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Deliverability 101
This is the first Woodpecker ebook that tackles email deliverability. Inside you’ll find
our professional know-how on how to schedule a cold email campaign to prevent
deliverability issues. For that to happen, you need to understand the basics of email
automation and email deliverability. Then, we should move on to scheduling your
email campaign, step by step. Let’s optimize your email campaign together!

© 2019 Woodpecker.co
 Author: Mary Siewierska
Technical Reviewer: Wojtek Błażałek
Illustrations: Kinga Tarczyńska
 Table of contents

I. EMAIL BASICS 6

Let’s begin 7
1| What you should know about email automation 8
2| How email is generally sent 9
3| How email automation tools send email 11
#1 What does it mean to send email like a human? 12
#2 Why cold email software sends emails from your mailbox 14

II. EMAIL AUTOMATION 15

4| Automating email sending: The basics 16

#1 Get a domain for outreach 17
#2 Set up an email address 19
#3 Authenticate your domain 20
#4 Send a few emails 24
#5 Send a test campaign with a tool 25

5| What is email deliverability? 26

III. CAMPAIGN OPTIMIZATION 30

6| How to optimize your cold email campaign? 31

#1 Stay within sending limits 33
#2 Avoid email overlap 34
#3 Keep a consistent sending volume 35
#4 Personalize your email copy 36

7| How to monitor the campaign’s stats board? 37

#1 How to identify that your emails don’t get delivered to the inbox 38
#2 How to identify that your emails are going to SPAM folder 38
#3 Emails get delivered to the main inbox, why nobody replies? 39

A few closing thoughts 40

APPENDIX 41

50 scenario - 7 followups 42
150 scenario - 3 followups 43
150 scenario - 7 followups 44
250 scenario - 3 followups 45
I. EMAIL
BASICS
 Let’s begin

So you’ve grabbed this ebook because you want to send cold email campaigns
but you are completely in the dark about campaign optimization. Or maybe you’ve
already run into some trouble with email deliverability. Here’s everything you should
know about automating email campaigns.

But first...

Spare a moment to think about what ‘email automation’ actually means.

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 1| What you should know about
email automation

You may associate email automation with email marketing software, such as
MailChimp or GetResponse. That kind of software sends emails for you, using their
own delivery infrastructure. You just need to gather the contact list, write an email,
run a campaign, and all addresses will get the email. No need to send it manually.

But there’s another type of email automation tool -- cold email automation. This is
the category Woodpecker falls into. Cold email automation also sends emails for
you. However, it does so using your own email address -- and your own delivery
settings. Messages go out of your inbox automatically. They are meant to target
a smaller, well-defined group in order to provoke responses and initiate 1-to-1
business relationships.

Whatever the type, email automation does exactly that. It automates email sending.

But you can conclude one thing from the above. Cold email automation tool is
different than email marketing software. A proper one implements the user’s mailbox
delivery settings to send emails -- it doesn’t have its own delivery infrastructure.

What further differentiates the two types of email automation tools is a way they
send email. Where does that difference come from? I’ll explain it to you in the
chapters to come. But now, let’s find out what the process of sending emails looks
like, no matter if you use automation or not.

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 2| How email is generally sent

I’m sure you’ve sent thousands of emails. But have you ever wondered what happens
when you click ‘Send’? It’s crucial for you to know the basics if you’re going to
understand the following chapters.

In order to send emails, you need to set up an account at an email service provider.
Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail are just a few to name. Next, you log into your
account, write a message and click ‘Send’. Then your email server sends the email.
But how is it done exactly?

Your email server uses Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to send your message.
What can we compare an SMTP to? I think I have one example that would help us
understand what this protocol is. A great analogy for how SMTP works like is a real-
world post office.

Let’s say you want to send your email as you would mail a postcard. You would write
an address on it and post it. Next, your email would travel from one post office to
another until it finds its destination -- SMTP that belongs to the person you addressed
it to.

So congratulations, you’ve successfully sent your email. Amazing, isn’t it? But can the
recipient read it? In order for the recipient to read the message from you, you need
another protocol, Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP).

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 IMAP is involved in collecting your email and putting it into the right folder of your
inbox. To expand on our postal service analogy, IMAP is like a real-world postman. It
picks up your email from a post office and gets your email at the right address,
allowing the addressee to access the message. And when your email gets noticed
by the addressee, the chance they respond to it and consider your offer grows
exponentially.

Plus, there’s another advantage of setting up an IMAP if you use software like
Woodpecker. Even though you mainly use it to automate the sending process,
Woodpecker earns a lot if your IMAP is properly configured.

A software like Woodpecker needs your IMAP details to be able to classify your
messages as the campaign responses and cease sending further follow-ups to that
addressee.

Note for Gmail users: IMAP can put the email into the primary inbox, ‘Promotions’ tab,
SPAM folder, etc. Wherever the email lands depends on many factors that we’ll
discuss later on.

Where do you get an email server from?

• your email service provider (internal)

• your Internet service provider (internal)

• your marketing email automation tool (external)

Follow-up reading here >>

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 3| How email automation tools
send email

As I wrote in the first chapter, there’s a difference between the way in which bulk
email software and a cold emailing app send email.

Bulk email software sends email from their own servers. That’s why messages can
get delivered to your addressees as fast as they do. Bulk email software has hundreds
of email servers at their disposal. And it sends email at once. So when you send 10k
emails, they can be delivered over a couple of minutes/hours.

A proper cold emailing solution does not send email like that.

Emails come out way slower.

Wait? What? Isn’t that a scam? Why would I pay for a cold email software when I can
send my messages with an email marketing tool way faster?

You see… the goal of a proper cold email software isn’t to get your campaign out as
quickly as possible. Instead, it aims at getting your cold email delivered to the primary
inbox, away from ‘Promotions’ tab, or, heaven forbid, the dreaded SPAM folder.

To make sure your email gets into the primary inbox, a proper cold emailing solution
does not use its own SMTP to send email sequence. It uses your SMTP. Why? Because
it wants to send emails like a human.

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 So a cold email solution isn’t perfect for sending thousands of impersonal, untargeted,
mass messages. And the other way round, bulk email software doesn’t do a great
job at sending tailor-made emails that aim at initiating conversations.

Read more >>

#1 What does it mean to send emails like

a human?

Let’s assume you were asked to send ten messages with the same content to ten
different addresses. You type in an email address, a subject line, then retype the
copy, and hit ‘Send’. I’m sure you won’t type in all of the messages at the same
speed. Some emails will take longer, some less time before they will go out of your
mailbox. It doesn’t matter that the content of the message is the same.

Also, the time spent at getting a single message off to the addressee will vary when
you ask your friend to do it. So the time spent on sending each message will differ. It’s
natural.

Humans send email at uneven intervals -- automation, on the other hand, doesn’t.

And that’s one of the ways in which a server discerns between a message sent by
hand and SPAM.

Automation doesn’t send emails at uneven intervals unless it’s programmed to do so.

Woodpecker is programmed to do so.

When using cold email automation tool like Woodpecker, the messages will get sent
at randomized frequencies (not equal ones), so they look like they were sent by
a human being.

Similarly, during our little thought experiment, you sent messages one by one. Your
friend, too, sent one email at a time. Automation sends emails in bulk. A proper cold
email software sends emails one at a time, just like you would.

Because of that messages go to the ‘Primary’ inbox, far away from marketing emails.

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 The other thing is cold email automation sends emails from your own email address.
You’ll learn what it exactly means in the next chapter.

When is it better to use email marketing software to send email?

• for sending regular emails to a defined group of recipients (every week, every
month…)

• for sending marketing material, such as an ebook, audio book, PDF file

• for sending an automated ‘Welcome’ message when you have a new

subscriber/user

• for sending to a large group of addressees when we want to inform them

about something as quickly as possible

Follow-up reading here>>

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 #2 Why cold email software sends emails
from your mailbox

Cold email automation software sends messages directly from your mailbox.

By sending messages from your email address, cold email software uses your SMTP
to send emails. Due to that your email stays clear of the ‘Promotions’ tab or bulk
messages. Plus, it looks as if it was sent by you manually.

Our goal in sending cold emails is to make it feel like a personal, direct message. The
kind of email that is specifically written for the recipient. After all, we are the ones
who chose the person we want to reach out to. We initiated the contact.

That is not the case when it comes to marketing communication. For marketing stuff,
most of the time, it’s the other way around. Somebody filled out a form to get
something sent to them.

Because cold email automation uses your own email address to

send messages, you need to respect the rules set up by your email
host when sending cold emails:

• check how many emails your host allows you to send per day/hour

• check what content your email host considers to be SPAM

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 II. EMAIL
AUTOMATION
 ain
dom

4| Automating email sending:

The basics

In the early days, cold emailing process was pretty dreadful. You would send all the
emails manually and you would keep track of that in an Excel file.

Every time someone responded to you, you would open your Excel file, look up their
name and mark them as ‘Replied’. And then you would need to remember not to
follow-up with them. It sounds easy, but it’s actually very annoying, especially when
you have some follow-ups to send. Been there, done that.

It’s easy to assume that all you need is email copy, a contact base and a cold email
automation tool to begin. Well, from the basis of what we discussed, you can sense
that you need way more than that to launch your first campaign. And you do.

What do you actually need to start cold emailing?

• domain ready for sending

• email address properly warmed up

• cold email tool

• some groundwork done to get it right

That is all you need in your arsenal. Let’s learn how to get it.

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 #1 Get a domain for outreach

The first thing you need to send emails is a domain. If you’re going to send over 50
emails a day (counting in follow-up emails), you should get a domain exclusively for
email outreach, and nothing else.

But if you send lean campaigns from one email address, you can use your own
company domain. That’s actually good because domain age plays a huge role in
email deliverability. The older a domain, the better it is for deliverability. Be careful
though. You need to include the number of emails you send a day outside of
Woodpecker in your calculations. You want to stay within sending limits, don’t you?

The name of that outreach domain should be similar to your company domain to
build trust and show competence.

Your email address and your company website will be included in the email. If
anything that comes after “@” sign differs from your company website, you won’t
achieve that. Use words like “get”, “reach”, “check”, “see” + {{company name}} are
great outreach domains options. For example, we use “@getwoodpecker.com” as
an outreach domain to “www.woodpecker.co”.

It takes 3 months before a domain is ready to automate email outreach on it. Why
does it take so long?

Domains have reputations. When you register a new domain and it’s younger than
15 days, it’s treated as suspicious by default. When you send emails from a suspicious
domain, your emails are also treated as suspicious.

Simple outreach domain formula:

• use an active verb like “get” or “try” before your company name

• use a noun like “app”, “agency”, “biz” after your company name

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 So it’s better to wait until you earn good reputation. I recommend waiting up to 3
months and warming it up by sending a couple emails a day.

Reputation is not something you get and it sticks forever. In fact, it’s fickle. You can
lose it overnight. And then, you’re in trouble, because it can get blacklisted. Once
a domain gets on a blacklist, there’s little to do to make it work again.

What do you need to do then? Spend at least 3 months on earning good domain
reputation.

More to read >>

How to find out the age of my domain?

You can check the age of your domain by using tools like Whois.com or Who.is.
Just type in the name of your domain and check the registration date. If it is
younger than 3 months - you definitely want to warm it up!

Can a domain be too old? For example, sending campaigns

for too long?

There is no such thing as a “too old domain.” Generally an older, well-kept

domain, will have higher reputation score build up, and therefore, has a better
deliverability.

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 #2 Set up an email address

When your domain is getting ready for action, set up an email address on it that you
will use just for outbound and nothing else. I repeat “nothing else”. Here’s why.

Why do you need a new email address?

• safety - you’re going to send a lot of email from that mailbox. In case you get
caught in some spam trap and get blocked, it’s better to keep your company
domain safe.

• simplicity - you’ll have all replies in one place, separated from your company
emails.

Pair it with this blog post >>

So there’s that. While your outreach domain is in the middle of earning reputation,
choose an email provider following the steps below. Then set up an email address
at that provider, and start warming up your mailbox to make it ready for sending
automated campaigns.

Such a warm-up takes up to a month. But it’s pretty simple.

What to consider when choosing an email provider for outbound?

• Compare daily sending limits of email providers

• Think how many mailboxes you need for outreach

• Check if it integrates with a cold email tool you choose

• Check if you can get help in case of delivery issues

Read more here >>

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 #3 Authenticate your domain

Before we get to sending anything from our new email address, we need to add
some records to your outreach domain’s TXT records. We also need to configure SPF
and DKIM records, plus DMARC policy. What are those? The protocols that make
your domain and email address authentic. Both of them have an immense impact
on email deliverability.

SPF

SPF is short for Sender Policy Framework. It’s a security mechanism that defines which
IP addresses can be used to send emails from your domain. So it prevents suspicious
bots and unauthorized people from sending emails from your email address.

The mechanism is all about communication between DNS servers. Here’s an excerpt
from our blog in which Cathy explained what SPF is.

“ Let’s say you’ve sent an email to Bob. But how does Bob’s DNS server know that
the email was in fact sent by you? The problem is, it doesn’t really. Unless you
have SPF set on your DNS server.

Let’s imagine two possible server “conversations”. To make it all easier, let’s
assume your name is Mike.

Scenario 1 – You don’t have SPF set up

Mike’s server: Hey, Bob’s server. I’ve got a new message from Mike.

Bob’s server: Hi Mike’s server. What’s your SPF?

Mike’s server: Yeah, about the SPF… Who cares, really. I don’t have one.
Trust me, it’s from Mike.

Bob’s server: If you don’t have SPF, I can’t be sure it was Mike who sent this.
Give me Mike’s allowed IPs, so I can compare it with yours.

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 Mike’s server: I don’t have the list of Mike’s allowed IPs.

Bob’s server: Then I don’t want your message. Delivery denied. Sorry, buddy…

Scenario 2 – You do have SPF set up

Mike’s server: Hey, Bob’s server. I’ve got a new message from Mike.

Bob’s server: Hi Mike’s server. What’s your SPF?

Mike’s server: There you go, here’s my SPF. There’s a whole list of IPs that Mike
himself declared as the ones which can be used on his behalf.

Bob’s server: Ok, let me see… And the message you have for me is sent from
IP 64.233.160.19. Ok, it’s on the list. Everything looks fine. Gimme
the message, I’ll show it to Bob. Thanks!

Do I need to add Woodpecker to my SPF?

No, you don’t and you shouldn’t. You need to include in your SPF record all the
applications that send emails on your behalf but are using their own SMTP.
Woodpecker uses your SMTP to send emails within your campaigns and only
kickstarts the sending process by sending a ping to your SMTP. This also means
that the deliverability of the emails sent from your campaigns are tied to the
reputation of your domain.

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 DKIM

DKIM stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail. It’s also a security mechanism meant for
preventing bots and unauthorized people from sending emails in your name. It’s sort
of an additional way for the recipient’s server to tell whether the sender is really you.
It can tell it’s you thanks to two keys: a public and a private one.

Let’s say you’ve finished writing an email. Now you want to send it. But before you do
that, your server adds a hidden signature in the header of the email you’ve just
written -- a private key. That key is unique to you and available only for you.

The recipient’s server sees your email. Before receiving the email, it needs to decrypt
your private key using another key - a public key.

Providing you added the private key to your DNS records using DKIM standard, the
recipient’s server decrypts your private key with ease. Again, a nice explanation by
Cathy on how it works.

“ Take Game of Thrones to get the bigger picture of DKIM. Ned Stark is sending
a raven with a message to king Robert. Everyone could take a piece of paper,
write a message and sign it “Ned Stark”. But there’s a way to authenticate the
message – the seal. Now, everyone knows that Ned’s seal is a direwolf (that’s the
public key). But only Ned has the original seal and can set it on his messages
(that’s the private key).

Source of the blog fragments >>

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 DMARC

DMARC, Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance, is

an email validation system. By setting it up, you can indicate which domain you trust
to get emails from and which you want to reject or quarantine.

DMARC is optional as of today, but many senders decide to adopt it. Having it set
up is an additional way of letting the filters know that you are a trustworthy email
sender. So it can help with your deliverability.

DMARC is a record you should set up after you deal with SPF and DKIM, not before.

Mail-Tester is saying that DMARC is necessary, what should I do?

To our knowledge, Mail-Tester informs about DMARC but it is not counting it as

a minus point while generating your score. If you don’t have a SPF or DKIM set up
then Mail-Tester will give you a negative score of “-2”, hence you should set up
a SPF and DKIM. Regarding DMARC, the Mail-Tester service will only inform you,
that it is not set up. Whenever you set it up or not remains your choice. Again to our
knowledge it is not mandatory as of now.

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 #4 Send a few emails

A popular newbie mistake is starting an email campaign the moment an email

address gets connected to Woodpecker. If you’ve just connected your email address
to Woodpecker, stop and ask yourself, “Is it ready for an automated outreach?”

Can you start sending cold email campaigns from your email address right away?
Not really. First you need to warm it up.

Configure your email account

Right after you set up an email address and records you need to configure your
email account. Go to your email account’s settings. Edit a “From:” line and add
an email signature. Make it professional. After all, you are going to use it for
professional purposes.

There are different forms of “From:” lines:

• First Name + Last Name

• First Name + Last Name + Job position

• First Name + Company Name

Check out our guide on the “From:” line here >>

Additionally, pay attention to the HTML code of your email signature. It should be
clean and succinct. Look at an HTML code and check if your signature is not longer
than your actual email content. Remember that a poorly coded signature may
decrease your email deliverability.

More on that here >>

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 Send a dozen or more emails by hand

Now, when you successfully configured your email account, it’s time to send a few
emails. Note that the emails you’re about to send are not outreach emails. They are
regular emails sent from your mailbox. At this point, don’t use automation.

Send messages to trusted email addresses that you are 100% certain they exist. They
can be your other email addresses, your friends’ email addresses, your colleagues’
ones. Ask them to reply to you and carry a conversation over a few emails or so.
Engagement is really important (more on that later).

It would be best if those email addresses were at different email providers. Don’t
send the same email. Try to have a normal conversation. That process should last at
least three weeks. After that, you’re ready to send a test campaign.

#5 Send a test campaign with a tool

Now, you can switch from using your mailbox to using a cold email automation tool.

For your test campaign, you need 10-20 verified email addresses. Those, too, should
be email addresses you know, so you can easily get a reply from them. Send them
the exact email copy you plan to send to your prospects.

There is a way of checking the quality of your cold email copy. Just get a test email
address from mail-tester.com and include it in your campaign as one of your
prospects. More importantly, mail-tester.com assesses the correctness of your cold
email settings. So if you want to make sure you set everything up right, get the test
email and put in on your prospect list.

Don’t try to send your test campaign as quickly as possible. Ideally, set a big time
window (even a week) so that you avoid sending spikes. It seems suspicious to email
server filters when you suddenly send a lot of messages from your email address.

Once you complete that phase and mail-tester doesn’t show anything suspicious,
you can send your first real campaign to about 20 prospects.

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 5| What is email deliverability?

I’m sure you’ve noticed I used the word “deliverability” here and there. But what
does it mean and how can we use it? We will go through a couple of definitions in
this chapter.

Deliverability definition

Deliverability is a rate that measures the number of emails that successfully reached
the prospects’ inboxes compared to the total number of emails that were in your
campaign.

Deliverability matters a lot for you as a cold email sender. For one, the goal of a cold
email campaign is to get prospects to read and reply to your cold email. If they
don’t get your email, they can’t read it nor can they reply to it. Your cold outreach
efforts will be futile.

But there’s another point why deliverability is important. If many of your emails don’t
get delivered, you will burn your email address and domain. You won’t be able to
use any of them anymore.

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 How do we measure deliverability?

sent emails - bounces

deliverability rate = x 100%
sent emails

As you can see in the table above, I introduced yet another term -- “bounce”. Let’s
discuss what it means.

Bounce definition

The recipient’s server may reject your email. When that happens, we say the email
bounced. We recognize two types of bounces:

• Soft bounces - a message couldn’t be delivered due to a temporary

connection issue;

• Hard bounces - a message couldn’t be delivered, because the email

address is invalid.

A few soft bounces are completely normal. You don’t need to worry about them.

Hard bounces are the ones you should stay away from. They usually happen if you
send email campaign without verifying the email list beforehand. Lucky for you,
Woodpecker verifies emails before it fires off your email campaign.

Nonetheless, better be safe than sorry and verify your list manually while building it.
A high number of bounces spoils your sender reputation, and the reputation of your
domain. After all, that means that servers reject your emails. Don’t neglect the
bounce rate because you may get yourself on a blacklist, and then, none of your
emails will be delivered.

Summing up, the higher the bounce rate, the lower your email deliverability. But
there’s also another important metric people often miss out from ebooks like that.
And it is...

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 Is there a way to find out how many emails went into
the spam folder?

Unfortunately, there is no automated and reliable way to find out how many
emails landed in the spam folder, although there are some signs that might
indicate whether the emails are accidentally delivered to the spam folder or not.

• Check if your open rate has suddenly dropped. Such a drop might indicate
that emails are landing in the spam folder.

• Send some test emails to your colleagues, clients or even family members
and ask them if the email landed in their inbox or spam folder.

• If you have many bounced messages we would recommend checking the

bounce reasons most likely attached to the message. You can do this within
Woodpecker (Inbox) or in your main mailbox.

Engagement rate definition

There are a few metrics that you wouldn’t believe influence cold email deliverability.
Such a metric is the engagement rate. That is a metric that measures how many
people interacted with your email.

Engagement rate includes:

• the time recipients have spent reading your email (from not reading at all, immediate
deletes to having the email opened for a long time);

• the number of times recipients have opened your email;

• whether people forwarded your email;

• whether people replied or not.

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 How to take care of that rate? Taking care of that rate isn’t hard.

Do everything you can to make people reply to your email. Carefully select email
recipients. Make the email engaging and test your copy against spam-triggering
words. Provide an opt-out way for your addressee – it doesn’t have to be an
unsubscribe link). Add a professional signature that clearly shows you’re a genuine
email sender. That should help.

A word about spam-triggering words

A list of SPAM-triggering words is being constantly updated. If a word or

an expression is abused by spammers, email providers put it on the list to protect
their email users from unsolicited messages.

Although this blog post is for real estate agents or financial advisors, I strongly
encourage you to read it. It’s about not-so-common SPAM-triggering vocabulary:

A Pain of Cold Emailing in Finance/Real Estate, and How to Overcome it >>

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III. CAMPAIGN
OPTIMIZATION
 6| How to optimize your cold email
campaign?

And now the part you’ve been waiting for. How to schedule your campaign to run
smoothly, without any hiccups.

As I mentioned earlier, a proper cold emailing solution sends email from your mailbox.
For that reason, you need to get through a mailbox warm-up process before you
start automating outbound campaigns.

Now, once you have done warming up your email address, it’s time to work on your
email outbound strategy. I’m sure you thought about this prior to grabbing this ebook.
You must have a rough idea of who to target. You’ve surely defined your Ideal
Customer Profile and chosen where to find the people who fit that profile. You know
that your campaign should include follow-ups.

But how to bring it all together? And above all else, how to schedule your campaign?

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 What is an Ideal Customer Profile?

Ideal Customer Profile is a desired customer silhouette that you should target. To
work out who your ideal customers are, take into consideration their success
potential (success means they achieved their desired outcome with your solution)
and let it guide you throughout the prospecting phase. The profile isn’t set in
stone. It changes when you grow. Rethink it as often as you see fit (say, once
a year).

More on ICP here >>

For the sake of this ebook, let’s assume you have a cold emailing campaign waiting
to be sent. You’ve uploaded a list of prospects into Woodpecker. There’s a hundred
prospects on your list. You’ve also finished crafting a cold email sequence --
an opening email plus three follow-ups, that is four emails in total.

There’s only one thing left to do.

Scheduling the campaign.

A proper cold email tool allows you to choose sending windows for your email.
Ideally, you can set up separate sending windows for every email in the sequence.

You can also alter the timezone to match that of your prospects. So if you’re based
in France but target Brazil, change the time zone to Brazil’s one.

Take advice with a grain of salt

Many sales or marketing gurus claim there’s a perfect day to send your email on.
Don’t listen to them. There’s no universal advice here. You need to tailor it to your
target group. If you have no idea how to do it, try split testing. Divide your prospect
group into two equal parts and send emails at different times.

Learn here >>

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 There are four things to keep in mind when scheduling an email campaign.

Four things to keep in mind:

• stay within sending limits;

• avoid email overlap;

• keep a consistent sending volume;

• personalize your email copy.

#1 Stay within sending limits

Theoretically, cold emailing tool allows you to send so many emails as you please. It
doesn’t limit the number of emails you send a day because it sends emails from your
mailbox. It uses your SMTP to send it.

However, blast emails to your heart’s content and you get blocked. What happens
then? Well, you won’t be able to send any email from that account for 24 hours or
more. Why? Shouldn’t Woodpecker send as many messages as you want? Well, you
won’t get blocked by Woodpecker. You’ll get blocked by your email host. Ultimately,
it’s the one who sets limits.

Email providers limit the number of emails one can send, be it daily, hourly, or even
per minute at some hosts. By sending cold email campaigns without being aware
of your email provider’s limits, you are basically asking for trouble.

Stay within the limits of your email provider and your campaigns will be smoothly
sent as planned. Well, on the account that you are sending a customized email
copy with different snippet content for every recipient.

Note: The email sending limits posed by your provider are for all the messages getting
out of your address. If you have follow-ups planned within your campaign, they are
treated as individual emails.

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 What if I need to send more emails right now?

You can connect an external SMTP to your cold emailing tool. Then, you can
increase the sending frequency. It requires an advanced configuration of your
domain and DNS servers. Plus, it’s rather costly, so you really need a good reason
and a specific situation to benefit from it.

For more info, read this >>

Since you know the limits, how to plan your campaign to stay within them?

#2 Avoid email overlap

Sending spikes or no spikes, there’s another thing you need to think over. Email
overlap. When do emails overlap? There are two scenarios.

Scenario A

You send a campaign with a 5-email sequence to 200 prospects. You schedule the
follow-ups to go out 3 days after the opening message. After 3 days from running the
campaign, there is not only the remaining opening messages queued to be sent
a day, but also a number of follow-ups. Your emails overlap.

Scenario B

You send a campaign with a 5-email sequence to 200 prospects. You schedule the
follow-ups to be go out 3 days after the opening message. Two days later you run
another campaign that will be sent from the same email address. It has the same
number of emails and the same number of prospects. There’s twice as many emails
to be sent after a few days. And the emails overlap.

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 Will those situations get you over the email provider’s sending limits? Consult those
tables to see the exact number of emails that will go out of your mailbox.

Please see the attached sending simulations that are in the Appendix.

Jump to Appendix:

50 scenario 7 followups
150 scenario 3 followups
150 scenario 7 followups
250 scenario 3 followups

#3 Keep a consistent sending volume

Let’s look into your prospect base. How many people will receive your email? It’s
important to keep track of that.

As I’ve mentioned earlier in this ebook, it’s important to maintain a stable sending
volume. Think about it when planning your sending. Any aberration looks suspicious
in the eyes of the mailbox providers filters. The worst thing you can do is to fill your
campaign with suspicious sending spikes.

To avoid that, set up larger sending windows. Or send a smaller batch of emails per
day. Plus, avoid the lack of activity. Mailbox providers monitor complaint rates
everyday. When you stay inactive for a while, your IP may be treated as a new IP,
you would need to earn trust once again. That’s why it’s better to send fewer emails
after you take a break from sending cold emails.

I would advise you to make your sending windows larger than you would instinctively
set up. What do I mean? For example, if you want your emails to be sent from 9 AM
to 5 PM, change your sending windows to be 7 AM to 7 PM. It takes time to send the
email. Plus, you’ll avoid email build-up.

You can use an online tool Talos by Cisco to check your sending volume history.

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 #4 Personalize your email copy

If you try to send emails that look the same to many addressees in a small amount
of time, you get labeled as a spammer. What follows is that you get blocked from
sending while your messages get blocked from being delivered. And there you
have it -- your email server IP gets on a blacklist.

How to avoid that?

• Add some personalization snippets to your email templates;

• Split your prospect base to a few smaller batches and customize the copy for each
batch.

This way, your messages will vary, which will allow you to keep away from anti-spam
filters.

Moreover, your messages will be more relevant to those who will receive them, and
in turn, a chance of getting replies is higher.

I mentioned that you can add personalization snippets to your email templates.
What are those? Personalization snippets, or snippets as we call them here, are some
pieces of information about each of your prospects that can be merged into your
email templates to make your messages unique and customized to each addressee.

You have an option to add:

• Basic snippets - common snippets like company name, first name, etc.

• Custom snippets - snippets that can contain words, phrases or even full sentences

Head out to this article to learn more >>

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 7| How to monitor the campaign’s
stats board?

Say you have a campaign running. How would you check its effectiveness? You
would count how many positive replies you got, right? That’s correct. But what if
you’re getting no replies? Maybe none of your prospects have opened your email?
Or worse… none of them really got it.

How to check that?

Thankfully, cold email tools are powered with an intelligent statistics board that
empowers you to keep track of your campaign’s effectiveness.

With a stats board, you can monitor the journey of your email. You can see how
many of your emails got out and whether they landed in your prospect’s mailbox.
You can also keep an eye on email opens, opt-outs and replies. You can mark
positive, negative or neutral replies. Isn’t that convenient?

Now you know what you can track, but that’s not the end of the story. The numbers
are not here for you to brag about. Cold emailing isn’t the numbers game. You need
to learn how to draw conclusions from the stats a cold email tool offers you. What
would you need a tracking for if you can’t interpret the results? Let’s see how to
do that.

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 #1 How to identify that your emails don’t get
delivered to the inbox
You’ll recognize that your emails don’t get delivered by looking at the relationship
between sent emails and delivered emails on the Woodpecker stats board.
Woodpecker shows you how many emails have been sent so far. It also shows you
how many of them have been delivered. Just click on one of your campaigns and
you’ll be able to see the dashboard. Can you?

Let’s say your campaign has 50 prospects. 25 emails have been already sent, but
only 3 have gotten delivered. Well, you have deliverability trouble. What now?

What about invalid email addresses?

Invalid email addresses are the email addresses Woodpecker deemed as non-
existent. You get many invalid email addresses when your prospect list is of poor
quality.

Go over this checklist here >>

#2 How to identify that your emails are going to

SPAM folder

Look at the stats of your campaign. Let’s check the sent emails: 25 emails have
already been sent. Most of them have already gotten delivered. Yet, your open rate
is close to none. What does it mean? There’s a great chance your emails are landing
in the SPAM folder.

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 What’s the reason for it?

• an email provider’s anti-SPAM filter thinks you’re a bot;

• your SPF and/or DKIM are set up incorrectly;

• your prospects think they got a SPAM message, so they mark your email as SPAM.

To see if you’re classified as a spammer, use mail-tester.com. Send your email to

an email address you get from mail-tester and you’ll see what SpamAssassin thinks
of you. Also, you’ll be able to check your SPF and DKIM records.

#3 Emails get delivered to the main inbox,

why nobody replies?
What if you send everything by the book. Your email copy doesn’t contain any SPAM-
triggering vocabulary. You keep a consistent sending volume. Your prospect list
contains carefully selected email addresses that you’re sure exist, etcetera, etcetera.

Why nobody replies?

There are no replies because you have:

• a poor target,

• an irrelevant email copy,

• an unclear Call To Action,

• poor timing.

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 What to do with that? Well, either rework your ICP or invest some time in A/B-testing
your email. Have you tried A/B testing before? First, you need to decide what you
want to test. You can test one element at a time, for instance, the day when you send
your email. Then split your prospects into two equal groups.

Remember the group must be homogenous. What does it mean? They need to be
similar to each other. For example, they need to have as much in common as
possible. One group will get an email on the workday and the other one on the
weekend. Can you spot any difference in the reply rate?

A few closing thoughts

I hope after reading that you will sail through scheduling your email campaign. Just
look at what you’ve learned. Now, we know why we need a separate tool for sending
cold email campaigns, and how such a tool differs from marketing software.

We can explain how email is generally sent and what protocols are involved in the
sendinding process. We recognize the importance of staying within our sending
limits and we’re not lost in deliverability vocabulary.

But most importantly, we can optimize our cold email campaign thanks to sending
schedule we can set up and monitoring the most valuable statistics. I feel confident
that with a good targeting, right copy and proper personalization you can achieve
really good score.

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APPENDIX
 50 scenario - 7 followups

first-touch follow-up follow-up follow-up follow-up follow-up follow-up follow-up each

email 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 day

day 1 50

day 2 50 50
day 3 50

day 4 50 50

day 5 50 50 100
day 6 50 50

day 7 50 50 50

day 8 50 50 50 150
day 9 50 50 50

day 10 50 50 50 50

day 11 50 50 50 50 200
day 12 50 50 50 50

day 13 50 50 50 50 50

day 14 50 50 50 50 50 250
day 15 50 50 50 50 50

day 16 50 50 50 50 50 50

day 17 50 50 50 50 50 50 300
day 18 50 50 50 50 50 50

day 19 50 50 50 50 50 50 50

day 20 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 350
day 21 50 50 50 50 50 50 50

day 22 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50

day 23 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 400
day 24 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50

Summary

Total number of prospects: 1720 Sending peak: 400/day

Daily limit of opening messages (Email #1): 50 On which day will I go over the limits?
Number of emails in the cadence: 8 (if no bounces)
Days between subsequent follow-ups: 3 Leading Email Provider 1: day 22

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 150 scenario - 3 followups

first-touch follow-up follow-up follow-up each day

email 1 2 3

day 1 150

day 2 150 150

day 3 150

day 4 150 150

day 5 150 150 300

day 6 150 150

day 7 150 150 150

day 8 150 150 150 450

day 9 150 150 150

day 10 150 150 150 150

day 11 150 150 150 150 600

day 12 150 150 150 150

Summary

Total number of prospects: 5250

Daily limit of opening messages (Email #1): 150
Number of emails in the cadence: 4
Days between subsequent follow-ups: 3

Sending peak: 600/day

On which day will I go over the limits?

(if no bounces)
Leading Email Provider 1: day 10
Leading Email Provider 2: day 7

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 150 scenario - 7 followups

first-touch follow-up follow-up follow-up follow-up follow-up follow-up follow-up each

email 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 day

day 1 150

day 2 150 150

day 3 150

day 4 150 150

day 5 150 150 300

day 6 150 150

day 7 150 150 150

day 8 150 150 150 450

day 9 150 150 150

day 10 150 150 150 150

day 11 150 150 150 150 600

day 12 150 150 150 150

day 13 150 150 150 150 150

day 14 150 150 150 150 150 750

day 15 150 150 150 150 150

day 16 150 150 150 150 150 150

day 17 150 150 150 150 150 150 900

day 18 150 150 150 150 150 150

day 19 150 150 150 150 150 150 150

day 20 150 150 150 150 150 150 150 1050

day 21 150 150 150 150 150 150 150

day 22 150 150 150 150 150 150 150 150

day 23 150 150 150 150 150 150 150 150 1200
day 24 150 150 150 150 150 150 150 150

Summary

Total number of prospects: 4200 Sending peak: 1200/day

Daily limit of opening messages (Email #1): 150 On which day will I go over the limits?
Number of emails in the cadence: 8 (if no bounces)
Days between subsequent follow-ups: 3 Leading Email Provider 1: day 7
Leading Email Provider 2: day 6

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 250 scenario - 3 followups

first-touch follow-up follow-up follow-up each day

email 1 2 3

day 1 250

day 2 250 250

day 3 250

day 4 250 250

day 5 250 250 500

day 6 250 250

day 7 250 250 250

day 8 250 250 250 750

day 9 250 250 250

day 10 250 250 250 250

day 11 250 250 250 250 1000

day 12 250 250 250 250

Summary

Total number of prospects: 8750

Daily limit of opening messages (Email #1): 250
Number of emails in the cadence: 4
Days between subsequent follow-ups: 3

Sending peak: 1000/day

On which day will I go over the limits?

(if no bounces)
Leading Email Provider 1: day 4
Leading Email Provider 2: day 4

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