Apollo.io is a terrific tool to use to generate leads with cold email marketing, but if you have low open rates you won’t get any results. It’s possible to fix cold email deliverability issues in Apollo, and we’ll explain a few strategies you can use in this article.
Hacked BD can be trusted to write this quick guide because we are an AI focused cold email agency that exclusively uses Apollo.io to run our clients email campaigns. We constantly have to keep an eye on deliverability so that our clients get results. We have a strong understanding of what you can do to fix the issues you might be experiencing. If you’re interested in learning how we work and potentially having dedicated professionals run your lead generation drop us a line on our contact page here.
We regularly use the two extremely simple tactics below to keep Apollo cold email deliverability strong if we see that one of our accounts is having issues.
The quickest, easiest, and most effective way to improve your cold email open rate is to send less emails. The more you send, the greater risk you have of your deliverability decreasing and your open rates dropping.
If we ever have an account that is going through a rough patch we’ll scale back the volume and wait for the deliverability to improve. We measure our deliverability through our mailwarming email data. If the warming emails are going to the inbox, the emails from our cold email sequences will likely go to the inbox. If the warming emails are going to spam, the emails from our cold email sequences will likely go to spam.
Reduce your outbound volume until your warming data is strong, and then ramp up slowly. We will ramp up by 25 emails per day and monitor. Some accounts need a longer time at low volume than others. Let the data tell you what’s working or not working. This might mean that you can only send 25 emails a day (or zero emails a day if it’s really bad) for a while, but you have to fix the problem before you can ramp up again.
Note: Make sure you are using an email warming provider that gives you data on where your emails are going. This is the most important thing they can do for you, aside from warming your addresses.
Send more warming emails to offset the drop in cold outbound email volume while you’re repairing a bad email reputation. You need to improve your baseline deliverability in the eyes of the email service providers.
If you send 100 cold emails with a 0% open rate and 100 warming emails with a 50% open rate the email service providers will see that you have a 25% open rate. Not so good.
If you send 50 cold emails with a 0% open rate and 150 warming emails with a 50% open rate the email service providers will see that you have a 37.% open rate. Not bad.
Keep adjusting this volume balance until you get to a number you deem suitable and then ramp your outbound email volume back up slowly.
Note: Don’t think that sending 1000’s of warming emails is a hack to get perfect deliverability. It isn’t. Send a reasonable volume that a human would be able to manually send. We try to have our cold email marketing campaigns mimic the behavior of a BDR manually sending cold emails.
This article is extremely short because this is the actual process we use when an email account starts running into open rate issues on Apollo. There isn’t anything complicated that needs to be done if you have the right configuration, the right copy, the right sending behavior, and you’re getting low open rates.
If you don’t know if you have the right configuration, the right copy, or the right sending behavior, you will probably struggle with bad deliverability.
Cold email is getting crowded. Tools like Apollo are really cheap, so most companies are trying to figure out how to use cold email to generate leads. The more companies use cold email, the more email service providers work to prevent their emails from reaching the inbox.
Hacked BD has been doing cold email marketing for years and has sent millions of emails across many different industries. We have a deep understanding of what works and what doesn’t because we have been able to do so much testing.
It’s possible to crack the code yourself, but work slowly and protect your deliverability - if you can’t get good open rates nothing else will matter.
