Especially when you start to send, you want to set you want to start really with low volume and slowly increase over time. And it helps to know what the anticipated amount of emails you wanna be sending at the end of the ninety days looks like.

And then that way you can kind of, you know, grow to that amount, you know, increasing slowly over time.

But that first week, it's absolutely critical to send low amounts of email, preferably to highly engaged users.

So moving on to another feature that we have inside of SalesLoft, it's domain send limits. So this is something we highly recommend setting up because it can help prevent too many emails being sent to a single domain on a given day.

So let's say for example, your sales team is prospecting a large company and you have multiple leads at a single domain.

So user a sends five emails to this domain in a given cadence, and user b sends five more emails to users at this domain, and then the next person sends five more, your team could be sending way too many emails to a single domain over that single day.

And with a larger amount of, risks essentially with emails ending up in spam, because let's say email one comes across and it gets marked as spam, then the secondary email could potentially just instantaneously go to the spam box. So that's one reason why domain send limits are really the main reason why domain send limits are so important.

So domain send limits will set a max amount of email touches that can to a given domain, in a given time. So our recommendation here is three to five. So that's three to five emails to a single domain in a given day.

So some of you may be saying that, well, this is not possible due to how our workflow works. And in those cases, we just recommend setting it as low as you possibly can. And if it's not possible, then everything else we've said must be taken with Absolution. So personalization being absolutely critical.

So lastly, but definitely not least, and this is just a overall best practice, unsubscribe links. There's a lot of ways you can set these up inside of SalesLoft.

The easiest way is to set up a global unsubscribe link.

And we recommend these for all SalesLoft emails. Some may only want it on cadences.

Our recommendation is for all of them.

And you may ask, what I mean, what's the reasoning here? And really, the reasoning is kind of simple.

The the when you make it easier for someone to unsubscribe, you're getting clear feedback that that person does not want to hear from you and you are preventing them from marking the email as spam.

So it's easier to unsubscribe and most people would rather unsubscribe.

Okay. So talks a lot there. So now we're gonna talk about some requirements that Google and Yahoo has set up earlier this year.

And some of you may have heard it before. It's commonly referred to as the bulk sender guidelines.

So in earlier this year February, Google and Yahoo started to restrict emails, on high volumes of what they classified as bulk emails.

So starting with how many is too many.

Google specifically said their their amount what they classify as bulk emails is five thousand emails a day to gmail dot com addresses and Yahoo doesn't say what their number is at all.

One important thing to note here Google Workspace is not included. This is only Gmail and Yahoo companies.

So the, if you are a classified as a bulk sender there's a strict enforcement on email technologies. The biggest one that everyone usually has SPF and DKIM set up. DMARC is the one that may be new, and it is required. So preferably, you set this to p equals reject, which what this means is that, this would prevent any sort of, problematic senders or if people are spoofing your domain from even reaching, an inbox. So it prevents people from impersonating your domain.

So if you're classified as a bulk sender, one click unsubscribe is also a requirement. So if a SalesLoft team is classified as a bulk sender, they would need to enable, one click unsubscribe in their settings, which is different than global opt out links.

This just gives another way for a someone receiving an email to opt out.

Typically, this is like through a native connection in their inbox instead of a link. So every system is gonna handle this differently.

So it's hard to say exactly what that's going to look like.

But you may also be wondering how do you even know if you're a bulk send?

So it's it's important to consider if you're prospecting b to b or b to c. So if you're b to c, you're much more likely to be marked as a bulk sender because you're gonna be sending the Gmail and Yahoo accounts.

Most teams that I've seen do b two b.

So most of those domains will not be classified as bulk sender. It's important to keep this in mind. In tools like Google Postmaster Tools can help you navigate this sort of thing. I believe in Google Postmaster Tools, there is a way to actually tell you if you're a bulk sender or not. And we'll talk about that more later.

Gabe, one one comment just, before we leave. With DMARC, ensure you start with the none policy and reporting. Yes. Ensure all your authentication is is configured properly before moving into the reject, but, certainly follow the process to to ensure your your setup. Otherwise, you could actually cause mail to be lost.

That's actually a really good point. I should have mentioned that. So p p equals reject would be what you ultimately wanna move to.

At first, you would just wanna gather, potentially gather, examples of emails that are misconfigured. So thanks for pointing that out, Matt. Great point.

So those are bulk center guidelines. We're gonna we couldn't I could not figure out the best place to put this slide, so we decided to put it here.

So what this slide is is it's basically, you may have seen this on LinkedIn, I guess is the best way to put it. And there was a lot of, you know, I guess a lot of people were worried about this and for good reason. So I'm gonna take a step back and kind of reiterate something about what I think Jeff was talking about earlier. And let's talk about how open tracking actually works inside of SalesLoft.

And that is if sale if you've enabled open tracking, what that does is SalesLoft will put a one by one very small image in an email.

So when this image is loaded, that's how we detect if somebody has viewed the email.

So addressing, you know, all of the stuff you may have heard at LinkedIn or other social media, earlier this year we saw some concern around the alert that you're seeing at the bottom of this screen. So it's important to know what this actually means, and there's actually two ways that you can read this phrase.

It means basically so it means that the emails might be suspicious, so the images are hidden.

It doesn't mean that because there are hidden images, such as a tracking pixel, the message is being marked as spam.

So, really, what we wanna address is who would who would see this message, and what does this, you know, what does this really mean?

And, really, it's new domains, suspicious domains, can generate this error, email center mark as spam.

Domains that are classified as a bulk sender and are not fighting, you know, following the guidelines and haven't gotten into compliance could also generate this alert.

Typically, any email that shows up in the bulk or spam folders would also have this as well.

So it's one important thing to know is that this, only shows up in the native Gmail client or Google Workspace client.

So if you're using Apple Mail, Thunderbird, any sort of third party thing, it's not able to show up because this is like a Google specific thing.

So touching on what Jeff said again, a lot of this is all, like, wrapped together.

Opens in general, while we do show this measure in SalesLoft, it is something to be taken with a grain of salt because there's a lot of reasons why opens could be inflated or deflated.

For example, automated security filters, proxy loading services.

And we do spend a lot of time making sure it's accurate as possible.

But it's not an exact science.

And even in some Outlook configurations, some teams may just turn off images entirely and just never load any images in the emails. So you would never get an open.

Okay. So I talked a lot. Now I'm gonna pass it over to Matt.

Matt, you're on mute.

Classic.

You know, I knew that was gonna happen as soon as I put myself on mute.

So we're yeah. We're gonna talk a bit about some settings and some things that you should pay attention to as you're, setting up your email programs and, if, you know, we'll get through, a number of the things. You probably heard some of them already today, but, definitely just to kind of continue to iterate and sort of express the importance of these things. So if we could just move forward, that would be great.

So, you know, we just talked about this in regards to the send delay. So one of the pieces that this the reason that this is important is because as you're sending email, right, there's a normal cadence to how people would send email. And platforms like Office three sixty five and Google are looking for those anomalies. So if you're sending email too fast, they can tell that it's not automated or they can tell it's automated.

So ensure that you're putting those delays in. Right? We've already mentioned sort of a minimum sixty second up to five minutes, you know, in regards to the types of delays that you wanna do. It gives the machine, if you will, that's monitoring everything, the appearance that you're actually doing it in a manual fashion. Right? Nobody's sending five hundred emails in a minute. So certainly make sure that you're introducing that process of how the machine would look at a normal cadence for email.

Also consider your daily send limits. Right? There are limits on workspace accounts. There are limits on Office three sixty five accounts in regards to how many messages the account can send per day. So in order to appear like a normal person sending email, right, definitely make sure you're staying within a reasonable limit for the number of messages you're sending and then, really, the number of messages you're sending to people or to specific domains. There's nothing worse than getting emails from multiple people, if you will, for the same service on the same day and sort of having those collisions.

And really sort of pay attention to the number of messages your organization is sending per day, to those same individuals. So if you have regional sales or you have, geographic zones that you service, make sure you're aware of the service zones and the individuals within those zones so that you are not stepping on each other's toes as you're moving forward with regards to those conversations.

And I probably, you know, probably can't say this enough. Right? When you're looking at who you're reaching out to, ensure that you're reaching out to the right person at that company. Right? A lot of people we've talked about this in in sort of previous slides. A lot of people will say, you know, this message is completely irrelevant to my role.

If that's the audience you're targeting, make sure you've actually vetted the individual you're sending mail to. This gets really important, in a few slides when we talk about some of the geographic legislation pieces.

Understanding who you're talking to, understanding where they're located, and the messages that you're sending to them.

So we can go forward.

And then, you know, looking into how your emails are configured. Right? It's not just a matter of are you a bulk sender, do you need to authenticate. Authentication is coming in regards to it being mandatory to send email.

Right? We're not quite at no auth, no entry at this point, but we're starting to approach that. And as Google and Yahoo have sort of put out in the world that they're going to be requiring this, and, sure, they've said we're gonna start with bulk sending, but, you know, they are going to continue to push this down into smaller and smaller volumes as they go. Other mailbox providers are already paying attention to this as well.

We've seen Comcast looking into these same restrictions. We've seen international locations like, mail dot com, GMX, WebDE, which is part of the one on one. They're also looking at these types of configurations.

And, really, other mailbox providers are going to start to simply use these types of settings for all mail coming in the door. And the best part about it is once you've set it up, it works for everybody. Right? So you don't have to set it up individually for each domain that you're sending to, but you do have to set it up individually for each domain you're sending from. So there are some things that you need to pay attention to there.

The other benefit of implementing proper authentication and moving DMARC into a enforcement policy, so either a quarantine or a reject policy, is it opens up the door for you to enable a service like BIMI.

So BIMI, brand identified message indicators, allows you as a brand owner or, you know, as your brand to put your logo into an email client and have a consistent experience across multiple email providers. So there are, somewhere in the nature of a dozen or so major mailbox providers around the world that are already supporting BIMI.

And, you'll see here in the the photo example, the SalesLoft logo showing up next to the emails that they would have sent. This is a a a example rendering, but it works because if you get email from anyone in SalesLoft, these logos show up. So that's how it how their BEMI record is is working.

Traditionally, up until most recently, this required a trademark logo. So in order to get a certificate to show your your email, you needed to have a trademark logo and a verified mark certificate. Google won't show your logos or your images without a verified mark certificate.

Yahoo will show it on your marketing mail, but not your personal one to one mail.

Other platforms like La Poste in France will show it, under some circumstances where a VMC is or in some conditions without a VMC depending on domain reputation. And that's always part of this too. Your domain reputation plays a part in ensuring that these logos show. But most recently, common mark certificates were launched.

These are for brands that maybe don't own a trademark logo, but have had a logo under copyright for a long period of time. And due to prior use, you can then qualify for a certificate, in order to have your logos displayed currently only at Gmail, but other mailbox providers are also looking at implementing support for CMCs as well. So if that is something that's important to you and you want to have your branding in the email client, consider looking into these solutions. There is some work, and there is a cost associated to both of them.

But, you know, all of the things that I've seen in regards to brands that implement BIMI show that it increases engagement, increases open rates, and increases consumer, interaction with a brand. So it works very well for for a lot of those things. Custom link tracking. So this is an absolute, I think, thing that brands need to consider when they're sending any email, whether it's business email or whether it's commercial email.

Having a consistent domain experience right from the authentication and the from address to the links is something that consumers look for. Right? Phishing, spoofing, all of that stuff is running rampant right now, and having a consistent brand experience and a consistent, experience in the URLs that are being sent is very important. A lot of mailbox providers also look for that because each element of the email contains reputation.

Right? So URLs also contain reputation.

And then even if you're not sending a lot of mail to Google or Gmail, specifically or or Google mail dot com, the consumer domains, set up Google Postmaster. The new tools they're building have much lower thresholds for showing data. They have much lower thresholds for, understanding how your domain and your brand reputation is.

And you're gonna still see things like complaint rates and, any error messages that might be coming through. And with the the Google feedback loops, so the the complaint metric, the only way that you can see if you're getting complaints against your domain is using the Google Postmaster tools. So definitely make sure you take the time to set those up. It's a very quick it's a simple DNS record in order to get access, and then you can have that metric.

You can have that information displayed right, you know, for your view. There is a forty eight hour delay, so you're not seeing real time data, but you're seeing stuff that happened two days ago. And that's how the the platform is expected to function. So if you're not doing that, highly recommend that you do it.

Even if, you know, you're only seeing data occasionally, it still gives you a good heartbeat as to how your brand reputation is going.

Next.

So within the platform, right, this is definitely a way you want to look at ensuring that you're properly set up. So there's tools to help you in regards to have you set up all of your authentication properly. It's very easy to break authentication and set it up poorly.

So when we were talking about Demark earlier and implementing that for your brand, that's what Demark's going to do. Set up a reporting address, receive the reports. Honestly, find a DMARC tool that works well for your brand and and for your budget, in order to interpret the reports unless you like reading, JSON files, which nobody likes reading JSON files just as an FYI.

Set up a tool to ensure that you're interpreting that. It will tell you where your mail comes from, if it's authenticated, if it's failing, if there are other challenges or problems with your mail, as well as if anyone's spoofing your mail. So then you'll have some data to go back and say, do I need to take that next step along the enforcement path?

So absolutely make sure you set these records up properly before you start sending any email, from your domain or any of the subdomains that you have.

So where do we wanna start when it comes to having success with email? Right? So all the positive things we wanna look at.

Consent is gonna be a winner every single time. So if somebody asks you for communications, that's gonna be a winner. That's gonna help because people are interested in your product or services. So make sure you spend time investing in ways to collect email addresses for your consumers, with consent.

This is also very important depending on the geographic region that you're sending mail to. So if you're purchasing or using, lists from a a third party, ensure that you're hygiening them. Ensure that you understand the target audience, and make sure that it is actually the audience you want to talk to.

As a recipient of a lot of cold emails, most of them end up being sent to me where I have no responsibility for that role. So pay attention to who you're sending to and pay attention to the responses from those individuals.

A lack of a spot of response from an individual, especially after two, maybe three communications, is likely that you're talking to the wrong person.

Monitor all your metrics. So look at metrics, all the time in regards to, are your open rates changing, are your click rates changing, are the number of meetings that you're booking changing. Anytime you see a decline in those metrics likely means you're starting to see a delivery problem.

Ensure your opt out's working, test it, ensure that it's in your emails, ensure that it's something that is easy for consumers to use. Make your unsubscribe as easy or easier than it is to report a message to spam. Right? If someone is given an option to say stop, they'll use that typically before they were report something to spam, especially if it's a brand or a partner or a company they recognize.

If it's something they don't recognize, chances are they might just report it as spam anyways. And if that's the case, that means you're talking to the wrong person to begin with. So email is a quality, metric, not a quantity metric. So if you continue to think I will just book more meetings by throwing more things at the wall, ensure that you understand that it's a quality metric and not a quantity metric.

Things to pay attention to. Right? Like, if you if you act like a spammer, you're going to be treated like a spammer. Right?

So if you send a whole bunch of unsolicited communications, nobody wants to read and people are reporting into spam, you're gonna have a very similar experience. And you may end up burning and churning domains. Right? These are things that have become expensive.

There's time associated with warming them up. There's time associated with buying those domains, and, you know, really look at how you're messaging and who you're messaging and really do some solid account based marketing. Right? ABM marketing is a huge thing when it comes to this type of outreach to ensure you're talking to the right persona at the companies you're reaching out to.

Now I know we talked about this. There are a lot of privacy laws, and I haven't even touched on sort of any metric of what is out there. But just as an FYI, some very high level ones that you should be familiar with, especially if you're mailing in these specific regions. Right? GDPR, the UK, privacy act, the e privacy directive in in the European region.

So all of these influence who and how you can talk to people, talk about how you can collect their personal data, and how you can use it, how long you can store it.

And there are real life consequences to violations of GDPR. There are real life consequences to violations of the UK privacy act and the e privacy directive.

And these laws are continuously evolving. There's new laws being layered on. You know, like I said, I barely scratched the surface on the number of laws in the European region, but these are the key ones to pay attention to if that's a region that you're sending emails into.

From the North American's perspective, being in Canada myself, Canada's anti spam legislation is a big deal. A lot of companies I work with, have a lot of questions about it. They're unsure how it relates under sort of the b to b marketing realm and who they can reach out to. There are some very fine line exclusions and exemptions for b to b mail, but they're very hard to ensure that you get right.

So pay extra close attention if you're mailing into, into Canada. We also have a number of different privacy legislations depending where you're located and who the recipient of those messages, are. So in Alberta, British Columbia, and Quebec, they have their own privacy legislation. Quebec just recently passed bill sixty four, which is much closer to GDPR than our federal privacy legislation, PIPEDA, which covers all of the other provinces and territories, in regards to how personal information can be used.

And a lot of people say, well, business information is not personal information. However, if you were to email me and my name is my email address, that's considered personal identifiable information. Right? So there are limits and there are restrictions, so you need to understand what those are based on the geographic region that you're mailing.

Can't spam, as well as a plethora of state legislation around privacy and how those impact the different, regions that you might be mailing to. So, the IAPP, which is the International Association of Privacy Professionals, has a, great resource that you can look at in regards to the different pieces of legislation, where they're currently in process, being passed or introduced or reviewed in committee, and those that are actually enforced.

So certainly pay attention to some of those things, when it comes to understanding the different regions. Right? California has the CCPA, that a lot of people pay attention to because it has things like right to access, right to deletion, right to correction. It has monetary penalties associated to it if you violate that legislation.

And really sort of understanding the regions that you're sending mail to becomes extra important so that you're not doing outreach in a way that actually causes violations and causes additional legal headaches for your company. So having an understanding, having a playbook, and working with a privacy consulting, working with your your legal counsel internal or external to understand the boundaries that you're paying you should be paying attention to based on the regions that you're sending mail to becomes extra important as these privacy legislations and anti spam laws around the world continue to evolve and continue to be passed.

Last I heard, there was a hundred and thirty five anti spam laws around the world. So there's a whole bunch of them. People need to pay attention. And those laws are constantly updating, constantly changing, and they vary quite a bit across the different regions of the world, and how their their impact to your email campaigns are are really coming across and making sure that you're on the right side of the law.

Some of them have very large anti, monetary penalties.

Others are civil, so you could be sued. So there are, you know, again, a combination of those things that you should be paying attention to just to make sure you're always on the right side of the law.

Two others that I quickly wanted to mention. Brazil has a GDPR style law, and Australia has had an anti spam law since two thousand and three. So a lot of these laws have been established. They do have history. They do have case behind them, and they're they're very well established. So understanding how you fall into those in the different regions that you're mailing becomes extra important as you as you move forward with your outreach efforts.

We have a list of a few resources that we also wanted to share. You'll get this as part of, the presentation.

Afterwards, we can just skip to those just so people can see. These tools will help you with everything from, understanding your, current reputation, monitoring your reputation, email validation, helping, you know, implement BIMI, as well as just sort of understanding how your communications, are performing and how they're delivering across the multiple different mailbox providers that you might be sending communications to. So we wanted to put these all in one place and make it nice and easy for you to find, afterwards.

And I think we're ready for questions.

Yeah. I see one new question in the chat.

And so we'll let you guys take that. And then, any other questions, we have about seven minutes left. Definitely pop them into the q and a. We wanna make sure that you leave with no questions unanswered.

And just to reiterate, the session was recorded. It will be sent to you, or a recording of the session will be sent to your email in about two hours, and the slide deck will be shared with you later this afternoon. So you'll have access to all those resources that Matt just covered.

But, we'll, just wrap up with some final q and a.

Sure.

Thoughts on warm up?

Jeff, what do you think about, email warm up when it comes to, new email addresses on an existing domain?

You're on mute.

So yeah. I believe Albert might have answered that. Yeah. So if an established domain but a new email address, it's still important to warm it up to an extent.

We recommend starting the new accounts with about twenty five a day week in regards to sending out emails, on week one, and then we typically ramp it up. Excuse me. Typically, ramp it up to about fifty a day on week two and doubling the volume each week until expected till you reach your expected volume. That's typically how we work.

Okay.

Yeah. I'm happy to take the question on, the subdomains.

So, and, Matt, I'm also curious of your thoughts on that one too. But, when it comes to subdomains, I believe they have unique, kind of their own unique health. So you should warm up a subdomain the same that you would a root domain. So let's say sales loft dot com.

Let's say you set up mail dot sales loft dot com. You should warm that up as you would any other independent domain. We are starting to see, Google has specifically mentioned that, deliverability and health is kind of starting to be shared between subdomains. They're they've only really poked at that.

There's really no solid answers on, like, how that would work.

One often thing we may see is that sales, for example, gets their own subdomain, and marketing may get their own subdomain.

And that and that all can work. It's just that in the future, I would not be surprised if they all get considered under the same root domain.

And you also have the you also lose the day to day business type traffic. So let's say your sales domain does suffer some sort of deliverability problem, it can be harder to bring that back. So just keep that in mind.

Matt, do you have anything to add to that?

Yeah. I I think there's lots of times when when you should consider doing warm up. Anytime you're turning on a a new subdomain, you should do warm up. If you're changing platforms for whatever reason, you should do warm up.

If you change IP addresses, it requires warm up. If you change authentication. So if you move platforms, you're changing your DKIM keys, you're changing potentially your envelope domain for sending email. This more so when you're changing between, like, marketing technology platforms.

All of those would require a warm up. And then I think the other part would be if you do burn your domain, you know, if you hurt your reputation, dialing your traffic way back and doing another warm up of really good quality traffic, will help with recovery of that domain. So, you know, there's a lot of times that I talk to customers about segmentation, much like you were saying, Gabe, a marketing subdomain, a sales subdomain, a transactional subdomain, and having those messages authenticate in a line way and having their own reputation, but with the understanding that all of that is part of the same organization.

And, yes, domain reputation is mostly independent, but never completely independent.

And, Brian, I also see you have a question in regards to how to basically set up the send delay. And within your SalesLoft application, there's a area in the admin settings as to where you can get that done. What I'll do is I'll send you over a link showing you how to do that.

Yeah. That's available. If you go into your sales left admin settings, you do have to be an admin to change that. That's if you go in your settings, it's, like, in the bottom left where it's, like, team.

You should have an option there for email. You go in there and you can set your send delay.

It's gonna be in seconds, not minutes, so keep that in mind.

So not, anonymous user is s.

We have a lot of customers that reach out who are on trial with us as we have a lot of per we have a lot of personalized emails sent or having a lot of personalized emails sent to these customers would be difficult. What solution would you approach in such a case? It's a really good question. Personalization at scale is one thing that SalesLoft tries to do tries to enable persons to send personalized emails.

So in those specific cases, I can say that we have a lot of features around this coming out at some point, but when they come out, I cannot say exactly. But, hopefully, you know, personalization within SalesLoft should just get easier is is one thing. The next thing is, like, personalizing realistically as much as you can is kinda as Matt said. It's really about the quality of emails. How can you how can you break that noise of the inbox? And how do you get someone who's gonna be engaged in a way where they see this email and they're like, wow. This this resonates with me and I want to reply.

So, really, you know, to answer the question, what's the best case is personalize as much as you can, use rhythm as much as you can, try to get as many buyer signals as you can, try to use as much interesting language. A lot of you know, another interesting thing is there's a lot of subject line science that we have, documented online.

But things is, like, singular words subject lines do better. So it's flying as much as those types of things, and you can find those on our knowledge base, as you can realistically while understanding you still have a quota, you still have to send so many emails. Just trying to implement as much as you can would be the recommendation.

Yeah. I think one thing to add to that is depending on what your trial journey looks like, building automation that says, you know, day one, you could do this on your trial. Day seven, you should be at this point with your trial. Day ten, you should be at whatever point with your trial.

Something that's going to be universally necessary or certain the universal experience of your workflow as well is certainly something that you should look at. It doesn't necessarily have to be personalized, but the fact that you can drip it out over time during that trial period with your customers gives them that personalized experience of, you know, as I work through the trial, this is the journey I should be on. So you can move out of potentially the sales communication back and forth during the trial period to a user experience guided walk through almost of the trial, as a separate mail stream, during that period, and then intersperse that with your sales communication to keep tabs on your customers and ensure that they are, moving forward towards closing a business deal with you or implementing a purchase.

I think we have time for one more new question, which I see in the chat. And then, any other questions that come up, please, we'll follow-up with you via email, and we can, help address those questions afterwards.

So I'll take, you know, that last question. So the question is, if, email address or domain is affected by spam rules, how long does it take to restore the domain? One thing to, understand about the, domain health, it is not granular. It is not yes or no as more of a temperature. So that being said, it's a if you look at Google postmaster tools, you have, like, very high, high, medium, and low.

So the the most important thing is that as soon as you start to see and this kinda goes back to keeping an eye on basically every sort of measure you can. If you start to see a dip, that is when you should take action because it is much easier to heal a little bit than a lot. So let's say if you if you've burned a domain to the point where its reputation is zero, it can take essentially, you're rebooting that domain's health. So it can take ninety days or potentially longer if it has reached, you know, absolute rock bottom in terms of health.

So it's gonna be much easier that if you see a smaller shift, you can heal that within, you know, days to weeks.

So it's much easier to monitor and react than it is to realize that everything is going to spam and there's gonna take, you know, months of time to heal.

So that that would be my advice there. I don't know if anybody else wants to touch on it.

Yeah. I I agree. I think it depends on how long it's been in a bad state. That's part of it, as well as the actions you take to fix those things. So, you know, if you end up on a block list, it's understanding why you ended up on said block list and the steps you need to take to to remediate that.

Or if you end up in, like, a spam filter, that's a a more corporate use, and you have to remediate something with Proofpoint because now all of Proofpoint domains are blocking you. There are different actions that need to be taken, but understanding what caused the issue is always the first step to understanding how to remediate.

When it comes to things like Google Postmaster reputation, you know, it could be a thirty day journey. It could be a hundred and twenty day journey.

Again, it comes down to what caused the issue and how long has it been happening.

Right on.

Alright. Awesome. Answered all the questions. Yeah.

I think so too. Thank you everyone for, you know, sticking around with us and answering or asking such great questions. And thank you, host, for, you know, providing such valuable information for us.

We are gonna, you know, like I said, send you follow ups with the recording and, slide deck. So definitely let us know if there's anything else we can do to help or any other questions we can help address here.

It's a really important topic that we plan to address, you know, a few times a year since it's, frequently changing. So, definitely check out the next time we we host a session similar to this one.

Alright. Thank you, everyone.

Thank you.