Make investors subscribe to YOUR mailing list!📬Part 4 - keeping your emails away from spam folders.
In this part I explain how to keep your delivery rates high and prevent the "burnout".
In the previous 3 parts of these series I have explained:
How to find👀 the contact information of investors for your Investor Mailing List (IML). Read part 1 here.
How to find that information in large volumes at the lowest cost. Read part 2 here.
What do you need to know about the anti-spam laws in the US (CAN-SPAM regulations). Read part 3 here.
But what is more important than not getting screwed by the government regulations? Right, the prevention of a far more likely event - burning your email. And it WILL burn in a very unpleasant way if you don’t take precautions. In this part I will explain what you need to do to make sure that your emails don’t end up in SPAM folders.
Making sure your email doesn’t burn out🔥 from these volumes.
With system in place, you will be exporting close to 10,000 emails every single month so keeping an eye on your deliverability rates is crucial or nearly ALL of your emails will end up in the spam folders of your recipients. In this section I will provide you with 5 steps you need to take in order to keep your deliverability rates high and your mailbox healthy😷
Step 1: check your mailbox deliverability before sending any campaign.
I personally use a free tool called mail-tester which you can find here. To find your deliverability score follow these steps:
Go to mail-tester:
Follow the instructions on the site and you’ll get your score page that will look like this:
Bare in mind that I send 200 cold emails from my personal email every single day. No breaks, no weekends - this machine runs automatically and I have to pause it and make small changes once a month or so. The goal for this part of the series is to get you to the deliverability score of at least 7/10.
Step 2: if your current deliverability score is below 7, FIX it before sending more emails.
Of course not everyone will get a 9.5 score which is completely fine and nothing to be worries about. On numerous occasions have I found myself with the score of 4/10 and as you can see, I fixed it so don’t panic. Here is what you do to improve your email deliverability score:
Review all the reasons why you’ve lost points. In my case, I’ve only lost 0.5 points because I’m on one of the blacklists (SORBS 28 days), this one is pretty much impossible to get out of if you send volumes like mine so I won’t worry about it.
Identify the point-losing reasons that are “easy-fixes”. For example, you might lose points if some of your links are broken, the system will show which ones are broken and you simply replace them.
If your score is below 2 - abandon the ship! Some things might be beyond repair or just not worth the effort. If this is your work email connected to your custom domain - you’re screwed because you’ve messed up your domain name’s deliverability and you just can’t abandon a ship like this.
If you can’t abandon the ship, take your time to repair it.
Stop all the running email campaigns from your inbox or any inbox connected to that domain name.
Review all the “easy-fixes” that I’ve described in the second point.
Use email warm-up tool. Here is the article about this process.
If you don’t want to pay for any extra tools, just send emails to your other mailboxes that aren’t connected to the “messed up” domain name, click through all the links and respond to that email. Do that for 5-15 days and the deliverability score will start going up.
Step 3: bounces kill your email campaigns, here is how to kill the bouncing☠️.
I have already mentioned this in Part 1. of these series, but make sure to apply the right filter in Apollo.io - here is how:
Search people → more filters (bottom left) → scroll to the bottom and click on “email status” → click “verified” → apply filters. Done!
This is the easiest step you can take in this process so please don’t forget about it.
Step 4: clean the emails again.
After you export your email list from Apollo, go to Mailshake.com and create your email campaign. I personally use Mailshake to run my personal cold-email campaigns (the 200 emails/day I’ve mentioned) but you can use any other service that you prefer.
The process of creating an email campaign on Mailshake is very straightforward so I won’t describe it in greater details but the step that you need to focus on is №2 - “Prospects”. This is the cleaning part and once you upload your CSV file from Apollo, and all you need to do now is open list cleaner as mailshake suggests and wait for 10-15 minutes. Once it finishes, you will see the following at the bottom right of your screen:
After you remove “Risky” and “Bad” prospects and either proceed to creating your email sequence or go to the 5th step - the second email cleaning.
Step 5 (optional): clean the emails AGAIN.
If you clean your email list through Mailshake you will end up with a bounce rate of 0.5%-1.7% If you want to go an extra mile and decrease that rate to 0.2%-0.8% range, you will need to export the clean email list from Mailshake and clean it ONCE AGAIN on another platform. It can be done on any platform that allows bulk email verification.
When it comes to the standard 10k/month volumes, I would recommend sticking with just one email cleaning step through Mailshake but if the volume is higher, I suggest using the second email clean.
Pro of second email cleaning: you’ll have a very small bounce rate, I personally have gone as low as 0.2% bounces for over 16,000 emails sent.
Con of second email cleaning: you’ll lose another 10-15% of your email list. When you clean your list, the system sometimes removes emails that are perfectly fine but might be a tiny-tiny bit risky so you might remove 1 bounce from you campaign at a cost of losing 200 emails from being sent at all.
If you chose to second-clean it, I’d recommend Snov.io because it’s one of the cheapest and most reliable tools out there.
Just go to Bulk Email Verification and bam, you’re all set.
This concludes Part 4 of these series. In the next (and last) part, I will explain how you should construct the emails that will make investors actually subscribe to your updates. So stay tuned!
After my last post I got quite a few requests to help people setup their IML growth machines and for understandable reasons. Even if you have all the right steps in front of you in the form of Fundraising Radio’s blog you’re reading right now, if you don’t have experience in this field, it’ll take a while to setup and launch the system.
So if you need help setting up your IML growth machine, feel free to book a quick call below.