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Intro

Spam is a big challenge in cold outbound for two reasons: getting sent to spam is relatively easy, and getting out of spam is relatively hard.

This guide will help you with both of those things. You’ll learn how to prevent landing in spam and how to avoid getting there in the first place. The information here is based on real experience earned by sending millions of emails with my agency, Aurora, and from building Za-zu, a cold email sequencer.

How does hitting spam happen in the first place? A friend came to me recently with a familiar story. His startup had been sending a modest amount of cold outbound for a while. Some of it was working. Lately, though, performance was dipping. Their emails were landing in spam.

And it wasn’t just their cold outbound that was landing in spam. It was all of their emails. Emails to customers weren’t getting read. Investors were texting to ask why updates were landing in the spam folder. Even internal emails—between team members!—were getting whisked away.

Landing in spam folders ultimately means that:

1. You will not be able to grow revenue via cold outbound (potentially millions in lost revenue).
2. If you are sending from your company’s domain, you are risking the domain itself.

This handbook is a lifeline. A survival manual. A last-minute emergency surgery to get you out of spam or to help you avoid getting there in the first place. I am confident that if you are sending cold outbound, this guide may either unlock millions of dollars of new potential revenue for you or prevent that potential revenue from being locked away by the spam filter.

I hope you find it helpful. Remember you can always email me at matt@za-zu(dot)com with any questions.

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I: What you can do in the next hour

Everything in the next section will help you get out of (or prevent going to) spam, and you can do all of these things within the next 60 minutes. If you are currently landing in spam, this is the fastest way to start undoing the damage. If you are not landing in spam yet, follow these instructions to lower your risk.

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Quick fixes for your infrastructure

Infrastructure problems are the most common reason people hit spam. Here are the hotfixes:

If you are sending from your company’s main domain (i.e. za-zu.com), stop doing that right now. Don’t just stop sending cold email—stop sending any email that could possibly be marked by a recipient as spam. This includes non-cold sales emails, like recruiting messages. Our goal here is to save your company’s domain from further damage and start recovering its reputation. In the future, never send cold outbound from your company’s actual domain (more on that later).

Check if your domain(s) are on any blacklists. Use a tool like this to check the blacklist status of all the domains you send from. If you are on one, report it to them to try to get it fixed. But this isn’t a guarantee, and it can take time. So, if you find yourself on blacklists, you should also begin buying and warming new adjacent domains immediately.

Buy new adjacent domains and create email accounts on them. If you are landing in spam, you almost definitely need to spin up new cold email infrastructure. As a good rule of thumb, you should set up 3 accounts per domain and expect to send 25 emails—including warming emails—per day from those accounts. So if you wanted to send 1,000 cold emails a day, you should buy ~18 domains. Here is my advice on choosing adjacent domains. You can see an immediate spike in outbound performance by doing this step. These domains should all forward to your site so that, if people look them up, they end up in the right place.

Warm up all the email accounts and domains you send from. To clarify, ‘warming’ is when you send emails to a friendly pool of accounts that give you positive interactions (like clicks or replies). You should be warming every account you send from, and if you are hitting spam, then you should only be warming those accounts—no more outbound for now. Setting warming up manually can take days or weeks, but with a tool like Za-zu you can get started in minutes.

Note that it can take weeks or months to recover an account/domain that was landing in spam, so you should be spinning up new domains and accounts in the meantime.

Set up your DNS records properly so ESPs feel like you can’t be spoofed. Here is my short guide on doing that.

Stop using open rate tracking. Open rate tracking works by including a hidden image in an email, which is loaded when the recipient opens it (and thus tracked as an open). But open rate tracking is less reliable than ever these days. Apple loads images automatically, and Gmail blocks certain images—both of which can lead to inaccurate numbers. Worse, hidden images in your email can sometimes hurt deliverability and get you sent to spam. Tracking open rates across all emails is a high-risk, low-reward endeavor these days. More thoughts on this here.

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Quick fixes for your emails

The other way to get your emails sent to spam is by sending bad emails. “Bad emails”, in this case, are emails that either:

1. Get flagged by spam filters.
2. Get marked as spam by the people who read them.

The first category is easier to fix in this hotfixes section. The second involves writing better emails, which may take more than 60 minutes and so we will cover it in the next section. To reduce the chance that your emails get flagged as spam automatically, do the following.

• Remove any images.
• Remove any links.
• If you really want to use a link, use the format za-zu(dot)com.
• If you really really want to use a link, only send it to people who reply with interest.
• Remove any attachments.
• Don’t use any colors or weird fonts.

Complying with all of these steps reduces the chance your emails will be automatically flagged as spam. And the good news is that it takes just a few minutes to do. If you are landing in spam, there are not any exceptions to the above—do them all and you can significantly reduce your risk.

You can complete all of the steps above in ~60 minutes and doing so should provide a quick boost to your cold outbound deliverability (or, at the least, prevent further damage). But there’s a lot more that you can, and should, do if you care about people reading your cold emails. Now let’s cover that.

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II: What you should set up for the future

All of the things in this section are things that you should do if you care about sending effective cold outbound, but they may take longer to do or may have a less immediate effect. The below aren’t hotfixes, but they are steps to maximize the success of your cold-outbound long-term.

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Best practices for your infrastructure

Warm email accounts properly.

There’s this view in outbound that warming is a one-and-done thing—just something you pay for at the beginning so that your emails hit Primary inboxes. That’s incorrect. The point of warming is to give your email account the activity metrics that a normal email account would have, which means that warming for 3 weeks and then sending cold outbound is a disaster (since your metrics tank without explanation). Proper warming is more gradual; you still want to be sending warming emails when you’re sending outbound. If performance dips, you should increase the warming and decrease the outbound.

This can be complex to do on your own but happens automatically when you send with Za-zu.

Maintain warmed accounts and domains that you do not actively use.

Many of the world’s best cold email agencies, like Aurora, have a 1:1 ratio of accounts they are sending from: accounts they are not sending from. This sounds like a lot—why have email accounts you aren’t using? The reason is that you need to be able to swap these accounts in for the current sending accounts if they dip in performance.

Intelligently rotate and optimize inboxes.

It can help you to think of outbound like you are playing a sports management game.

• You have all of these players. A roster.
• But they can get injured. They can get tired.
• Playing them more can reduce their stamina, or injury risk.
• When a player gets injured, you need a quality backup you can substitute.

Managing your outbound is similar. Every inbox (i.e. account) you send from will perform differently. Some of those differences can be huge—like if one account gets an unlucky streak of being flagged for spam and tanks in performance as a result. This is not the default way to think about outbound. Most people just set up accounts and send evenly across all of them. This is an unoptimal, less effective way to send.

So what can you do?

I’d suggest building something called a Sender Reputation Score: a way to track the performance of each inbox. You want data for everything. Once you understand performance on an inbox-specific level, you can do a few things. The first is you can determine what ratio of warm: cold emails the inbox should be sending. If an inbox is performing well, it may be able to handle more cold emails. If an inbox is dipping in performance, you may want to send a higher percentage of warming emails.

If an inbox (or an entire domain) performs too poorly, you can swap it out entirely for one of your warm, unused email accounts sitting on the bench. While your freshly warmed account picks up the sending, your damaged account can switch to warming-only so it can recover.

It’s true that, while this sounds great, actually doing it can be complex. We’ve spent the last few months working on the perfect solution over at Za-zu. I don’t believe there is one comprehensive guide that can show you exactly how to do this, but if you want to build the fix manually, you’re welcome to try. Otherwise, use a tool like Za-zu that will automate it.

Improve your targeting.

There’s often a temptation to cast the widest net possible. More emails sent means more revenue, right? While it can sometimes work, broadening your targeting also means increasing the likelihood that you are emailing people who do not care about your product. These people may mark your emails as spam.

Broad campaigns can be a lose-lose: people who were never going to buy your product anyway mark your emails as spam, which hurts your deliverability when you send quality campaigns to the right people.

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Best practices for your emails

In the first section of this guide, we covered quick fixes to keep your emails out of spam (e.g. not including images, links, or attachments). But that only solves the technical reasons your emails may hit spam. There’s another thing that may land you in spam: recipients marking your emails as spam.

This section is all about how to improve your emails so that the recipients who get them don’t mark them as spam. Part of the solution is better targeting—don’t cast such a wide net. But there are plenty of things you can do to increase the chance that your emails themselves are actually valuable.

• Don’t use a fancy HTML signature. Many of the HTML signatures I see include images, links, and weird fonts—all things that can get you caught for spam. If you do want to use a signature, make it plaintext.

• Use a real profile picture. This helps your emails feel more human and less spammy.

• Email from a real persona who has a real LinkedIn account (or online profile). Don’t make up a fake persona to send emails from—that’s one of the clearest markers for spam. When I send cold email for Za-zu, I send as Matt Redler (myself). People can look me up online and see that I am a real person who would have a real reason for reaching out to them.

• Stop sending to personal emails. Personal emails have much tougher spam filters. And, because they are harder to guess and verify, they’re more likely to bounce. On a human level, it’s also more jarring to receive a sales email to your personal inbox than it is to receive one to your work inbox—more people will mark these emails as spam. Ideally, just send B2B to work emails.

• Include an easy way to unsubscribe. It’s important you give people another path to get out of your outbound list without marking you as spam. You could add an unsubscribe link, but links can hurt deliverability. I prefer writing something like: “Just reply: unsubscribe if you don’t want to hear from me again” at the bottom of the email, right after the signature. This is effective both because you don’t have to send a link and because email replies count as positive engagement.

• Use word shuffling (i.e. spintaxing). Word shuffling is when you automatically use synonyms for words and phases in your emails so that you aren’t sending 1,000s of the exact same email. For example, you might start Email A with “Hi,” Email B with “Hey,” and Email C with “Hello”. It sounds simple, but it can help deliverability. Doing this on your own can be complex but is solvable with some code. (Or you can use a sequencer that automates it, like Za-zu.)

Avoid red flags that make your emails feel 1:Many. Read your emails before sending and ask: Does this sound like one human wrote it to another human? This is especially important if you’re using personalized variables, like from Clay.com, or if you are doing word shuffling—which you should probably do. Double-check that the outputs make sense.

Write less aggressive follow-up emails. It’s almost always a good idea to follow up with people who haven’t replied, but aggressive or pushy follow-ups can make people angry and lead them to mark you as spam. Popular lines like: “It’s been a week and I haven’t heard back from you” or “Is there any reason you haven’t replied?” can be received poorly. Try something softer and make every follow-up something that the recipient may find valuable.

Finally, write an email that a real human would actually want to read! This is the single best way to avoid people marking your emails as spam. None of this advice matters otherwise, a 100% open rate on 100% Primary inbox deliveries is useless if people do not care about what they are reading. And so, if you have fixed everything in this guide and still do not see success, the answer may be in the writing. I’ve written a guide to writing great cold emails here, if you’d like to learn more.

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Start sending with Za-zu to get maximum deliverability (and more)

There are a lot of steps in this guide. They take a lot of work. Fortunately, you can avoid them by sending your cold outbound via Za-zu. We handle all the technical work for you so you can simply connect as many inboxes as you’d like, write your emails, and start sending—at any scale.

Za-zu is one inbox for effective cold email with maximum deliverability. Sign up for free here.