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Inbox rotation is the answer to your cold email scaling problems. Rather than putting all your eggs in one basket and increasing the volume of your main email inbox, inbox rotation will help you split your sending volume across multiple inboxes.
In this article, we're going to dive into what inbox rotation is, whether or not you should be considering using inbox rotation in your outreach campaigns, and how it can help you improve your delivery rates.
We’ll cover:
Let's dive straight in.
What Is Inbox Rotation?
Inbox rotation is a feature invented by QuickMail that cold emailers use to send email campaigns from multiple inboxes rather than having one inbox send the entire campaign.
When we say ‘inbox,' that's the single account you're sending emails from. For example, john@quickmail.com would be a different inbox to sarah@quickmail.com.
This helps spread the email-sending volume between inboxes and reduces the chances of any single inbox being impacted by deliverability problems from email providers.
Inbox rotation is vital for anyone looking to scale their cold email or LinkedIn campaigns without hitting email sending limits or encountering deliverability challenges, which is why we have it as a core feature in QuickMail and other cold email tools have created their copy-cat versions of our solution.
You might have also seen this term referred to as load balancing, which is relevant but mainly used in the context of rotating between different email servers. Most people sending cold emails won't need to load balance between different servers but will still benefit from inbox rotation.
How Does Inbox Rotation Work?
Inbox rotation is a simple process. Firstly, you’ll need to add multiple cold email inboxes to your cold email tool, like QuickMail.
Then, when you start a campaign, the inbox or LinkedIn accounts that are sending the emails or messages to your prospects will rotate to spread the volume.
For example, if you have a high volume of emails to send, like 1,000 emails, you can rotate between five inboxes. You can set each inbox to send 200 emails, rather than any single inbox needing to send 1,000 emails in a short time span.
You won’t max out your sending limits on any account and can still send a high volume of cold emails per day or week.
You can choose the inboxes you want a particular campaign to send from or have them randomly allocated.
This ensures any single inbox doesn't exceed your daily limits.
Why Does Inbox Rotation Matter for Cold Email Outreach?
1. Scale Campaign Without Hitting Send Limits
Most cold email and lead generation agencies struggle to scale campaigns past a certain limit.
Why?
Well, most cold email platforms don’t let you send emails from multiple inboxes with ease. You’ll end up cloning campaigns, re-uploading prospect lists into the new campaign, and copy-pasting email sequences.
It’s feasible, but it’s slow and is more likely to lead to errors as you need to regularly make edits to existing successful campaigns.
On the other hand, inbox rotation lets you add a new inbox to an existing campaign, so you’re only taking one step instead of multiple.
2. Powerful Way to Avoid Deliverability Problems
Your cold email deliverability is another roadblock to scaling campaigns. If you're sending a cold email campaign to hundreds of prospects, having even a small percentage of your emails being sent to your prospects' spam folder will impact how many replies you get, the meetings you book, and the revenue your campaigns generate for you or your clients.
Using multiple inboxes and rotating between them will spread the volume and make each inbox less likely to be impacted by deliverability issues.
It's also a way to spread risk between inboxes and LinkedIn accounts. If you rely on a single email address to send your emails, the moment it encounters problems, your entire agency and sales process will come crumbling down.
If you’re using inbox rotation, you can instantly pause sending from a particular inbox if it has problems without needing to cancel your entire campaign, as your other inboxes can take over and handle the sending volume.
3. Avoid Making Simple Mistakes in Campaign Creation
Without inbox rotation, you'll need to copy all your email templates to new campaigns to send from multiple inboxes and increase your sending volume.
But that's a slow, repetitive, and mistake-prone process.
Then, if you decide to make copy edits to any campaign, whether it's to test a new call-to-action or talk about the benefits of your service in a different way, you'll need to go into every campaign and make those updates.
With inbox rotation, you only need to create a single campaign and add your inboxes. When you make edits to a campaign, you only need to make them in that original campaign, saving you and your team the tedious task of making small, manual updates.
With inbox rotation, you only need to create a single campaign, and add your inboxes. When you make edits to a campaign, you only need to make them in that original campaign, saving you and your team the tedious task of making small, manual updates.
If you use inbox-specific attributes, such as {{inbox.signature}}, the campaign will use the signature from the specific inbox emails are sent from, so you won’t need to change anything.
Do You Need Inbox Rotation for Your Outreach?
You can be wildly successful with cold emails without ever rotating your inboxes.
However, if you’re getting results and are ready to scale up your outreach, there will be a time when it becomes essential that you create another cold email address to send from.
Here is a range of scenarios where you should consider using it:
1. Does Your Business Rely on Cold Email for Client Acquisition?
If your business relies on cold email to generate leads for your product/service or for your clients, then inbox rotation is likely going to be useful for you.
If you’re generating leads for your business with cold email, you don’t want that channel to drop in performance if you encounter deliverability problems.
If you run a business like a lead generation agency, generating leads consistently for your clients is the key.
Protecting your outreach campaigns from deliverability problems is key to your business running smoothly. Spreading your campaign volume between inboxes without having to clone campaigns every time you need to manually will save you hours every week and avoid any of your campaigns exceeding sending limits.
2. Do You Need an Accurate Way to Track Key Campaign Metrics Across Accounts?
Most cold email software displays individual campaign-based metrics. That means if you’re running campaigns from different inboxes, you’ll need to switch between different campaigns and manually compile the results to get a true picture of your success.
Because QuickMail is designed for scale, any campaign you send from multiple inboxes will have its metrics compiled into the same dashboard.
It’s easy to understand if your campaigns are working, and reporting back your key cold email campaign metrics to your agency clients won’t require hours of compiling spreadsheets from different data sources.
3. Do You Send High Volume Cold Email Campaigns?
If you’re a solo founder sending 100-200 cold emails per week, inbox rotation isn’t something that needs to be on your radar.
But, if you run an outreach or lead generation agency and need to send hundreds or thousands of emails per week, then inbox rotation is going to be key to scaling.
Managers can also use it to track which team members will receive replies from each campaign or use audit logs to understand which team members made changes to a campaign.
If anything goes wrong in your campaigns, you can easily track exactly what was changed, by whom, and when.
How to Implement Cold Email Inbox Rotation at an Agency
If you need to start rotating your cold email inboxes and LinkedIn accounts for outreach, it's simple to set it up inside QuickMail. Here's how:
1. Set Up Your New Inboxes or LinkedIn Accounts Inside QuickMail
First, you're going to need new email addresses and LinkedIn accounts to add. You can add new ones with the same cold email domain that you're using for your outreach.
The easiest way to manage this is to use a standardized naming convention for your inboxes that’s in line with your usual email structure.
To add your inboxes and LinkedIn accounts, head to your Settings and click on Add Inbox in the sending tab.
Then, connect your inbox in a few simple steps, and you’re ready to go.
2. Warm Up Your Inboxes
Another challenge when using multiple inboxes is ensuring good deliverability across all of them.
To help you keep every email address you use in good shape, connect them all to MailFlow, which is an email warm-up tool that has native integration with QuickMail.
MailFlow (which is free to use) will warm up your cold email inboxes by automatically sending and replying to emails from our network of inboxes. It shows ESPs like Outlook and Gmail that you're a trustworthy sender who regularly gets engagement.
You can track how well your inboxes are performing using the MailFlow Auto Warmer reports. If any individual inbox has problems or is getting flagged by spam filters, you can consider removing it as a sending inbox from your campaigns.
MailFlow's Auto Warmer is free for up to 100 inboxes, so it’s perfect for fast-growing outreach agencies that need email warming capabilities across multiple cold email inboxes.
3. Choose the Inboxes for Each Campaign
When you're ready to use your email or LinkedIn inboxes in your campaigns, all you need to do is head to your campaign settings and choose the inboxes you want to use.
You can send campaigns from as many or as few inboxes as you like.
You can even choose to make campaigns private to only the inbox owner or share them so your whole team can access them.
If you have certain team members managing different campaigns or clients, you can segment them that way or choose to send from inboxes or LinkedIn accounts that aren't near your daily sending limits.
You'll have the flexibility to make that choice and add or remove inboxes whenever you need to.
Extra Tips to Maximize Your Deliverability
There is a range of ways to improve your email deliverability beyond using multiple inboxes.
Make sure your SPF and DKIM records are in place for every email account
Use a tool like NeverBounce to verify emails for each prospect
Warm up your inboxes for 1-2 weeks before sending them with the cold email Auto Warmer
Avoid using open and click tracking unless absolutely necessary
Personalize every email with custom attributes like a custom opening line for every prospect
As well as that, turning on Deliverability Reports in your MailFlow account will let you track how the main email service providers and inboxes are handling your emails.
If you see any problems, such as a particular inbox provider sending your emails to spam, you know it’s time to pause any campaigns you have running with that inbox and switch to another while that one recovers.
There’s no single action that will guarantee your emails make the primary inbox. But combining all of these tips will help protect your inboxes from being unnecessarily flagged by spam filters.
Wrapping Up
Inbox rotation is a powerful tool for scaling up your outreach campaigns. You can:
Spread your sending volume out over several email or LinkedIn accounts
Easily manage high-volume campaigns without copy-pasting your settings and email sequences
Consolidate your metrics across client campaigns into one place
While most cold email or LinkedIn software doesn't include inbox rotation, QuickMail does. At any moment, you can add an extra inbox and instantly have it added to your campaign and start sending emails.
You can also add your LinkedIn accounts to QuickMail and use inbox rotation to send from multiple sales team accounts, giving you another way to reach out to potential prospects.
