In truth, the vast majority of cold emailers have huge deliverability issues. This is no secret. Look at your spam folder.

Most send out spammy email scripts and burn through domains in days and weeks as a result of that.

I am going to show you how you can significantly increase the lifetime of your domains with my deliverability checklist and actually reach your prospect’s inbox.

Not only is this going to save money but also bring in more positive replies. But first we must analyse the current situation.

Why is it that most land in spam? How can this be such a universal problem?

One of the most discussed reasons is that email providers like Google and Outlook are getting better every day at filtering wheat from chaff.

But the fact that a small percentage of cold emailers surpass their peers by orders of magnitude tells me that deliverability is not only about technical setup.

It is actually merely about your technical setup.

The False Belief

Deliverability is definitely fundamental to the success of your campaign, and it is made up of two major factors.

• Technical Setup

• Content

Whereas technical setup is rather easy to cover, teaching something that requires a body of knowledge is very hard. It is very difficult to come up with frameworks that are actually helpful to the layman, and this is exactly the reason you mostly hear about the very basic technical side of things.

• DKIM

• SPF

• DMARC

But this does not help paint a picture of deliverability as a whole.

This is the origin of the false belief most cold emailers hold. The false belief that setting these up will do all the legwork for you.

And of course, this leads to most people absolutely getting their domains obliterated by Google and Outlook.

Here is my mental checklist to make deliverability a breeze.

TL;DR

Provide actual value, don’t BS people and show that you are human.

Rather-Technical-Side-Of-Things

Let’s start with the more technical stuff first, as it is easy to cover. Make sure you follow this checklist with every new campaign.

The main goal with these is to emulate human behaviour.

Spintax

'Spinning your text’ means that you simply replace some words with their synonyms. This can be {achieved|done} like this. Most sending tools have their own 'grammar' for Spintax.

You spin text to give your emails a more human touch. The sending tool will randomize the words you put in to make every single email unique, which in turn makes it more human.

Test Multiple Variations

Split-testing is not only important to experiment with different audiences and email scripts, but also to bring in more… variance!

This is also a measure we take to give our email script a more human touch.

The difference to Spintax — it comes with two benefits.

1. We are testing multiple variations with our audience to find the best performing script.

2. And at the same time, we are creating more and more unique emails.

Adding Spintax to each variation is as close to human behaviour as we can get. It’s Spintax on steroids with the added benefit of split-testing to gather data.

Important: Make sure to implement one variation per 500–1000 prospects you are reaching out to.

To test our variations properly, we will need enough prospects to make data-driven conclusions as to which variation is performing best.

The Most Basic Signature In The World

This was one of the biggest learnings for me, so write this down and implement it right away.

Contrary to popular belief, the signature is absolutely unimportant. So make sure it doesn’t add any dead weight.

If you are currently struggling with deliverability and also find yourself having a complex signature, try replacing your entire signature with your full name instead, and then send me a screenshot of a deliverability test showing the before and after. The average improvement this brings is shocking.

As a side note: My signature is super complex. So complex that I even use spintax: {Can Ersöz|Can}

Change Your Warmup Filter Tags Now And Then

For Smartlead, there are these two 5-letter words that one can freely choose to make filtering warmup emails in your inbox managers easier.

Make sure you change that every week or so to avoid non-human patterns.

This is not as paramount as the last 3 steps, but it won’t hurt to do this.

Content-Side-Of-Things

This is a lever long enough to move the world.

This can really make or break everything you have done on the technical-side-of-things.

I will structure these steps as if we were writing an email and going through your copy paragraph by paragraph.

Are You Real? — Show Them That You Are A Real Human

First five seconds. Are you real?

• 'Did you do any surface-level research on my company?'

• 'Who are you?'

• 'Why are you here?'

Surface-level means basic research. What industry are they in? Which town? What are they roughly doing? Who are you speaking to? CEO? Head of Marketing?

No-one needs you to tell them that they went to Yale and graduated in 2008.

WIIFM — What’s In It For Me?

Are you talking about yourself? Or rather, telling the prospect how you are looking to help them.

Make it about the prospect.

Generally, no-one cares about your company, you or how good you are.

Can you help your prospect? Good. Show them how.

Do You Actually Offer Anything?

Definition: An offer is a presenting of something for acceptance. Meaning that your offer as a standalone **allows someone to accept or decline** it.

It is not your company history. It is also not what your company does.

Rather, it is the thing you will do for them.

Good example:

'You pay a fixed amount every month, and I’ll generate leads and work them for you. I guarantee that I’ll bring 8 people every month. If I don’t, you don’t pay.'

This sentence is an offer because it is possible to either accept or decline it.

Bad example:

'We do email marketing with Klaviyo and brought in 80 leads a day for another e-com brand.'

This is not acceptable. (You get the joke?)

Biblical: Start Giving I

This is all about your call-to-action — so the ending of your email.

I am certain that you will have used this one already: ’Let’s jump on a 30-minute call on Friday.’

You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it.

You are making an ask here. Out of nowhere.

I suggest you come up with ways to give instead of asking. Here is a list of things a SaaS could use (getting more effective in this order):

• Offer a document covering how your product exactly works and how your target niche uses them

• Offer a video in which you show them how they would use your software

• Offer a video + free 14-day trial of your software.

So instead of making the ask to jump on a call, your new call-to-action could look like this:

‘I recorded a video showing how you could use SOFTWARE-NAME — mind if I share it with you?’

You record and send the video as soon as they reply positively, and you then send a link to a free 14-day trial.

Biblical: Start Giving II

This is after you have sent out your email and want to follow up with prospects.

Use your sales assets when following up with prospects. Not always, but most of the time. Try to implement the giving-attitude in every aspect of your cold outreach.

• Blogs

• Articles

• Tweets

• LinkedIn posts

• YouTube videos

… Whatever assets you have. Use them.

There is always space below the classic ‘Hey, just touching base here. Did you see my last message?‘ to offer some more assets for your prospect.

There are way more things I implement in my cold emails to massively boost deliverability, but this is getting too long for this format.

Sign up below if you want to read the rest of the article or get in touch with me if you have deliverability issues right now, and I’ll take a look at your copy for free!

Talk soon,

Can