Performance
April 7, 2024

Boost Your Sales Engagement with These 8 Salesloft Email Deliverability Tips

A high email deliverability rate is essential for a strong sales campaign. Learn how to increase engagement with these SalesLoft email deliverability tips.

Emails are probably a huge part of your outreach campaigns, but did you know that the average deliverability rate for all email service providers is only 83.1%? If your emails aren't reaching your prospects' inboxes, it can have a huge impact on your overall sales goals. After all, you can't engage with someone if they don't know you're trying to contact them. Luckily, Salesloft and email deliverability go hand-in-hand.  

Powered by AI, Salesloft is a powerful sales engagement platform that automates and prioritizes your workflow so that your reps are more productive and can place their focus on gaining new customers and closing more deals. It can help you grow your pipeline, find insights, and forecast future outcomes. One area where it really excels is helping you increase email deliverability. 

When you combine the platform's tools with your own understanding of how to craft high-quality emails, you can often increase your email deliverability rate to 90% or higher, a much more desirable number. In this guide, we'll take a closer look at some practical tips that will help you boost your deliverability rate and how Salesloft can help.   

Understanding Email Deliverability

Sending an email is often the first step of a sales campaign or your first point of contact with a lead. If those emails do not arrive at their intended destinations, your campaign is probably off to a bad start, and you may have a low email deliverability rate.  

What is Email Deliverability?

Email deliverability is simply the ability to send an email and have it reach the recipient's inbox. In sales, you're likely sending hundreds of emails every week.  But if they don't reach their intended recipient, you lose potential customers. 

Why Email Deliverability Matters

When a sales email isn't delivered to a lead's inbox, it's the same as making a cold call to a number that's out of order or holding a meeting in an empty room. It's a waste of your time. The email bounces back or goes to a spam folder, and the intended recipient doesn't even know you tried to contact them. And if it does land in the spam folder, it can hurt your reputation as a sender, lowering your email deliverability rate for the future.  

On the other hand, when your emails do land in those inboxes, your leads might just open them and engage with your content. This, of course, leads to them eventually engaging with you and potentially buying your product or service. 

Your email deliverability rate can have a huge impact on your sales. Ideally, you want it to be as close to 100% as possible, but anywhere between 90 and 98% is considered good, while anything below that, especially below 80%, can be a sign that something isn't right. 

Setting Up Your Salesloft Account for Optimal Deliverability

While there is no way to completely ensure your emails land in an inbox, you can increase your chances by setting up your Salesloft account's advanced email settings and passing email authentication. Improving your sender reputation can also help improve your deliverability rate. 

1. Use Salesloft for Email Authentication.

The first step towards creating a positive email deliverability rate is ensuring you've configured  SPF, DKIM and DMARC and passed email authentication checks. This proves to email providers that you're a legitimate sender. 

You can do this in Salesloft with your Email Deliverability Checklist. It checks to see if your domain has been set up with those exchange records, as well as your own custom tracking domain

Simply viewing the Email Deliverability Checklist will prompt the software to scan your Custom Tracking Domain, SPF Record, and DMARC record. Your admin will have to check your DKIM record, which verifies that your company owns its email domain.

2. Take Steps to Improve Your Sender Reputation.

Focusing on setting up your Salesloft account to optimize deliverability can help improve your sender reputation. That's the rating email service providers give your IP address. The lower it is, the more likely your emails are to end up in spam folders. Salesloft suggests using Google Postmaster Tools to monitor your reputation. While the data only applies to Gmail, it gives you an idea of what your reputation is with all email providers. 

Salesloft recommends a few specific email settings for improving deliverability as well. Try keeping your email delay at 60 seconds so providers don't think you're sending in bulk.  Set your daily send limit to 250, and enable click tracking.  

There are some ways that you can work to improve your sender reputation on your own too. For example, you can offer opt-out inks so people who don't want your emails can unsubscribe rather than send to spam. Avoid sending too many emails at once and don't send them too frequently.  Send engaging content that encourages recipients to open it and click on your links, and keep a clean email list (which we'll explain below).   

Crafting Emails That Get Delivered

While Salesloft is a great tool for ensuring higher email deliverability rates, you've got to put in some work on your end too. Drafting high-quality emails that spark engagement is key.  

3. Write Engaging Subject Lines and Preheaders.

Start by focusing on your subject lines. Adding anything that makes your email sound like a sales email will likely trigger a spam filter. Avoid words and phrases like "100% free," "satisfaction guaranteed," "limited time," "increase sales," and "join millions." It's also important to avoid all caps and an abundance of special characters like multiple question marks or dollar signs.   

Your subject line should be clear and concise, but you want to avoid making it too neutral. As with any aspect of your outreach, personalization can help. Use your recipient's name, the name of their company, or even their industry. You can mention their pain point, a geographic location, or their recent social media activity. Anything that resonates with that person will increase the likelihood of them opening your email, which helps improve your sender reputation. 

Preheaders are just as important as your subject lines. When you open your inbox, the preheader is the snippet of text you see next to the subject. Think of how many times you've looked at that text and opened (or deleted) an email because of it. Creating a compelling preheader can also help improve your email open rates, which can help your reputation. You can add personalization here too. You might also consider using a CTA or anything else  that might incentivize someone to want to learn more about what's inside that email.  

4. Create Engaging Email Content. 

Your actual email content should be high-quality and engaging as well if you want to avoid the spam filters. Fortunately, the same rules that apply to writing great sales emails also apply to creating a deliverable email. 

Keep it short and to the point. You want to try to get your message across in the first 100 words. Your leads don't want to read a long report, and a lengthy email will come across as spammy. Don't add too many images. Emails over 100 KB often look like spam. The same can be said for links. Keep them to a minimum.  When it comes to fonts, use the one your email provider defaults to or use one that is common and easy to read, like Arial or Verdana.   

You'll also want to make sure your emails include your company's physical address or a PO box somewhere in the body.. Not only does it help keep you out of spam folders, but it also keeps you above the law. In 2023, congress passed the CAN-SPAM Act, which created some rules for sending commercial emails and preventing spam. 

As with your subject lines, avoid using spam words and phrases. Again, this is anything that makes it sound like you're sending a sales email: "opportunity," "you're a winner," "give away," "don't hesitate," "bargain," etc.  The same goes for special characters. Avoid using multiple exclamation marks, dollar signs, or anything else that you wouldn't use in a general email with a customer. 

Managing Your Email List

Sometimes the problem isn't what you're sending or how you're sending it. It's who you're sending it to. Keeping a clean email list and practicing segmentation can help improve your deliverability rate and sender reputation  

5. Make List Hygiene a Habit. 

Every year, your email list deteriorates at a rate of just over 25%. When you continuously send emails to invalid addresses, people who have opted out of receiving your emails, or people who just don't engage with you, it hurts your sender reputation. Every sales rep should make a habit of cleaning their email list every three to six months or after each big sales campaign. . 

 It can also help with your engagement rates. If you're only sending emails to people who want to hear from you, you're more likely to see click-through and open rates  go up. It doesn't necessarily mean you're reaching more people, but it means you're focusing on higher-quality contacts.  

When cleaning your email list, consider removing: 

  • Inactive recipients  who haven't interacted with your emails in the last three to six months
  • Invalid email addresses that bounce back 
  • Duplicate emails for the same person 
  • Addresses that send you back an automated reply 

6. Consider Using Email Segmentation.

Something else to consider is email segmentation. This is simply dividing your email list into smaller groups based on various criteria. For example, if you have multiple buyer personas, you might want to create a group for each one. You can also divide them up by various demographics like age and geographic location, previous behavior, and what stage of your sales cycle they currently fall under.   

Segmentation helps you target recipients with more customized content. This can lead to increased engagement, improved customer satisfaction, and a better ROI for each campaign.  When you use Salesloft, you can enable numerous filters that can help you segment your contacts. These range from date last contacted to state of the sales cycle and job title to geographic location. 

Monitoring and Improving Email Deliverability

Once you've taken steps to improve your email deliverability, it's important to monitor your results by tracking key metrics. Salesloft can also help you conduct A/B tests to improve your strategies even further. 

7. Start Tracking Key Email Deliverability Metrics. 

There are several metrics that will help you track your email deliverability. Your bounce rate tells you how many emails didn't reach an inbox. An increase in your unsubscribe rate or spam complaints could hurt your sender reputation and tell you you're either reaching out to the wrong people or sending unappealing content. Good click through and email open rates tell you that your emails reached someone's inbox and were intriguing enough for that person to open them and engage. 

Salesloft Analytics can help all users on your team track these metrics and more. All of your data is located on one central dashboard and updates in real time. You can customize it to show you the metrics and KPIs that matter most to your process. 

8. Utilize A/B Testing. 

In addition to monitoring certain metrics, A/B testing can help you determine which of your emails perform the best. For example, you might send two emails with the same content but change the subject lines for each one. Then you can measure which subject is more likely to land in a spam folder. 

With Salesloft's automation tools, you can test your emails faster. Explore what happens when you change subject lines, body content, the formats of your email, and anything else that you think will make a positive impact on your email deliverability. 

Sending emails is typically a large and important part of any sales campaign, but if your emails aren't reaching your prospects' and customers' inboxes, you're wasting your efforts. Focusing on improving your email deliverability rate can change all of that.  Improving your content, cleaning up your email list, email authentication, and tracking certain metrics can help improve that number. Combining your efforts with Salesoft's power tools that can help you throughout the process can lead to a big boost in engagement. 

Latest Insights