When it's not your fault...

There's very few problems outside your control. Email deliverability isn't one of those if you work at a company. Most reps are yelling into the void when they send an email

It's Monday morning. You log in to your computer and check your inbox. You have 10 unopened emails. 1 event notification about the company Zoom happy hour. 1 reminding you the company all hands is in 1 hour. Another email from a prospect telling you they have to “think” about it. Another 3 are slack notifications about tasks you have to complete this week. And 4 are newsletters from marketing… and 0 are good news…

You decide TODAY is the day your emails will be heard!!! You WILL be SEEN! They WILL know your name!!!

You finished going through @bowtiedsalesguy course. You KNOW what matters to the prospect. You craft a god-tier cold email. It's the perfect balance of intrigue and relevant pain. When they open this email Zeus himself will throw his LIGHTING BOLT from the heavens above striking them RIGHT in their pocketbook!

You eagerly prepare to send the email campaign. You've meticulously placed your ducks in a neat line. One might say all in a row… and then *click*

Boom! *Poof* nothing happens… again…

If this sounds like you then you're not alone. Tens of thousands of sales reps across the world experience this same problem on a daily basis. What is it?

Cold Email deliverability

Yes, that’s right. Your emails simply aren’t being seen. It isn’t actually your fault. Can you believe it? The multi-million in rev $ corporation with hundreds of millions in VC funding can't figure out how to get an email delivered. Crazy. But this is the world we live in. In this SubStack, we'll be going over what you as a rep can do to combat this.

---

How to get your emails delivered as an employee

In order to show you how to do it I'll tell interaction I recently had with a client.

He couldn’t figure out why people weren’t opening his emails. When I say open emails I mean 3+ opens count as 1 real open.

Spam filters will open and scan your email upon sending to make sure the content isn’t spam. Sometimes they'll open it 2 times to be safe. So the only way to know for sure that your prospect opened your email is to count 3+ opens as real and legitimate opens. Anything less and it’s a guessing game.

So with that being said. How did I fix this person’s issue?

I went through a checklist of the points of failure when delivering an email.

1. Are your DNS records configured correctly?

2. Is your inbox warmed up and has a good reputation?

3. How many emails are you sending per domain per day?

4. Is your IP/domain blacklisted?

5. Is the email data clean/real/verified?

6. Is your messaging spam-proof?

If the answer is YES for all the questions above then it's your messaging that is the problem. If it's maybe or no for ANY of the questions above then it might be your messaging but it also might not. There's no way to find out without testing. But the issue is the test results will be inaccurate because 1-6 all affect your open rates/email deliverability.

Now since you're an employee you won’t have access to the records in your company needed to change the above. The only things you can change are the following:

• Data

• Bounce rate (clean your data)

• How many emails you send per day

• Messaging

Outside the above, if you want to *guarantee* that your emails are getting delivered you have to create your own system.

Search my Twitter for “deliverability” to learn how to set it up. I won't be doing that here.

---

Data

If the data you're getting isn’t good then you have to buy better data. There are many platforms you can use to get data. It all depends on your budget. But the solution to bad data is better data.

Just go to G2 and look under b2b data providers

The best you can get is ZoomInfo but as a rep, I get you're limited on budget. Just know you get what you pay for.

Emails are meant for landing not bouncing

If your bounce rate is more than 3% then you have a real problem. Each time an email bounces it affects your future deliverability. So get software like NeverBounce and run all emails you will be emailing through that software. I had a client do this and his response rate went from 0-4% and got rid of most of the bounced emails.

This could dramatically increase your deliverability rates.

You're sending how many emails??

Don't send more than 125 emails per domain per day. That’s it. There are no expectations. It doesn’t matter if you have 125 different inboxes. If they're all on the same domain don't send more than 1 per inbox. It's 125 emails MAX PER DOMAIN.

Since you're working for a company just limit yourself to 125 emails per day.

Don't kill the Messenger

It’s not the system’s fault if your email suck. Each time your emails get marked as spam the whole company suffers. Get marked as spam? Your whole team gets put in cold email timeout and an entire week of outreach disappears into the void.

Seriously stop sending irrelevant emails and being pushy with prospects. Adding them into a 200-step follow-up email cadence won’t get them to respond. It'll just piss them off. They aren't afraid to mark you as spam.

Learn how to make your cold emails better by following @bowtiedsalesguy on Twitter and buying his course I won't help you with your messaging. But he will and has for countless others.

---

Wrapping it up

Phew, that was a long one, wasn’t it? Hopefully, you learned why your emails aren’t getting responses and what you can do about it as a rep.

I'll be doing more Substack articles in the future. A few tutorials. Some rants here and there. Maybe some guest writers 👀

If you have any questions please leave them down below and I'll get to them. If you want to see a specific topic addressed comment here or DM me at @bowtiedsystems on Twitter.