Backup inbox strategies for marketers

Don't use a single company domain, instead use a multi-domain strategy. If you're only using one domain for all your B2B email communication, you'll inevitably get in trouble. Here's why: •Single point of failure: Your entire communication stack (invoices, investor updates, customer support) depends on one domain's reputation. •Lengthy recovery: If your domain gets flagged, you could face weeks or months of reduced deliverability while rebuilding your sender reputation. •Missed opportunities: During downtime, critical emails might land in spam folders, potentially costing you deals or important relationships. A more robust approach: -Domain diversification: Set up 2-3 email accounts per domain for different communication purposes (e.g., yourbrand.ai, your-brand.co).  -Admin panels: Set up multiple admin accounts per domain, don't put all your eggs in one basket here. -Warm-up protocol: Implement a 4-6 week warm-up for each new domain, gradually increasing send volume and monitoring key metrics like open rates and spam complaints. -Continuous monitoring: Set up alerts for sudden drops in open rates or increases in bounce rates. Tools like MxToolbox can help automate this process. Track this daily or weekly and watch it closely. -Fallback strategy: Always have at least one "fresh" email in reserve, warmed up and ready to deploy if issues arise with your primary domains. In B2B SaaS, your outbound email infrastructure (ie distribution channel) is as critical as your product. Treat it with the same level of strategic planning and redundancy.

Cold Email is Not Dead. It’s just not for the faint of heart. Cold email is HARD. I built my first two businesses (2016) entirely from cold email. So when I started my third and current business, Goodwork, I was cocky and confident about cold email. RUDE AWAKENING. Google knows what’s up. Landing in the inbox is brutal. People are inundated with unsolicited emails and super annoyed by them. Sorry. 😬 We spent $26K on cold email last year. It resulted in ~$24K in sales. 🫠 Here’s what happened: We had what we thought was an ideal setup - 33 domains - 96 email accounts - Fully set up email infrastructure (domain hosting, SPF, DMARC, etc.) - Verified leads - Tight copy Here’s how it would go within two weeks after sending out warmed-up emails: - 55% open rate (industry standard is 51%) - 1.08% reply rate (industry standard is 2.75%) - 13.19% positive reply rate (industry standard is 3.7%) - 2 calls booked Then disaster. Open rates tanked. Replies disappeared. Silence. 🦗 We’d have to pause campaigns while putting out fires. We’d have to rebuy domains, reset everything, warm up new accounts, and do the whole song and dance again. Here’s what we’re doing differently this year: 1. Always have backup accounts that are warmed up and ready to go WHEN (not if) our current accounts get burned, we’ll have fully warmed backups ready to send immediately. I’ve finally accepted the very real and expensive truth that cold email accounts have about two weeks to one month before they burn out. 2. Backup for our backups. Our backup accounts will also get burned at some point. Instead of waiting for them to recover, we’ll have another set of pre-warmed accounts ready to take over. We will rinse and repeat. No more campaign pauses. Just continuous sending, always staying ahead of the inevitable email burn. Despite this absolute shitshow that is cold email, 17% of our revenue STILL comes from it. So am I ready to kill cold email for us? Nope. Am I solely relying on cold email like I did in the past? Also nope. But I’m not hanging up my hat just yet. If anything, I’m betting on others giving up— which means more inbox space for Goodwork. 🤓 The goal is to take cold email revenue from 17% to 30%. So, to my fellow founders who aren’t faint of heart, keep at it. (Or don’t—more inbox space for us. 😛) P.S. Here is an awkward photo of me, depicting how I feel about cold email. 😬

If Google and Microsoft change their algorithm tomorrow, will your Cold Email campaigns survive? Most Outbound Experts don’t think about this until it’s too late. One day your emails are landing in inboxes, the next they’re in spam (or worse, not delivered at all). After months of testing, here’s what we’ve learned at SalesCaptain about keeping Cold Email campaigns alive: 1️⃣ Monitor inbox health every day Check if your inbox is in good health. If there’s a drop in performance, fix it immediately. Automation is your friend here. 2️⃣ Replace “burned” domains instantly Domains don’t last forever. When a domain gets flagged or “burned,” swap it out. ✨ Pro tip: Always have backup domains warmed up and ready to go. Don’t wait weeks to start fresh. 3️⃣ Diversify your campaign infrastructure Separate your domains, registrars, email providers, and IPs. One failure shouldn’t take down your entire campaign. 4️⃣ Validate every single email A high bounce rate will kill your deliverability. Double-check each email before sending to ensure it’s valid and active. Tools like Smartlead can help. 5️⃣ Specialized campaigns for Microsoft Microsoft emails are notoriously tricky. Use inboxes specifically designed and warmed for them. If you’re not proactively solving deliverability issues, your pipeline will suffer. But with the right approach, you can win. What’s your biggest challenge with deliverability right now? Let me know in the comments👇

In the past 6 months, I’ve sent over over 9,000,000 cold emails with great deliverability (while reply rates dipped <1% for most). My 5 deliverability pro tips for December 2024: 1. Lack of infrastructure diversification. You should NEVER have all your inboxes with one provider. Rules and regs change all the time. If you put all your eggs in one basket, the second that provider makes a change, you're toast. You're far better off diversifying providers, even if it doesn't maximize performance (because it keeps you safe long-term). 2. Not only using Google / Microsoft. Too many people are using sketchy SMTPs that ruin deliverability either quickly or over time. Just because it's cheaper doesn't mean it's worth it. 3. Too many accounts in one Google Panel / MS tenant I see people with hundreds of them. It screams "spammer" to Google and Microsoft – and your performance is punished accordingly. You're far better off spreading out the same number of accounts across Panels / Tenants to preserve safety. 4. Too much volume from one inbox/domain. You want this number to be as close to zero as possible. I still see people saying they're sending 50+/day per inbox. 95% of people are better off keeping this number below 5 per day. This is a silly thing to lose performance over. 5. No back-up protocols. This may be the biggest one. We don't have great deliverability because we have better tech. We don't. It's because we have better systems to account for performance issues. Our set-up goes: - 2x Hypertide orders - Mailreef - Non-branded domains As soon as one line of defense fails, the other is there to pick it up. TAKEAWAY: These deliverability tips have saved me and my clients insane amounts of time and money. If I didn't know them or know how to use them, I literally wouldn't have a business. But there's more to it than I can share in just a LinkedIn post. It'd be far better if I could show you a live demo of how we have near-perfect deliverability. That's why I'm SO excited to announce: Tomorrow at 10am ET, I'm going LIVE with Vaibhav Namburi to run you through our EXACT deliverability playbook that helps us get these results. Join here: https://lu.ma/ot7jz4xi