Outbound is harder than ever

Reflections on the first month of mass mailer updates

DEAR STAGE 2: I read your article in December about the upcoming Google/Yahoo changes to mass mailing and it helped us prep for the Feb 1 date. It’s been about a month since the changes went into effect. What are you seeing? Any new guidance for companies? ~TRYING TO LAND IN THE INBOX

DEAR TRYING TO LAND IN THE INBOX: For those of you playing catch up… back in December, we did a deep dive on the much anticipated Feb 1 changes to mass mailer regulations.

Fast forward 4 months, and the world hasn’t ended. Email still exists. But, outbound is getting even harder. 

So, what happened?

First, Google pulled back. They did a 160 (*almost a 180 😉) and said that all of the changes they announced actually applied to only the @gmail domain and NOT corporate domains like @stage2.capital which is hosted on gmail. That said, the changes rolled out were still impactful and my bet is that more change is ahead. The frenzy around the proposed changes brought awareness to a problem that’s been building over the last few years — the volume of outbound email is out of control. Consider that October announcement a preview of what’s to come.

We’re monitoring progress on outbound email closely. In fact, Stage 2 was lucky enough to have Jesse Ouellette from LeadMagic join us this week, and share his observations and learnings from the first month of these new spam rules with our portfolio:

The TL;DR (aka if you do nothing else, do these 2 things):

1. Domain management: Your primary domain is where the entire company conducts business — do not send unsolicited outbound emails from this domain. Set up a secondary (or multiple!) domains for your BDR/Sales/Recruiting teams to leverage for outbound. 

2. Authentication: Make sure you have set up the proper authentication. Details from Google here. NOTE: there are different guidelines for those sending <5K and >5K emails daily

Assuming you’ve got a handle on the 2 tips above, read on for some other takeaways from our chat with Jesse…

• Watch for lockouts: For most startups, you will first hear about this when a rep on your team sounds the alarm bells — “I can’t log in to Gmail!” But, you can also monitor this via the admin panel in Google which shows if there are spam concerns/lockouts. If you have to unlock someone, make sure you address/correct the underlying behavior. This is a warning signal and we have seen entire domains locked out for repeat offenders (back to #1 above). 

• Good outbound/cold conversion right now: conversion rate for outbound is low. Expect something like: 1000 sends > 50 replies > 5-20 positive replies. It’s critical that you isolate outbound emails to determine if it's working at all — many companies are close to zero positive response, but think outbound is “working” because they evaluate the performance of all email including follow up to inbound.  

• Use email validation tools: You only want to send to verified email addresses. There are many tools out there, so pick one and start. LeadMagic is offering a discounted option right now, with a one time charge of $99 for 200K!

• Warm up tools: Send fake engagement emails — the ones that are good are the ones that are integrated and tied to a sequencer (e.g. SmartLead and Instantly), but there are other considerations before you say go:

  • Warm up has to be done through your own internal email server or it's not worth doing. And even then, Jesse has found that warm up really only works if you are sending cold email at the same time. Think of it as counteracting any of the negative outcomes from unsolicited email.

  • SOC II: This is a big one folks! Using a warm up tool means you have to go down a tier of security (can't have 2 factor authentication using OAuth1), so you will need to confirm if you can get through SOC II with this in place before you start. 

• General sending guidelines: 

  • Do not email 2 contacts at the same company in the same day, especially at large companies (Fortune 1000).

  • Limit the number of emails to any one contact in a sequence to 3 or less — this is a big change for most!

  • Do not use break up emails.

  • Send slower and space out over the day v. batch sending to avoid the patterns of bulk send.

  • Microsoft is cleaner and harder to get locked out relative to Google. We’re seeing some companies set up a second ESP for their sales team even if they are otherwise a Google shop. 

For most companies these changes are leading to a quality > quantity mindset (there are still exceptions — especially for SMB horizontal products!), where you are actively integrating/scaling non-email channels. 

Let us know if you have further tips in the comments.

Until next week!