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When doing outreach for multiple clients, deliverability is the #1 factor to make or break your agency.
Because the more main inboxes you reach, the more opens, replies, and leads you’ll generate.
With that in mind, we’ve collated 14 key elements to improve email deliverability for lead gen agencies — plus ways to automate the process to save you time and money.
Let’s get into it…
How To Improve Your Email Deliverability: 14 Key Components for Lead Gen Agencies
Configure SPF, DKIM and DMARC
Before sending from a new email domain, you need to lay the groundwork by checking the email servers and technical foundations. That means configuring three types of email authentication protocols.
| Record Type | What Does It Do? | Why Do You Need It? |
|---|---|---|
| SPF (Sender Policy Framework) | Tells email service providers (ESPs) that your emails come from you and haven’t been forged. | Helps build trust for your email address with ESPs. |
| DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) | Tells ESPs that your email hasn’t been modified on the way to the sender. | Without DKIM, there’s a risk your emails could be tampered with after sending, which can trigger spam filters. |
| DMARC (Domain-Based Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance) | Tells ESPs that your emails are protected by SPF and SKIM. | Without it, the recipient’s inbox may send your email straight to spam. |
Don’t worry if you’ve never set them up before, as most hosting providers and ESPs have their own instructions on how to do it (and you can learn more in our guide SPF, DKIM, DMARC: How Email Authentication Aids Email Deliverability ).
After you’ve configured all three, check they’re correctly set up using Google’s free Check MX tool.
If you see a bunch of green checks, you’re good to go.
Once the inboxes are in QuickMail, we run constant DNS monitoring to make sure the authentication methods are set up and working properly.
Warm Up New Email Accounts
Inbox providers are naturally suspicious of fresh domains, so if you start sending from them straight away, there’s a higher chance your emails will land in spam. This is especially true of .com domains — in our experience, .ai and .io domains often face less scrutiny.
Still, whatever domain you’re using, you should absolutely take the time to warm it up before using it in your cold email campaigns.
Email warmup involves gradually sending more emails from new (or inactive) email accounts, thereby making them look more trustworthy to email providers.
This process takes a ton of time and effort if you’re doing it manually. That’s why we offer free access to MailFlow — one of the top email warmup solutions — with all QuickMail plans.
Use 2+ Domains and Inboxes
Adding more inboxes is one of the simplest ways to scale email outreach. But it’s not a silver bullet.
Fact is, domain reputation applies to all inboxes with the same domain. So when one inbox on the domain gets flagged, all the others suffer too.
For that reason, we recommend using at least two domains, with 2+ inboxes per domain.
Use a Cold Email Tool (Not Email Marketing Software)
Cold email tools (like QuickMail) and email marketing platforms (like Mailchimp) both let you send emails at scale. But that’s where the similarities end.
Email marketing software is designed for sending campaigns to email subscribers who’ve specifically opted-in to receive communications from the sender. It’s not designed for personal cold outreach — in fact, using it in this way will likely violate the terms of service. In which case you’ll get booted off the platform.
So if you’re sending cold emails, stick to a dedicated solution like QuickMail.
Build an Engaged Prospect List
If recipients don’t engage with your emails (or, even worse, make spam complaints), your email deliverability rate will suffer.
Lack of engagement can happen for a few reasons. Maybe your email subject lines are uninspiring or your sender name looks untrustworthy. But, often, low email engagement is a sign that you’re targeting the wrong people.
Consider your client’s ideal customer profile (ICP). Does it truly represent the people with most need for your client’s product or service? Or is there a different audience you should be targeting that’s more likely to convert?
Also, review your personas — that is, the people at your target organizations who are most likely to make buying decisions involving your client’s product. Are they clear enough? Do they need updating with new job titles?
With the right ICP and personas in place, you can be more confident that the names on your email list will be interested in what you're selling. Which should translate to higher open and reply rates.
Learn more: Strategies To Build Your Email List From Scratch
Validate Prospect Email Addresses
Building a prospect list is only part of the battle. Next, you need to ensure that the addresses you’ve collected are legit.
That’s where email validation comes in.
Running your email list through a verification tool helps improve email deliverability by identifying invalid email addresses before you hit “send”, thereby mitigating the risk of damaging email bounces.
QuickMail makes the verification process simple.
You can maintain a clean list by purchasing verification credits as an add-on within QuickMail or integrating directly with multiple email verification tools, including Dropcontact, NeverBounce, and ZeroBounce.
This allows you to:
Import cold email prospects into QuickMail
Verify email addresses during the import process
Feel confident that you’re only targeting valid email addresses
Avoid Sending To Generic Addresses
Sending to generic email addresses (like info@ and sales@) might seem like a safe bet for your cold email program. You know they’re real addresses, so they’re not going to bounce, right?
Trouble is, these generic accounts often send to multiple recipients. That’s a bad thing, because it increases your risk of receiving spam complaints.
(Plus, if you don’t know who’s going to be reading your emails, you can’t add meaningful personalization — which can hurt your response and conversion rates.)
Make Every Single Email Personal and Unique
Personalized emails get more opens and replies than generic communications.
This shows ESPs that people are interested in receiving your emails — which means they’re less likely to send you to the spam folder. And it also helps you avoid getting flagged for mass email blasts.
To be clear, when we talk about cold email personalization, we don’t mean surface-level personalization like mentioning the email recipient’s first name and company. The whole email should feel personal to each individual prospect on your list.
(Hint: QuickMail lets you craft unique, highly personalized emails using custom attributes and spintax.)
Start With a Low Volume of Emails
Lead gen agencies need to produce results fast — because clients are rarely patient.
But starting slowly with new inboxes will help improve email deliverability over time because it means those addresses are much less likely to get instantly marked as spam and/or blacklisted.
While there are no hard and fast guidelines for email frequency with new accounts, we recommend something like this:
| Time | Action |
|---|---|
| Weeks 1 + 2 | Buy new domain; warm it up with your auto-warmer |
| Week 3 | Send 5 emails per day |
| Week 4 | Send 10 emails per day |
After your first 30 days, your new inbox should have enough positive sentiment that you can increase to your target send volume. We recommend not increasing daily sends by more than 10/week to avoid a large spike in sending.
Abrupt changes in sending habits are a red flag to email providers so play it safe and go slow.
Rotate Your Sending Inboxes
Inbox rotation is a tool invented by QuickMail (you’re welcome!). It lets you send emails from multiple inboxes rather than just one, thereby reducing the chances of any individual inbox running into deliverability problems.
But manually adding and substituting sending inboxes takes time — and, for agencies, every minute is precious.
That’s why we introduced Deliverability AI, our proprietary solution that automatically prioritizes sending from your top-performing accounts.
Best of all, we included Deliverability AI in all QuickMail agency plans.
Because sky-high email deliverability shouldn’t be something that’s only available to the largest, highest-spending agencies.
Vary Your Sending Times and Limits
ESPs are constantly on the lookout for unnatural sending behavior.
So if you routinely send 50 emails a day at exactly 9 am, they’re going to get real suspicious, real fast.
Fortunately, there’s a simple solution to improve email deliverability here: just mix up the time of day and number of emails you send using our scheduling feature, which lets you change the time you start sending emails and the number of prospects you reach out to in a day.
Add an Unsubscribe Link
Let’s be honest: even if you take the time to hyper-personalize every email message you send, your emails are still unsolicited. Some people just won’t want to receive them, whatever you say.
And if they decide to mark you as spam, it could be a major blow to your email deliverability. Indeed, Google says bulk email senders should aim for a spam complaint rate of 0.1% — so if you send 1,000 emails and one recipient reports you for spamming, you’ve already hit your threshold.
Learn more: New Gmail Bulk Sender Guidelines: Everything You Need To Know
While you can’t eradicate every spam report, you can lower the chances of your emails being flagged by simply adding an unsubscribe link to your email content, signature, or header.
Run Multichannel Campaigns
At QuickMail, we love cold email.
But we don’t think it should be your one and only way to reach prospects. Targeting them through multiple platforms helps them become more familiar with your name and brand, which makes them more likely to engage (and less likely to flag your emails as spam).
Multichannel outreach campaigns also make you less reliant on one single channel — so if you have to reduce your email sending volume for a couple weeks to help your deliverability recover, you can lean on other channels to pick up the slack.
QuickMail makes it easy to build multichannel campaigns incorporating:
Cold email
Cold calling
LinkedIn steps
SMS
This lets you build some pretty sophisticated and highly engaging sequences.
For example, you can (automatically) view a prospect’s LinkedIn profile, send a connection request, reach out via email, then follow up with a second email.
Monitor Your Sender Score
Follow all of the above tips and you’ll be well placed to build and maintain a high email deliverability rate.
But we still recommend keeping a close eye on your Sender Score — a metric that indicates the strength of your sender reputation based on indicators like how engaged your recipients are, whether they’re marking you as spam, and if you’ve ended up on any email blacklists.
It’s not a failsafe solution, but it should help you identify potential issues before they become a major deliverability problem.
Level Up Your Cold Email Deliverability With QuickMail
QuickMail was built from the ground up with email deliverability in mind.
That’s why we invented inbox rotation. And it’s why all of our email deliverability tools — like Deliverability AI, blacklist monitoring, and MX bounce protection — come as standard with every QuickMail agency plan.
All of which means many of our customers are sending thousands of emails a day with high deliverability rates.
For a full overview of how QuickMail can help your agency, speak with us.
FAQs
What is email deliverability?
Email deliverability is the process of reaching your prospect’s primary inboxes (rather than the promotions folder, or even worse the junk folder).
Why is email deliverability important?
Email deliverability is one of the most important email metrics for lead gen agencies because it helps you achieve a high inbox placement rate, which lets you generate stronger results from fewer sends. Because there’s zero chance of converting a prospect into a lead if your email doesn’t reach their main inbox.
What is a good email deliverability rate?
A good email deliverability rate is 95%+. Anything lower suggests a problem, such as a high bounce rate, low email engagement metrics, or a poor sender reputation.
What factors affect email deliverability?
Email deliverability issues can be caused by a range of factors, including:
High email bounce rates
Too many recipients marking your emails as spam
Low email engagement/response rates
