10 Cold Email Practices to Achieve 40% Positive Reply Rate

We launched Smartlead–a cold email tool—in May 2022 and landed our first customer in the following June.

As we marked our first anniversary, we have decided to acknowledge our day-to-day wins.  

Currently, we are sending 7 million emails everyday with an 18% average reply rate. Being one of the top three warm-up pools, Smartlead is empowering 6800 Businesses with a 42x average ROI. 

Amazing, huh?

If you want to know how we do that using cold emails, read this blog post till the end. You will find our secret cold email practices revealed by none other than Vaibhav—Smartlead founder and CEO—himself. 

Dig in to steal the secrets.

10 Secret Cold Email Practices to Achieve 40% Positive Reply Rates

Everybody knows the basic cold email guidelines but are these enough for a successful campaign? I asked Vaibhav—Smartlead founder—and the answer was NO.

Here are some of the email practices that nobody tells you, but you must know. At Smartlead, our customers have seen as high as 40% positive reply rate following the below practices.

#1 Five Mins Minimum Email Time Gap 

Sending bulk emails is always risky. For instance, sending 100 emails from one email address looks spammy. 

Many marketers use multiple email addresses to avoid that, but only a handful of them know about the email time gap. 

“Keep a minimum of 5 mins email time gap between sending emails”~ Vaibhav

If you are sending a large number (volume) of emails from one email address (within the sending limit), you can continue doing so.

However, you must maintain a minimum of 5 mins time gap between sending emails.  

#2 Maintain a DNC Checklist

DNC or the Do Not Contact (DNC) list is something that nobody tells a beginner. 

A DNC list is a list of leads or domains that you shouldn’t send your messages to. They have either unsubscribed or blocked you, or asked you to stop sending emails. 

“Maintain a DNC list for better email sender reputation”~ Vaibhav

In case you aren’t aware, sending messages to leads that unsubscribed or blocked you is violating the CAN-SPAM Act. 

Cold email automation tools like Smartlead allow users to create a DNC list on the software itself. So that you can exclude specific leads from receiving any further emails from a campaign, even if they are part of an ongoing campaign. 

#3 Run Campaigns with Less than a 2% Bounce Rate  

While response rate, delivery rate, and clickthrough rate are crucial, marketers mustn’t ignore the bounce rate of email campaigns. 

If you have launched an email campaign and you are seeing more than 2% bounce rate, then the best initiative is to stop. 

Stop the campaign, check what went wrong, and fix it before resuming it. 

#4 Stop Low Performing Campaigns

“Review the lead quality, copy, and email reputation before resuming a low-performing campaign”~ Vaibhav

Cold email automation tools come with an analytics dashboard where you can see the overall performance of email campaigns. 

The dashboard mainly shows

• Number of sent emails
• Open rate
• Click-through rate
• Reply rate
• Bounce rate, etc.

The industry standard for the above email marketing metrics is below:

• Open rate: >20%
• Click-through rate: 2-5%
• Reply rate: >10%
• Bounce rate: <2%

Campaigns that don’t meet the above metrics should be paused immediately. Review the copy, and assess the quality of the lead list and the email reputation before resuming the campaign. 

#5 Remove Low Performing Email Accounts

A cold email campaign includes several email accounts. While some of those might perform well, some might not. 

At Smartlead, we try to filter out the low-performing email accounts after launching a campaign via the analytics dashboard. 

This is a great way to boost deliverability. It has proven to be highly impactful for us. 

#6 Check Common Spam Blacklists for Your Domain 

“Look for your domain on Common Spam Blacklist”~ Vaibhav

Are your campaigns underperforming recently? Have the open rates dropped down to 5%, and the spam rate gone up?

If yes, there’s a chance that your domain is blacklisted (blocklisted). 

ESPs (Email Service Providers) blacklist a domain or an IP address under suspicion of sending out spam emails. Sometimes, it is also because you are failing the SPF or DMARC authentication or there’s a mistake in the copy that alerted the spam filters. 

Regardless of the reason, it’s important to learn why your campaigns are not performing like before and landing in the spam folder. Is your domain blacklisted?

To know that, you can check out free blacklist checker tools like mxtoolbox.

#7 Send 50 Emails/Addresses per day

Popular ESPs—Google, Yahoo, HotMail, and Outlook—provide a daily sending limit of 500 emails per day. 

But, for a successful outreach campaign, the best practice is to set a sending limit of 50 emails per address per day.  

This has been a highly beneficial practice for us at Smartlead. The above sending limit includes the warm-up emails too.   

#8 Gradually Increase Email Sent Volume

If you are using certain mailboxes to send 10 emails per day, don’t increase the volume suddenly. 

Take a week or two to gradually increase the email volume to 50 or 60 emails per day.

A sudden increase in the number of messages sent will alert the spam filters, eventually affecting the sender reputation score. 

#9 Use Spintax To Randomise Email Messages 

“Spintax improves deliverability by increasing randomization of messages”~ Vaibhav

Spintax or Spin Syntax is a bulk emailing hack that creates variations of sentences or words by using multiple words or phrases in the template. 

You can add similar words such as {Hey} and {Hi}, separated by a vertical line | 

For example:

{Hi|Hello|Hey}

This tactic will help you generate a more personalized set of cold emails. Sending email messages with a little variation from one another increases the chances of landing in leads’ inboxes. 

#10 Inbox Rotation

“Select multiple mailboxes per campaign to send the load horizontally”~ Vaibhav

Inbox rotation means sending emails from various mailboxes instead of sending from one mailbox only. 

Here, inbox means one mailbox/email address.

So, the inbox rotation practice means rotating the sender’s account or using various sender addresses to send bulk emails. 

This is a great tactic to divide the email volume into small chunks for several mailboxes. This will help to stick to the “50 emails per day per address” limit. 

Final Thoughts!

The internet is full of cold email tips & tricks. These tips & tricks mainly include

• Write text-based emails
• Don’t use multiple links
• Do A/B testing
• No spam words
• Personalization, etc.

While I totally agree with the effectiveness of the above emailing hacks, as a marketer, you need MORE.

You need the secret emailing practice from an experienced email marketer who has already brought the results (multiple times).

If you are reading this, get set, GO. 

Use the above game-changing tips from Vaibhav and let us know the results. If you are looking for automation tools, check out Smartlead.

Ciao!