NOTE: Deliverability setup → As of February 1, 2024, new email sender requirements by Google and Yahoo! require email authentication from custom domains. Non-compliant emails risk being marked as spam or not delivered. Repeated offenses may lead to domain blacklisting. Our Done For You service offers two levels to help ensure compliance - a basic one, and an advanced one. Learn more about it here: click!

In February 2024, Google and Yahoo imposed stronger restrictions and authentication requirements upon "bulk senders".

It’s best to be compliant with Google and Yahoo’s policy while doing outbound, and these are the most important takeaways:

And in case you noticed some SPAM rates in your Deliverability dashboard, here are some general tips that can help you get out of the SPAM folder:

- Pausing the campaigns (for SPAM rates > 30%)
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At first, it would be a good idea to pause all your current campaigns and keep Warmbots turned on and set to send 40 messages per day. This way your reputation will get rebuilt - it might take from 1 to 3 weeks for your SPAM rates to drop completely with pausing outreach and having Warmbots on, at its full capabilities.

- Warm up your email(s)

It’s super important to have Warmbots running at all times, at the maximum number of messages sent - just go the Deliverability dashboard, go to your emails’ settings and make sure Warmbots is turned on and set up to send 40 messages per day.

As of June 1st 2023, we had to turn off warm-up for Gmail inboxes connected via API, since Google banned all warm-up tools for this connection - if you'd like to keep the warm-up process running, it would be necessary to reconnect your emails through the IMAP/SMTP integration. You can read an instruction on that here.

- Lowering the sending limits (for SPAM rates < 30%)

It’s best to lower your daily sending limits to a maximum of 40 messages per day for now, until your deliverability improves. Moreover, we recommend never sending more than 100 messages per day per email account.

- Advanced sending limits (for SPAM rates < 30% and SPAM prevention)

We have a new feature to help you maintain good deliverability - it’s called advanced sending limits. It allows you to set up separate sending limits for initial messages and follow-up messages - we would recommend setting it up to about 10 initial messages and 20 follow-ups.

- Use multiple emails

Our research clearly shows that our top performing customers are sending their campaigns from multiple emails set up on two or more separate domains. Apart from the fact that this increases their sending capacity, this is also a great solution from the deliverability perspective. With multiple domains, whenever one domain starts to land in SPAM (SPAM-related issues are usually domain-wide), you don’t have to pause your outreach entirely - you still have the other domain(s) to keep sending your campaigns consistently. You can easily increase the number of emails you can connect to Growbots in Settings → Billing.

- Verify your prospects’ email addresses (for import campaigns)

If you’re importing your own prospects to your campaigns, make sure to get them from a reliable source and verify the emails while uploading them. Sending to inactive or inaccurate email addresses damages your reputation.

- Add the opt-out option to all of your messages.
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Make sure that all your email templates include a clear opt-out, preferably an unsubscribe link (here is an article on how to create one). There is an option of adding a sentence like "PS. If you don't want to hear from me anymore, please just let me know." at the bottom of your templates, however, it’s best to have your own opt-out text instead of using the most common ones. In general, we rather recommend using an unsubscribe link, since it's a very easy (pretty much the easiest) opt-out from your recipient's perspective.

- Make your messages look natural

It’s best to use the default font & size format in your templates, so that your emails look as if they were written to a friend - Arial 11 is the most popular format in most of the email services.

- Target the right people

One of the most important factors influencing deliverability is targeting the right people - you could try tweaking the targeting criteria and narrowing down your target - it’s better to create a number of campaigns with a narrow target than one massive campaign for a broad audience - that way you can personalize your messages more. If your prospect can actually relate to your message, they are way less likely to mark it as SPAM.

- Polish your copy

Take a second look at the copy of the messages you’re sending out - after all, this is one of the main factor influencing whether your prospects mark your messages as SPAM or not. Especially the subject line and opening sentence is important here - make sure they are personalized, interesting, but don’t sound too “salesy”.

- Personalization

You could try personalizing your messages more - you can use custom fields to personalize the messages - use the prospect’s name, company name, job title etc. That way they will feel personally addressed, rather than just an email in a massive campaign. Moreover, it’s crucial to write about the prospect’s problems and how you can solve them with your product or service - make the message about them, not about you!

- Follow up

Try to send out 3 follow-ups in a sequence, where at least the first two of are in the same thread.

- Improve your signature

We recommend the signature to be just plain text - without any links or images.

Additionally, we would recommend adding your company’s physical address and a phone number to your signature - it will increase your credibility as a sender, and we noticed it can improve your deliverability to Outlook inboxes.

Once your SPAM rates drop, make sure to send the campaigns at low volume (30 messages per day) and increase the daily sending limits gradually. We recommend increasing them by ~20 every two weeks.

We also recommend sending the campaigns consistently, without sudden drops and increases of volume.

Following these tips can help you decrease your SPAM rates and improve the results of your campaigns. The last, but super-important thing is monitoring your deliverability in your Deliverability dashboard. We recommend doing that every other day and reacting quickly & accordingly, following the above tips!

After all, if your deliverability is not great, and you're not reaching the main inbox, you might not get the desired results, since prospects are not likely to respond to emails in SPAM. We fully understand that such changes might bring new challenges ahead, but we keep our fingers crossed for your results, and we believe that these recommendations may turn out really helpful.