Breaking Through Email Noise in 2024

Every sales team doing outbound needs to know this about email deliverability in 2024: No EXCEPTIONS. Email deliverability is a “death by a thousands paper cuts” type of situation. Stop stacking paper cuts. ✅ Set up secondary domains. If you are still cold emailing off your primary email domain you may be in big trouble. The last thing you want (especially if you aren’t a reputable company) is to burn your primary domain. This doesn’t just affect your sales team. It affects everybody at your company. ✅ Set up your DNS (DMARC, SPF & DKIM) records for ALL of your secondary domains. ✅ Secondary domains should link to your primary. You want to make sure your prospects are being directed to your actual company domain if they are curious and click. ✅ Instantly.ai recommends limiting yourself to 3 email addresses per domain. ✅. Email Warmup - Domains should be “warmed up” for 14 days before cold emailing. Send at least 20-40 warm up emails per day per email account, with a 40% reply rate. This builds your domain reputation. NEVER switch off email warm-up. ✅ Email Volume - do NOT send more than 30 emails per day per email account. ✅ Keep your email signature plain text. No Links. AT ALL. Add your address in your signature and make sure you put a picture in your Outlook or Gmail profile. ✅ Vary your cold email copy. Sending the same template to every prospect signals that you are a spammer. Take the time to personalize emails. For emails further in your sequence, use Spintax. Use alternate phrases “Hi, Hey, Hello”. ✅ Understand that your domain gets TORCHED when people mark your email as spam. Good and relevant copy matter. Also, don’t run 7+ email step sequences. It’s okay to have sequences that are 15 steps. But make them multi-channel (Calls, LinkedIn, Email). ✅ Constantly monitor your email deliverability. Highly recommend using Instantly.ai to make this all easier. Maintaining good deliverability over time is key in the success of outbound. Curious - what else should I have mentioned here?

C-level inboxes are a war zone. Good news? 99% of cold emails they get look the same. Use these 5 tips to stand out and start the conversation 1. Spend 80% of your time prospecting and researching. • Cold emails in 2024 are all about having a clear reason WHY you’re contacting • 50% of your cold email should be information you found during the research.  • Dig deep into Sales Nav, company news, and reports to find it. 2. Lead hygiene is crucial for long-term success. • Even the top 1% of cold email won’t work if it lands in SPAM.  • Email deliverability is a must if you want to be successful in 2025. • I use Prospeo.io to find and validate emails/phone numbers on LinkedIn. Two reasons why Prospeo is my preferred choice: 1) ⁠It finds more valid data (like a lot more).  They figured out how to pull out 40% of verified data (emails + phone) from Sales Nav. Others do 25% max. 2) ⁠Extracting many leads from Sales Nav is hard.  There’s a limit of leads you can extract per search (2,5k). Prospeo can get you 5k (100% more) 3. Front load the 1st sentence with a proper personalization • Director/VP/C-level prefers company-based personalization over interest-based one. • They don’t care if you know where they went to college or what post they commented on recently. • They will care if you know how to help them solve a pain or a problem that has a sizeable enough impact 4. Show something new = stand out • Put a new perspective on how prospects can solve their main challenge. • Show a benefit gained from solving this + cost of inaction (COI) if they keep things the old way.  • You have to beat the status quo. Prospect’s got to realize that it's in her best interest not to ignore your email. 5. Shift the conversation from emails to text/messages • Chats are less crowded than emails/LinkedIn inboxes, etc.  • Text chats allow you to understand what decision-makers really want. • They’re more open to sharing information about their real buying process. • Use Prospeo to find their phone numbers. Bonus tip: Don’t push for the meeting in your CTA. Use the softer tones. Send relevant cold emails = Book more meetings = Win more deals. What would you add? 

This is the new reality: "The Great Ignore." Buyers are drowning in cold outreach.   Thousands of messages flood their inboxes daily.   Most get ignored or filtered out.  The old outbound playbook is dead.   Mass emails and cold calls don’t work anymore.   So how do you break through the noise?  Leverage relationships. Trust gets you in the door when automation won’t.   Warm intros convert 5-10x higher than cold outreach.  Think about how you buy.   When searching for a tool, do you read cold emails?   Or do you ask peers and trusted connections?  Sales should follow the same logic.   Tap into existing relationships.   Get recommended by people your buyers trust.   It’s not just about booking meetings, it drives higher win rates and stronger retention.  Outbound isn’t dead.   But the way we do it has to change.   2025 is about relationships over volume.   Time to adapt.

Google just started the Hunger Games for cold email. And they’ve given prospects a huge advantage… One that can not only shut down your outreach campaigns, but get your entire company suspended from using email. The “Report spam” button just became the most powerful tool in the fight against crappy sales emails. Under the new requirements starting Feb ‘24 senders must stay under 0.3% spam report rate. For an outreach campaign to 1,000 people, 3 spam reports is all it takes. 1,000 x 0.3% = 3 (For those who want to check my math.) Here’s some more: - Unsolicited email + no personalization + zero relevance = spam. - Spray and pray hasn’t worked for a while. But Sales teams are about to be forced to step it up… Or they’ll put their entire org at risk of losing a critical communication channel. Will this kill cold email for good? Maybe. Will email fit at all into GTM strategies post-Feb? Yes. If teams do it right. Good prospecting in 2024 (and beyond) is: - Thoughtful, relevant outreach - Delivered respectfully through solid email infrastructure - To people with a genuine interest in the problem you promise to solve This means acting on deep intent signals instead of shallow firmographics. #AI is at the core of this new approach. It excels at finding intent signals quickly. There are plenty of new and emerging tools that help with this. OneShot.ai is the only one that lets you run your entire prospecting strategy from one tab. Getting prospecting right in 2024 will put you in a category of one. Innovative teams will have a massive first mover advantage as the noise in the inbox finally fades away.

The "OPEN" starts to become even less relevant in 2024. The shift towards CLICKS will be more the focus than ever. If your email CTR is below 2.5% or your SMS CTR is under 19%, here are 5 areas to focus on today: 1. Know Your Audience: Not all audiences are the same, so stop treating it that way. Customer and prospects aren't the same. Leverage the data in your fingertips to segment based on their lifecycle and behavior, not just “engagement” like on-site or clicks. Tip: Stop the "90 day engaged" batch and blast. 2. CTA Focus: Every email needs a clearly visible, clearly readable CTA that’s repeated often. To get a user to “click,” you have to ask clearly and frequently while staying focused on topic. Tip: One CTA, One Focus. 3. Copywriting: Your messages need to resonate with your audience. If they’re not, consider the angle, the story or the product offering. And change it. Tip: Yes words matter. Put some dollars towards it. 4. Real-Time Data: Using multiple platforms for email and SMS might mean you’re missing real-time data for real-time experiences along with contextual data on what they may be interested in and the ability to strike when the "iron is hot." Tip: Don't over-read the data and remember the human element of email marketing. 5. Email Deliverability: With the evolution of bots and changes like iOS15/MPP, open rates are deceptive. It's almost a better sign of data hygiene, then it is an actual engagement metric. The focus on Clicks will uncover that Low CTR often signals a message or an audience is too broad, unfocused, or unengaged. Tip: Stop wasting your time on people who aren't engaging and interested, focus on retaining those who are and help lead them to a first or repeat purchase. Remember: Low CTR tells you how relatable the content was to your audience based on those who opened. Aim to deliver messages that your customers can’t help but CLICK. Here's the golden targets to aim for: Aim for a minimum of 2.5% Click Rates, with a goal of 5%+ for your email. And for sms: Aim for 19%, with a goal of 25%. Start with your audience. How are you adapting your email and sms marketing in 2024 with all the changes?