Founders Guide to 2024 Anti-Spam Rules
Changes are quickly coming to major email providers. Here's your guide to be prepared so you can reach important early startup customers
Finding Product Market Fit (PMF) is hard for any startup. As detailed in my last post, founders who conduct cold outreach to their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) to test their idea before they build stand the best chance of reaching PMF and surviving. Cold outreach can be done on a variety of channels. I used X/Twitter for my startup as that’s where my audience clearly spent time. For my work with early stage startups, email and LinkedIn are the most effective methods to reach experts to talk with.
The rules for sending cold email are getting much tougher in the coming days. Google, Yahoo, and other major email providers are implementing new anti-SPAM rules in February aimed at reducing unwanted emails to their account holders. Founders will need to make some basic technical preparations and implement long-standing best practices for emails to continue to reach the target.
Take the Technical Steps
Set up and authenticate your emails using DMARC, SPF, and DKIM
Allow recipients to unsubscribe with one click. Most email sequencing tools provide functionality for this. Here’s an example from Outreach.
Keep your SPAM complaint rate under 0.3%. The best way to do this is by sending “wanted” emails which I’ll outline below
Warm Up Your Inbox
If you’ve recently founded your company, there’s a good chance you also have a newly created email domain. Corporate email services will be naturally suspicious of fresh email domains as that’s what spammers and phishers use. Fledgling domains are more likely to be sent to SPAM. This is why we see a lot of younger founders start emailing from their still-active university accounts.
Instead of sending from an alternative email address try “warming up” your inbox instead. Here’s how I recommend doing it:
Send outbound emails to people you know and who will respond
Use an inbox warm-up solution like Instantly
Start slow and gradually increase the number of emails you send from your domain
Limit cold outbound emails to 30 per day per sender
Scrub Your Lists
When I help founders at Unusual Ventures, I spend a ton of time making sure our email lists consist of people who should be interested in the solution the company is building. It’s not hard to build a list of engineers, for example, using Apollo or LinkedIn Sales Navigator. There are a zillion software engineers out there! What’s time consuming is making sure these engineers are in your ICP and the ones most likely feeling the pain your solutions aims to solve.
One technique I like to use is using profile keywords to find people working on a specific problem. For example, engineers working in robotics don’t always list themselves as a “robotics engineer”. However, robotics engineers often list ROS as something they have a skill for within their LinkedIn job description. Finding these types of specific attributes for your ICP helps you reach the right people.
Next, eye test your list for people that just shouldn’t be there. For example, in my searches for software engineers I often get “sales engineers” or “solutions engineers” in my results. These folks (who are great in the sales process) are customer facing and aren’t typically writing the code behind a software application. Sending them cold emails about dev tools or infra may fall on deaf ears and get you marked as SPAM.
Finally, I spend a good amount of time cleaning up names, job titles, and company names before putting contacts into email sequences. People put all sorts of words in their LinkedIn titles that become dead giveaways that your email is a bulk-sent if you don’t catch it ahead of time. In fact, some people deliberately place emojis, special characters, or other Easter eggs in their LinkedIn information to signal SPAM.
Below is an example of an email you 100% do not want to send. It will immediately tell a recipient it wasn’t meant just for them and you’re pretty sloppy.
Hi Mary 🚀🚀 ,
Your impressive background as a Building Cool Stuff in AI at Skynet (a subsidiary of Termatron) is why I wanted to connect. We founded a company that’s taking the pain out of data organization that reduces the time and cost by over 50%.
We are speaking to experts like you to get feedback on our MVP. Could we schedule 30 minutes with you in the next two or three days to show you what we are working on?
Thanks,
Founder
Use Only Verified Emails
Services like ZoomInfo or Apollo are great for building email lists but, let’s face it, they can’t provide emails that are 100% accurate all of the time. Some of your emails will bounce back. The key is to try to limit this as much as possible. Every prominent list building solution offers a confidence score for emails. You want to use only “verified” or high confidence score emails as much as possible.
Doing this helps Gmail and other email clients perceive your email account as non-spammy. In addition, you’ll limit embarrassing responses from people within organizations saying “This person hasn’t worked here in two years. Take us all off your list!” (Trust me, this happens)
Send “Wanted” Emails
Most people are good at quickly assessing an email and determining if it’s SPAM and/or also carelessly sent out to thousands of others. These emails get marked and will count against your SPAM rate.
The biggest key to avoiding SPAM filters is to send emails people want to receive. How do you do that if it’s a cold email and the recipient doesn’t know you from Adam? I’ve detailed the biggest mistakes in founder cold email in this post. You’ll want to follow the following best practices:
Keep your emails short
Be sure to provide value to the recipient (Hint: solve their pain or educate them)
Personalize the emails as much as possible
Have a clear call to action
