Cold emails have an excellent ROI. But getting as much as possible out of your cold email campaigns requires the right touch. If your email campaigns are under-performing, you may need to optimize to make sure they’re not getting filtered as spam. We’ll walk you through everything you need to know to ensure your emails are received.
How emails drive traffic to your website
When done well, an email marketing campaign should get more people to visit your website. There are three main ways this happens:
The first option is to send out an email newsletter. These keep your audience informed about new blog posts, company news, and whatever else you think will be relevant to them. The idea is to highlight different parts of your website so anyone interested in the subject matter can visit to learn more.
Another strategy is to send out emails that highlight limited-time promotions. Those on the fence about buying your product or service may click over to your website to take advantage of the deal.
Finally, you can send out emails as part of a marketing sequence. Sequences are designed to move a new lead through your sales pipeline so they’re ready to be closed by a salesperson.
When designing email sequences, it’s often good to include plenty of links to your website. Doing so will help to keep your audience engaged with your brand. And if you’re using website tracking software, you’ll get a ton of information about your leads which you can use for effective pitching.
Tips to ensure your emails are received
The emails you send might be getting filtered out of your audience’s inbox as spam for numerous reasons. If you’re dealing with this problem, here are some strategies you can try to resolve the issue.
Start your campaigns slowly
Both internet service providers (ISPs) and email providers automatically filter some emails as spam. They do that when they’ve identified that the sender of the email is untrustworthy.
When you’re just starting, ISPs don’t know whether your IP address is a trustworthy sender or not. One of the things they look at to determine this is the number of emails you’re sending.
If you send out hundreds or thousands of emails at once, your IP address will look like a spam account since it doesn’t have a history of trustworthiness for a recipient’s ISP to look at.
That means one way to make sure more of your emails get received is to start by sending fewer of them. You can gradually increase the number over time as your trustworthiness increases.
Set up a tracking subdomain
Another idea is to set up a tracking subdomain. This article will tell you how to do that.
Tracking subdomains are secondary domain names tied to your original one. You can use them for all of your tracking, links, open and unsubscribe metrics. Doing this should help more of your emails make it to your recipients successfully.
Remove links and images – at first
Links and images can also sometimes cause your emails to get spam filtered. These have the most significant potential to trigger a spam filter for the first cold email sequence. That’s because the recipient hasn’t interacted with your emails yet, so their ISP won’t know whether or not you’re trustworthy.
Make sure you’re targeting the right audience
You could also negatively impact your B2B sales process by targeting the wrong audience.
If you send emails to people who don’t want them, they’re much likelier to mark them as spam. And if enough people mark your emails as spam, your trustworthiness as a sender tanks. At that point, ISPs may automatically begin filtering the emails you send out as spam.
Consider refining your audience if you notice more of your emails are marked as spam. Doing so could help you replenish your sales pipeline by improving the hit rate on your sent emails.
Check your feedback loops
Most major email providers have feedback loops. You can check these to see the percentage of people who have complained about the emails you send. This is another good thing to get into the habit of doing.
Checking your feedback loops should give you more insight into how people are interacting with your emails. This can clue you in to the types of changes needed to make sure more of your emails are opened.
And when you increase the rate of interaction your emails get, you increase your trustworthiness. Ultimately, that’s the key to having fewer of your emails go to spam.
Optimize your sending schedule
We wrote an earlier tip about how sending too many emails at once can get you marked as a spam sender. But even if you’re not sending a ton of emails, you could end up having the same problem if you send them all at once.
Spam filters look for accounts that send a massive number of emails all at the same time. So if you space your sending schedule out, you can send the number of emails you want without worry.
Purge your email list regularly
Bounce rate is one of the factors that can impact whether your emails are marked as spam or not. It could skyrocket if you’re sending many emails to accounts that don’t exist or are set up just to receive spam.
That’s why purging your email lists should also help decrease your spam filter rate. Try to be consistent about eliminating the problem accounts on your lists. Doing so could help more of your cold emails make it into your real audience’s inboxes.
Use more engaging titles
Improving the number of people who engage with your emails is an excellent way to boost your trustworthiness as a sender. And one of the most effective ways to do that is through engaging subject lines.
The best email titles:
- Offer a clear value proposition
- Use numbers in the title
- Are relevant
- Have a touch of personalization
Check out our article on email titles for more guidance on how to optimize your own.
Try a double opt-in method for your email lists
The key to having a low spam filter rate is ensuring that the people you send them to want to receive them. That’s one of the reasons why it’s a smart move to try a double opt-in strategy for your email list sign-ups.
The idea is that only those most interested in what you have to say will go through a double opt-in sign-up process. That way, you’re left with a super high-quality email list that won’t report your emails as spam.
Leveraging your website traffic to optimize your sales pipeline
Once you get people to your website, you need to use the right strategies to convert them into paying customers. If you think you could be doing better at this stage of your sales pipeline, here are some strategies you can try to improve:
- Use targeted landing pages for each of the different ways someone can get to your site
- Optimize your CTAs
- Create forms that are easier to fill out
- Use high-quality images
- Offer new customers a small discount
- Add a live chatbot to your homepage
- A/B test your web pages
Improve your B2B sales results with LeadLander
Emails are a great way to get more people to visit your website. But you still need to do something with that traffic if you want to hit your B2B sales goals. That’s why you should consider giving LeadLander a try.
Our website visitor tracking software is the best in the business, providing a wealth of information about who’s visiting your website.
You can use that information to craft personalized pitches to increase your conversion rate. Sign up for a free 14-day trial of LeadLander today.
