The email you choose to send your campaigns a very important aspect of your setup, as we want you to have a high deliverability rate and we want you to have the best chances of getting warm replies from prospects. In this article we will discuss how to choose the perfect email address for your outbound messages and what to keep in mind while doing so:
What should my email address look like?
We recommend using a business address, something like name@company.com. This format has an advantage over something like sales@company.com since your prospects will see that the emails are coming from one person, not a sales or marketing team. When it comes from an individual, it looks more natural and less automated, as if you sat down and wrote this email yourself.
On the other hand, we do not recommend sending from addresses like companyname@gmail.com or firstlast@gmail.com, as they are not business addresses and your prospects are likely to not trust these emails, which means very low campaign results. Any email with @gmail, @yahoo, @aol, etc. should only be used for personal use.
If you would like to create new accounts, we recommend mixing up versions of your name. For example, you can use:
and so on. We do not recommend using a format that indicates that there are other email addresses, such as using numbers: first1@company.com, first2@company.com, first3@company.com, etc.
However, it's really important to use and email account which is already warmed up and has an established domain reputation - that's why it's best to use an email account which was already used in mailing campaigns, or at least in regular communication! If you do need to create a brand new email for your campaigns, remember to warm it up before sending them out - you can read more about it here.
Using the sender custom fields (shown below) will give you the ability to share templates across your team so you never have to worry about updating the “from” field per team member.
The replies your prospects send will go to the email address that sent the campaign out of Growbots. Please remember not to forward these messages automatically, because our system will not be able to track them unless they are in your inbox folder for at least 5 minutes!
Improving deliverability (high-level overview)
Each email provider has policies in place to make sure you are not sending SPAM or malicious emails. Since Growbots sends emails from your servers, we want to be sure that your emails are not marked as suspicious.
Different email providers have different sending limits. We recommend sending no more than 100 emails per day, per email address. If you are just starting to use an email account (as you've probably created it just for Growbots) then we recommend setting your limit for 30 emails per day for a start, and then gradually increasing it every week, so your domain will have time to build a reliable reputation. Use the advanced sending limit, and set it up to send 10 initial messages and 20 follow-ups. Take a look at this article about warming up your account.
If your email is an alias, the 2 (or more) email addresses would share that daily email limit (for example 2 emails sharing an inbox would each be allowed to send 100 emails each if the limit was 200).
If your email is forwarding emails in any way, those forwarded emails would also count towards the daily limit and we would have to have a lower limit within Growbots.
Here are the general anti-SPAM rules that we recommend. We gathered them through the research and our experience. Following these tips can prevent your messages from landing in the SPAM folder:
Use an established email address (older than 3 months old) with the correct DNS configuration. If you're using a brand-new email address, make sure to warm it up using Warmbots for at least 2 weeks before starting the campaigns.
If you use open and click tracking, set up a CNAME record for your domain.
Add unsubscribe notes to all of your messages (eg. If you do not want to receive any more messages from me, just let me know, and I will take you off my list.). You can always use the #{{unsubscribe_text}} custom field to generate this type of note, or you can use the unsubscribe link (#{{unsubscribe_url}} custom field), so that the prospect will be able to unsubscribe himself by clicking into it (however, our research shows that the link can decrease deliverability a little).
Keep your sending limits low and respect restrictions provided by your email provider.
That's it! Using these tips & tricks will prevent your messages from landing in the SPAM folder, and increase your chance of getting more warm replies from your prospects!