The landscape of outbound campaigns in 2024 has been riddled with challenges, especially concerning domain and deliverability changes. After the 3/1 changes from Yahoo and Google, we’ve seen several other changes from Email Service Providers and the enterprise email infrastructures themselves. Hence residual dips and decline in rates have wreaked havoc on new business meeting goals.
These evolving regulations and increasingly sophisticated email filtering mechanisms have made it tougher for outbound campaigns to land the inboxes of their target audience. And as a business owner myself, I am thankful for this. We all know email has been an extremely overused, reckless strategy for millions of companies for years. But it’s a vital way to communicate digitally with our prospects and customers. I am so thankful we’ve been tracking these changes for the last several years and have a playbook that has evolved with the times.
Deliverability Skills Are Non-Existent in Sales Organizations
And rightfully so. What sales leader has the bandwidth, much less skillset to ensure DNS is properly set, sender health is sound, and best practices are in constant motion so they’re not at risk of spam and blacklists? You hire a rep, IT sends over a new inbox, you subscribe them to a sales automation tool like Salesloft, Gong or Outreach, and hit ‘go’ on their ramp runway. And just like that – a powerful automation tool that can crash an entire domain and cost you the quarter lies in the hands of a sales rep.
The "State of Outbound" in 2024 has changed the way we automate communication forever. The companies fortunate enough to have an IT-savvy leader who can lean over to the sales team will be fine, but most don’t have this luxury. Building pipeline is a strong math game when domains are strong and sending patterns are healthy – so here are five simple principles we’ve subscribed to over the last several years that have helped us navigate these turbulent outbound-times:
1. Humanizing Patterns: Deploying multiple senders, not just one. The weight of outbound must be shared amongst multiple senders. Be sure to implement slow daily throttling so the domain sees a consistent trickle, rather than surges. We calculate sends per day per sender and even sends per day per company to avoid triggering spam filters. Your lists must be from diverse organizations so you’re not saturating all at once.
2. Content Reviews and Updates: Refresh your templates and content often – we do this every few weeks to prevent content fatigue. We always say “if we’re showing up in the inbox, we better deserve to be there”. Your content must serve the prospect, not sell them – content integrity is essential right now. Also, A/B test everything until you find a playbook - then it’s a constant play of refreshing content within that playbook.
3. DNS Updates: DMARC, SPF, DKIM, MX Records – to all sales leaders, this part of our meetings sounds like Spanglish. Ongoing DNS management is vital to keep our program compliant and up-to-date.
4. Inbox SDR Model: Every disposition counts. Every OOO or Parental Leave automated response must be noted to the contact. If not, it’s like knocking on your neighbor's door when you know they’re on vacation - rather come back when they're home and knock once. Getting inbox dispositions right allows our SDRs to spend their time on meaningful follow-ups with nurture prospects and only viable active contacts to enroll into your campaigns.
5. Warming automation: There are a million tools out there that will safely warm inboxes and sending domains. Make sure to leverage one with unique content that exchanges several times so the send/receive patterns are strong. We also have a manual domain warm-up process internally when we need to see deliverability first-hand.
The dips we saw in early 2024 are behind us here at AK Ops with a full recovery! But we saw changes occur again in June – we suspect a combination of the sale of Google Domains, the peak of summer vacations, and updated enterprise policies to be at the root. Every environment we access experienced MoM decline in open rates. However, we attacked these 5 things immediately and are already seeing measurable positive change. These incremental improvements are visible in our most affected clients, even catching some up to pace. Praise!
Our systems configuration manager, Shelby Cutright, ensures we stay ahead of these changes and catch potential issues sooner than most sales organizations. Nonetheless, the ripple effect of these changes is evident in all sales organizations right now that have traditionally leaned on outbound.
Big Picture Outlook on Outbound
Thankfully, inboxes will be cleaner and more protected than ever a year from now. Executives will find a balance of how to conduct inside sales with organizations using safe, established strategies. With ongoing monitoring and attention, AK Ops will continue to see our emails in inboxes while competitors who haven't kept up with deliverability changes will struggle. Our high-integrity process, DNS setup, content strategy, and safe daily fueling patterns position our clients to prevail. Luckily, our model is built to support clients through these changes as we are equipped to handle the complexities of today’s outbound strategies on their behalf.
I am happy to take any call with any organization struggling with this – and I mean that. The technology got smarter than the user quickly and it’s in my best interest to teach folks to tackle this themselves. The best part – these changes don’t take months to improve, you can typically see the uptick within days!