B2B Cold Emailing: How to Increase Your Deliverability Rate

A low deliverability rate can spell disaster for your B2B cold emailing strategy. Available to view in most email marketing platforms and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, deliverability rate is a measurement of how many prospects received your email. You may send a sales-related cold email to 300 prospects with whom you've had no prior contact, only for 30 of them to actually receive it. This means your deliverability rate would be 10%.

Deliverability rates are typically lower for cold emails as opposed to warm or hot emails. Rather than reaching prospects' inboxes, your emails may land in prospects' spam folders. Alternatively, prospects' email clients may reject your emails altogether. Whenever one of your emails is filtered as spam or rejected by a prospect's email client, your deliverability rate will decrease. Problems such as these are more common with cold emails because they involve first-time communications. Fortunately, you can increase the deliverability rate of your cold emails in several ways.

Avoid Using a Webmail Address

When sending cold emails, avoid using a webmail address. Webmail addresses are those offered by free web-based email services, such as Gmail, Yahoo and AOL Mail. Some B2B companies use a webmail address, believing it's just as effective as a branded address. The problem with webmail addresses, however, is that they look unprofessional. Prospects may not recognize your B2B company if you send them cold emails from a webmail address. And if they don't recognize your B2B company, they may assume your cold emails are spam.

Prune Your List

You can increase your cold emailing deliverability rate by pruning your list. All sales-related emailing strategies typically involve a list of prospects -- and cold emailing is no exception. You'll need to harvest or acquire the email addresses of prospects, after which you can add those addresses to a list for your cold emailing strategy. Rather than just blindly cold emailing prospects from this list, though, you should prune it.

Pruning means going through your list to remove addresses that are invalid, duplicate or otherwise not useful. If an email address doesn't use a valid format, for instance, there's no point in keeping it on your list. With an invalid format, any cold emails send to it will be rejected. The same applies to duplicate emails. Sending the same email to the same prospect will typically result in one of the emails being rejected. For a higher deliverability rate, you should prune your list by removing these bad addresses.

Monitor Your Sender Reputation

Don't forget to monitor your sender reputation. Sender reputation is a measurement of your credibility and trustworthiness as an email sender. The better your sender reputation, the higher your deliverability rate will be. Emails clients will trust you if you have a positive sender reputation, so they typically won't filter your emails as spam, nor will they reject your emails. With a negative sender reputation, on the other hand, your deliverability will decrease.

Sender Score is a commonly used metric for sender reputation. Sender Score is an algorithmic system developed by Return Path that assigns a score ranging from 0 to 100 to each outgoing email server (the sender). By monitoring your sender reputation, such as your Sender Score, you'll know whether your emails are perceived as trustworthy and credible.

Create Click-Enticing Subject Lines

Another way to increase your cold emailing deliverability rate is to create click-enticing subject lines. According to research by Convince and Convert, roughly one in three prospects decide whether to open an email based entirely on its subject line. In other words, they read the subject line of an email to see what it's about. If the subject line is enticing, they'll probably open it. If it's dull or boring, chances are they won't open it.

How can click-enticing subject lines lead to a higher deliverability rate exactly? With click-enticing subject lines, more prospects will open your emails. Email clients will take notice of your high open rate. They'll see that prospects are engaged with your emails. As a result, they'll reject and filter fewer of your email.

Time Your Cold Emails

Timing matters when cold emailing prospects. If you send them at the wrong time, prospects may overlook them. And by the time they check their inboxes, your cold emails could be buried below a dozen or more newer emails where they go unseen. This will essentially create a low open rate that, as mentioned above, can lower your deliverability rate.

To determine the best time for your cold emails, you should experiment. Try sending cold emails on different days of the week and different times of the day to determine what works best. According to HubSpot, 10 a.m. on Monday through Friday works well for many B2B companies. Other B2B companies, though, may experience greater success using a different schedule. This is why you should experiment with your own dates and times when cold emailing prospects.

Avoid Using Too Many Images

You should limit the number of images used in your cold emails. Images aren't necessarily bad. On the contrary, they can help you create engaging emails that compel prospects to respond and, thus, buy your B2B company's products or services. The problem is that using too many images can harm the user experience (UX) of your emails. Your emails may load slowly if they have too many images, resulting in a poorer UX that ultimately decreases your deliverability rate.

For a higher deliverability rate, as well as a more effective cold emailing strategy, you should avoid using too many images in your emails. One or two images will typically suffice. You'll can include a few images related to your B2B company's brand or its products or services, resulting in a better UX and a higher deliverability rate.

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