Hey everyone! Been a longtime lurker, just posting today to get some recommendations. My teams do hyper personalized cold email outreach. Our workflow is: Sales Nav > Eva Boot > Clay > La Growth Machine. We’re now getting very low open rates, despite using Clay waterfalls to verify email. So we’re wasting time customizing and no one even reads the emails. Is there a better way?
Should I set up some kind of burner domain, send an email and see if there’s an open? Then, only customize those? This seems a bit shady, but if necessary I guess it wouldn’t hurt anyone.
Is there a service that can verify emails? Again, I use Clay waterfall but it’s not great.
My domain is clean, no issues according to MailReach, MailGenius and MxToolbox. We send less than 50 emails a day.
Any other ideas?
Ricardo R. - you mention "hyperpersonalized cold emails", but it's unclear if the strategy is a one & done, or a series. 100% on Juan P.’s recommendation to keep the first one short. Another good strategy is to ONLY personalize the first & maybe last lines, have the core of the email be appropriately targeted/relevant to a segment.
Thanks Juan P.! We used to have 79.1% open rates and 10.86 reply rates when using Interseller. Then with LGM those tanked to around 23% and 2% reply rates. Is there a better tool to test our domain rep? Diane Fonseca Thanks! We do multichannel series, so the first one is the only hyper personalized email, the rest are follow ups that are personalized to the company. First is the only personalized line. But they are longer than 100 words, I can try that! Is there a better service to verify emails? Or do you think it’s a LGM/domain issue?
Hey Ricardo R., Sounds like you burnt your domains. There are multiple reasons to see a drop:
Your domains were burnt (most likely your reason)
When you initially send campaigns, you send emails to the best-fit clients. Your 2nd or 3rd lists might not be such a good fit.
I would move to a multi-domain domain rotation approach with LGM with brand new domains and you would be good to go 🙂
Inbox Placement Tests or MX Toolbox don’t provide a perfect picture of your inboxes. (Let me know if you want me to go technical here) To Verify Emails: We use this waterfall in clay
Millionverifier for all emails
Then bounceban for catch-all
Enrich all not founds via leadmagic
Re-verify millionverifier with new emails found
And then good to go
Namit J. thanks for your input! Very interesting. The odd thing is, when we send to certain companies, we get 100% open rates. Wouldn’t this indicate our domain is okay? I’d love for you to get technical re: inbox placement tests. Great waterfall in Clay. Haven’t tried those. Thanks again!
The reason you get 100% Open Rates when you email specific companies is because those companies have bots enabled (security features) that open your email and check if you are sending anything malicious. Open Rates are inflated in general. It’s hard to tell if your domain is okay or burnt given the current information, but if everything is the same (lead list, copy) and you see a drop in replies, the first thing I think about is domain burn. Domain reputation is also a scale vs (burnt or okay). Maybe you are landing in SPAM for some users and landing in the inbox for others? With us, we try not to think about how to repair reputation for secondary domains as much. It’s tough to figure out the exact problem. Give your domain a break and just use new domains because the ROI is so high. --- Inbox Placement Tests: Inbox Placement Tests are created when you send emails to a bunch of seed accounts. (Seed accounts are just accounts explicitly used for inbox placement tests.) These accounts may or may not (most likely not) mimic real human email accounts. So they have different security features. They never have Mimecast, IronPort, or Proofpoint protection. If some of those accounts are new, they won’t have similar security features compared to a bigger company. You also send just 1 email to those accounts, compared to 50 emails a day to multiple other accounts. So if 20% of your emails are going to SPAM, you will see a drop in reply rates, but inbox placement tests might show everything is okay. That being said, it is not a perfect indication, but one of the indicators. PS: I haven’t created my own Inbox placement tests, (We use other companies) so I don’t know all the technicalities behind it. This information is based on my personal experience Ricardo R.
Namit J. this is awesome information and I really appreciate it! If you are open to chatting, please DM me. I don’t know if Aerosend would make sense for us but I’m super open to talking. Also open to a quick consulting chat, I do value your time as a founder 🙂
Ricardo, suggesting in an alternative for evaboot: theboomerang.co, in case you wanna scrap more than 2500 from a single search of sales nav.
Bittu M. awesome - thank you!
