How to be a welcome guest when nobody expects you to come?
Cold email outreach takes lots of fine-tuning and adjustment before it starts delivering results. Some people don’t have much experience with cold outreach campaigns, so they fall victims to numerous deliverability issues. They start viewing cold outreach campaigns as an exercise in futility and a drain on their time and budget. After all, what’s the point of bothering a recipient who didn’t invite you to their business mailbox?
However, when you know what to do to secure high deliverability and understand the core elements of a successful cold outreach campaign, you know how to draw attention and make each cold email a pleasant surprise rather than an unwelcome intrusion.
It’s a good thing that this cold email deliverability checklist is here to help you achieve the former and avoid the latter!
Start with a domain audit
Quite a few senders learn about getting blacklisted until it’s too late. Sometimes, they only figure it out after launching several unsuccessful campaigns that led them to getting their domain name banned and completely unsalvageable. That’s unfortunate, given that you can de-list yourself with consistent and regular warmup campaigns.
The same thing can be told about a number of other factors that occur behind the curtains of your email outreach. You never know if something’s wrong until your deliverability drops and none of your emails is opened and viewed.
How to make sure your cold email campaigns perform to their fullest capacity?
A full-scale deliverability audit can help you cut back on the stress. This is why we suggest getting a good tool with multiple features to cover each aspect of cold email marketing.
- If you have a good tool that can comb through blacklist databases for you, it will let you know whether you’re good to go or need some warming up.
- An in-depth examination of your DNS records, from a DKIM signature and an SPF record to a DMARC policy, will show you any areas for improvement and remove potential pitfalls.
- Content analysis can point out any spam trigger words and misplaced links in your pre-made email templates, letting you send the cleanest messages that would appeal to your target audience and keep spam filters calm.
When you know that all your vulnerabilities are taken care of and there is currently nothing that can sabotage your campaigns from within, you can proceed with confidence and keep your mind on more relevant challenges.
Add BIMI
If you want your recipients to instantly recognize your brand, installing a BIMI record (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) for your domain is the way to go.
- Insert your brand logo in the preview. Creating and adding a BIMI record allows you to design and add a brand logo (SVG format) that will be displayed directly in the receiving inbox. It means that your prospects will be able to see that the message was sent by an actual employee from an actual company.
- Stand out from the crowd. Since cold email marketing is all about catching your prospects’ attention and being memorable, a BIMI record lets you do all that without coming off as obnoxious or annoying. It’s amazing how much difference one tiny image can make!
- Prove that you’re a safe sender. A BIMI record is based on your DMARC policy. That means that it can’t be forged by phishers and, therefore, serves as a proof of your legitimacy as a sender. This addition is extremely helpful during these uneasy times, when phishing attacks are quite common, and you must protect your brand identity at any cost.
To implement BIMI, you need a Verified Mark Certificate or VMC. VMCs were developed specifically to ensure that only credible senders can use a tiny version of their logo when sending mail. When purchasing a Verified Mark Certificate, the user goes through authentication and DMARC check. Only senders who demonstrated DMARC enforcement are allowed to purchase s VMC and use brand logo (think of a blue checkmark next to the user’s name on Twitter - this is how you know that you’re reading a tweet from the real Robert Downey Jr. or Neil deGrasse. Currently, you can buy a Verified Mark Certificate at DigiCert.
4 Steps to Implementing BIMI
- Change your DMARC policy to any other than “p=none”.
- Copyright your brand logo and purchase a Verified Mark Certificate for it.
- Make an SVG version of your brand logo.
- Use BIMI generator to upload your SVG logo and generate a BIMI record in a matter of seconds.
- Publish your record in your DNS records.
