Often, a sales team will take hours to select a CRM, import prospects and develop a diligently composed series of email messages, only to find that dozens of them never arrive. Open rates are dismal, response rates are MIA and the team begins to doubt that the subject line or the offer is the culprit.
Occasionally the more complex problem lies in the walls of the CRM.
Email deliverability is determined by how messages are sent. A free personal inbox, an unauthenticated domain or a badly maintained contact list can make it difficult for genuine sales emails to get through to recipients. Before ramping up volume, companies should ensure that their business email setup and email infrastructure are up to scratch.
How Email Providers Decide What Looks Like Spam
Mailbox providers, including Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo!, use a number of different cues to determine the appropriate destination within the mailbox for the message.
One other factor is sender reputation. If a sender, perhaps a domain or mailbox, has a long history of sending useful mail that people actually want to receive and interact with, it will be trusted more than one used for other purposes. The opposite is true if there are many complaints, bounces, or just plain ignoring of the messages.
Domain authentication is an important part of a reliable business email setup. It allows receiving providers to verify that an email was truly sent by the domain it was identified as.
Recipient behavior is another source of indicators. If recipients frequently open and reply to or otherwise act on received email, that can give strong clues about the sender. But repeatedly sending large volumes of unsolicited email can be counterproductive.
Lastly, note quality. Out-of-date, wrongly put together or bought lists can include invalid addresses and people who have explicitly asked not to have anything to do with the business. A relevant and clean list offers a good foundation.
Common Business Email Setup Problems That Hurt Sales Outreach
Common errors also include using a free personal email account to distribute CRM sequences. An individual's personal account might be suitable for one-to-one professional conversations, but it is not always the best way to build business outreach.
Another problem is sending from a brand-new domain without authentication. New domains have less commonality than established domains, so they have less standing and reputation until they have a sizable history of sending high-quality, legal email. For teams managing larger outreach campaigns, a SuiteCRM Multi Sender Bulk Campaign Manager can help organize multiple sender accounts and manage email campaigns more systematically.
Authentication records are another area where small businesses can overlook important groundwork:
- SPF offers direction to incoming mail systems about what servers and services are permitted to send email on your domain's behalf.
- Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) helps protect users receiving outbound messages by adding a digital signature to the outgoing message, allowing receiving users to check the authenticity and integrity of the message and its origin.
- DMARC extends the use of SPF and DKIM by instructing receiving MTAs how to handle email messages that fail authentication checks and by generating reports for domain owners.
The way these are set up is generally in the domain's DNS. The business should follow the service provider's setup instructions, rather than copying generic DNS values from another service.
Another weakness a common address might cause. If all salespeople use the same generic mailbox, it can be more difficult to maintain clear ownership of each conversation or to get an accurate overview of individual activity. Individual team mailboxes, or well-defined role addresses, may make setup easier.
What a Proper Business Email Setup Looks Like?
A more basic business email setup starts with having your own email address on your own domain. Instead of having the sales message come from someone's personal email, the team might be able to send messages from, for example, alex@company domain.com and so on that of that company's email address system.
The domain should then be properly authenticated using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, following the mail provider's guidance. Two different policies can then be applied: for each salesperson, an individual email account should be created; for business roles, role-based addresses should be used when appropriate.
Sending volume: the volume of emails is also supposed to grow incrementally. Do not suddenly go from a few emails when signing up to a new mailbox or a domain to hundreds of auto-mails in a very short time. As part of normal growth, the sending activity allows an organization to manage bounces, replies, and complaints before proceeding.
Connect the Business Email Setup to the CRM.
Once the email structure is in place, link the appropriate business email to the CRM so salespeople can manage emails, and the conversation history no longer has to be split across communication tools.
The CRM itself does not cure poor deliverability. It just gives the workshop tools to organize and automate your outreach. If the underlying mailbox, domain, or contact list is badly set up, automation will magnify the problem.
List hygiene has to be included in the CRM process. Remove undelivered entries; don't spam if the prospects or customers don't react; make your communication relevant.
Where applicable, it is also helpful to make available to the recipient a simple way of opting out of receiving marketing or outreach messages. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission's guidance on the CAN-SPAM Act sets out requirements for commercial email, including opt-out mechanisms. Businesses operating within the European Union should also refer to the European Commission's guidance on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Pre-Launch Checklist for CRM Outreach
Following Ultimate 15 Email Marketing Best Practices can also help teams review their email campaigns before sending and maintain better sending practices.
Before activating a sales sequence, check that your business email setup meets the following requirements:
- The address for sending is entered using the company's own domain.
- SPF, DKIM, and DMARC have been set up as recommended by the provider.
- Every salesperson has his own individual mailbox.
- The CRMs are correctly linked to the intended business mailbox.
- The contact list is up to date, applicable, and not obviously containing invalid addresses.
- The amount of mail being sent is suitable considering the past history of the domain/mailbox.
- The email contains an appropriately written sender identification.
- The known recipients have an appropriate way to opt out where required
- All bounces, replies and complaints will be monitored post launch.
Good deliverability isn't something that a CRM will suddenly provide. It is formed by a combination of correctly configured business email infrastructure, responsible sending, relevant targeting and consistent analysis. Securing those essentials before trying to expand and grow outreach gives the sales team a much more dependable CRM method.
Build the Right Foundation Before Scaling
Effective CRM outreach begins well before the first sequence is sent. Fully hosted and domain-authenticated mail servers, good business associate mailboxes, clean contact data and proportionate sending volumes all allow healthy email hygiene. Establish this foundation, then test and scale.