How Salesbot Works With Your Email Service Provider
With Salesbot, we can help you reach out using automated email campaigns to sales leads. We use your email account, linked securely to Salesbot, to send these automated emails to sales leads.
Salesbot does NOT send emails to sales leads on your behalf. When you send outreach, the emails come directly from you and your email account--Salesbot simply provides for the integration. You are responsible for all outreach, content and quality. Here at Salesbot, we HIGHLY encourage you to use a properly warmed email account, and have advanced email settings like DKIM, DMARC and SPF enabled for your domain.
Steps to Setting Up Your Email With Salesbot
Set Up DMARC, DKIM and SPF
Set up an Email Sub-Domain
Warm Your Email Domains or Sub-Domains
Configure Your Email
Set up DMARC, DKIM and SPF, Email Warming and Sub-Domains
Prior to linking your email with Salesbot, you should ensure your email domain (or sub-domain) is properly configured. These configurations are frequently referred to in the industry by terms such as DKIM, DMARC, and SPF. Don't worry, although these terms might sound confusing, they generally refer to ensuring emails get to where you want them to.
Here's a helpful diagram showing how DMARC, DKIM and SPF can help your email deliverability, from our friends at Cyberimpact.
Some quick definitions:
DMARC - Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) is an email security protocol that helps protect email senders and recipients from spoofing, phishing, and other threats. DMARC builds on other email authentication methods, such as DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), Sender Policy Framework (SPF), and the Domain Name System (DNS), to verify email senders.
DKIM - DKIM, or Domain Keys Identified Mail, is an email authentication method that uses a digital signature to let the receiver of an email know that the message was sent and authorized by the owner of a domain.
SPF - Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an email authentication method that helps prevent email spoofing, phishing, and spam. It allows a domain to create a public list of mail servers that are authorized to send emails on its behalf. When a receiving mail server receives an email, it can check the SPF record to verify that the email is from an authorized server.
TLDR - All of these combine to improve email deliverability and ensure your emails get delivered.
Setting up an Email Subdomain
A viable alternative to using your primary email domain is to set up a sub-domain for your email sending with Salesbot. This helps protect your primary email domain, just in case there are any issues such as spam, bounces, or junk mail reports affecting your main email.
An example would be adding an email subdomain for your sales outreach, let's call it sales.mycompany.com. This way, if your email gets flagged for spam, it doesn't affect your main email domain, mycompany.com, it only affects the subdomain or sales.mycompany.com.
For more information about setting up an email subdomain, refer to this helpful RecruitBot help desk article.
Email Warming
Warming an email domain refers to sending out small volumes of email outreach to approve and trusted recipients, in order to show that your sending email domain is 'trusted'. This is generally only required if you're using a new email sub-domain, but it can be useful for your primary domain as well. Here at Salesbot, we recommend any of the commercially available email warmers, such as:
-Mailreach (affiliate program link)
Once this email warming process is completed, you can link your email sub-domain to Salesbot and begin sending outreach.
Here's an example from our friends at Mailreach, where we've set up an email subdomain, properly warmed it, and have a good 'reputation score'. Typically this process of warming a new email sub-domain can take between 1-3 weeks, but can vary significantly depending on the amount of emails you want to send, your IP, etc. Warming your email will help ensure you're not immediately flagged as a spam email account.
After warming up your email domain or sub-domain and configuring your DMARC, DKIM and SPF, you're ready to link your email with Salesbot and start reaching out!
Linking Your Email with Salesbot
The next step is to link your email domain with Salesbot. Head to the Settings page, then click on Email. Choose Google or Microsoft (which includes Azure, Outlook and MS365 in the cloud) to get started linking your email.
Once you choose Google (Gmail) or Microsoft, you'll see a brief authentication process, where you'll choose your email account you'd like to link. This is a secure process using industry-standard OAUTH authentication, and you can unlink/disconnect the integration at any time. Salesbot ONLY uses this integration for the sole purpose of sending and receiving emails to sales leads, and does NOT read your entire inbox or other connected account properties.
Within Salebot, we show the current status of each item, along with the technical details such as the record name, type, the example, and if there's any error. If there's an error, you'll see it labeled in red--that's an indication of an issue you should resolve through your Gmail or Microsoft account.
Example of a well configured email domain (sections blanked out for sensitivity):
Example of a poorly configured email domain:
If you're missing any items related to SPF, DKIM or DMARC, here's a few helpful articles below on how to set these up with Google and Microsoft. Also, you can reach out to our support team at support@salesbot.io for more help. Although we can help direct you to the appropriate resources to get SPF, DKIM or DMARC configured, we cannot do it for you.
An important part of sending emails to Gmail users is ensuring your email domain is set up correctly. Google/Gmail REQUIRES your email domain to be set up properly in order to ensure deliverability to Gmail users. If you haven't already, you can use Google's handy postmaster tools, located at: https://gmail.com/postmaster/ to check the status of your account and resolve any issues.
Microsoft
Improving Your Email Deliverability
Things you can do to improve your chances of email deliverability and success:
✅Use non 'spammy' email subject lines (Bad = "FREE COUPON CLICK NOW DISCOUNT CODES". Better = "Marketing Director Opportunity for you in New York, NY")
✅Limiting your email outreach to a specific limit per day, based on your company type and requirements (Salesbot helps you with this automatically)
✅Using an email warming product or an established domain for outreach
✅Using personalized content in your emails
✅Providing a clickable unsubscribe link in your emails (you can enable an automatic unsubscribe link inside Salesbot using this setting
✅Setting up your DMARC, DKIM and SPF
Things NOT to do:
❌Sending > 200 emails in a single day
❌Using email subject lines like 'Free', 'Coupon', basically, anything you as a recipient would delete or likely to click that 'Spam' button in your email reader
❌Not including an unsubscribe link
❌Sending generic emails with little to no personalization
❌Using a brand new email domain with no previous outreach
❌Not setting up your DKIM, DMARC and SPF
Salesbot Sending Limits
Please remember, Salesbot does not send emails on your behalf. All the mail you send via Salesbot is sent via your email domain/service provider and your connected mailbox.
Why are Sending Limits important?
Every email provider, from Google to Outlook, has restrictions or limits set on how many emails their users can send, and what level of spam/bad emails they tolerate before your account is suspended or blocked. These restrictions aren't published, but you can take several steps to stay 'under the radar' of email service providers. Salesbot does NOT send email on your behalf, we are not responsible for your domain being suspended, blocked or banned, but we can help with suggestions and tips on limiting these issues.
That being said, here at Salesbot, we do have several 'behind the scenes' tools to assist you in reducing the chances your email domain will be blocked or suspended. We only allow a maximum of 200 emails to be sent, per day (on a rolling 24-hour time period from when your sequence is first sent), from each linked Salesbot account using your domain. If you send 'regular' emails from your linked email domain as well, you may consider sending fewer than 200 emails a day using Salesbot.
If you want to send MORE than 200 emails a day, consider adding an additional Salesbot license/user account to your company--each user account can have a linked email domain at 200/per day.
Quick note on sending by time - Salesbot adheres to the notion of FIFO, or "First In, First Out", when sending follow-up emails or drips. This means we'll always try to send drip emails before any newly scheduled emails or campaigns. We also stagger sending your email outreach during this process so your email domain isn't overloaded or gets a negative reputation. As such, the rare case may occur where emails take longer than the specified time to send out.
Also with Salesbot, you can enable a quick unsubscribe link to be included on all outbound emails. To enable the unsubscribe link, head to the Company settings page, and enable the option.
Hitting Email Sending Limits in Salesbot
If you hit a daily email sending limit in Salesbot, don't worry! We'll automatically delay sending the next batch of emails or drips on a rolling 24-hour period, no action from you required.
For example, if you have 200 emails scheduled to go out on Monday at 9am, then try to send another 200 at noon, we'll delay sending the second group of 200 until the next day.
What To Do If Your Email Domain Gets Banned or Suspended?
If your email domain is banned/suspended, it's not the end of the world. Typically, you can restore your domain immediately, but there are occasions when you might have to wait 24-48 hours. Consider it a 'slap on the wrist' by your email domain, telling you to slow down the pace of emails or consider iterating on their content. Future bans/suspensions could be lengthier or more stringent, and in some cases, your email domain can be permanently banned/canceled.
See here for steps on restoring your suspended Gmail account.
FAQ and Q&A:
Q: I have 1,000 sales leads I want to reach out, how long will it take me to send those?
A: At 200 emails a day, it will take 5 days to send emails to all your sales leads. If you want to send more emails, consider adding a second Salesbot user/license by contacting sales@salesbot.io.
Q: My sales email open and response rates are terrible! Why am I not getting XX%?
A: Sales email open and response rates can vary wildly, depending on market, recipient pool, time of day, industry, and weather (yes, really). Here's a breakdown of some average response rates from our friends at HubSpot. Average open rates are around ~35%, and average click-through or response rates are around 1-4%.
Q: I get a high number of bounced emails with other email providers like Constant Contact, Apollo--will that happen with Salesbot?
A: Great question! Salesbot verifies and validates each email address using our proprietary system, BEFORE sending outreach to your leads. This helps improve email deliverability, open, response and click rates, while also minimizing bounce rates. While the industry average is between 3-10%, you'll infrequently have emails bounce when using Salesbot as we pre-validate before sending to your sales leads.
Q: My email domain got banned or suspended! It's Salesbots' fault! 😠
A: As noted above, Salesbot uses your email mailbox to facilitate sending outreach, we don't send on your behalf. If your email gets banned/suspended, you have options such as reducing the amount of email you send, improving the content or quality of the email outreach, changing up the sales lead pool, spinning up a new email domain, setting up DKIM/DMARC/SPF, or all the above. We're happy to help point you in the right direction or provide guidance, but you are 100% responsible for your email domain and the emails you send.
Q: How do I know if my emails are being delivered and not going to Spam?
A: While there is no foolproof method to keep your emails out of a recipients spam, all of the best practices described above (setting up your DKIM, SPF and DMARC, sending high quality emails from a properly warmed email domain, properly calibrating the message to the recipient, etc) will all contribute to better email deliverability. If you want additional insights into your deliverability rates, you can use a tool like Mailreach's spam checker to automate your spam tests, they provide a great report and insights into your deliverability.
We hope this guide has been helpful--if you have ANY questions, don't hesitate to reach out to support@salesbot.io.