everyone's complaining about deliverability these days, but honestly our campaign results have never been better. A huge chunk of that comes down to how we handle email infrastructure and volume. here's what we're doing internally.

Infrastructure

NameCheap domains (nothing fancy, just solid)
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC set up properly from day one
Hypertide emails (Microsoft IPs) plus Google emails (Google IPs) - we use both
Rotate email addresses regularly. buy and warm new domains every month so there's always fresh addresses to swap in

Volume & Warmup

Our main metric for deliverability is reply rate. volume scales based on that. better reply rate = more emails from that address. Max is 10 new contacts and 30 total emails per day per address. hypertide emails are exempt because of their setup.
Three weeks of warmup before any cold volume hits
After warmup, slowly increase cold volume over a few weeks until we hit max. if reply rates drop, we pull back immediately

Campaign Setup

Open tracking is off. always.
No links, videos, or images in the first email. if a follow-up genuinely needs an image or link, fine, but know it'll wreck your email health faster, so be ready for that

Copy & Syntax

Use AI to personalize as much as possible. Boosts reply rates and adds variation to the copy
Vary syntax heavily - not just individual words, but whole sentences with different structures
Write good copy. Obvious, but reply rates are the lifeblood of email health. relevant, value-driven, and designed to provoke a response
Run everything through a spam word checker (Folderly's is decent) to avoid trigger words

Lead List & Qualification

Your list has to be qualified for your offer. even if they're not interested, they should find it relevant. Otherwise you're begging for spam flags. use whatever filters your database has, then run each lead through Clay against your ICP criteria
Verify leads with MillionVerifier - only contact verified ones
Use EmailGuard to figure out which ESP each lead uses, then remove all Outlook emails. That might change soon, but as of November 2024, Microsoft's anti-spam measures make Outlook a black hole for reply rates. Leaving them in kills your email health

Cold email is still one of the most effective B2B channels when you do it right. just takes more work than it used to. follow this, don't cut corners, and you'll fill your pipeline.

anyone else got additions to this?