Ask the Expert: How Your Behavior Affects Email Deliverability

Now that Amazon Prime Day is over, I can bet you need to close a few extra deals to cover your purchases.?

We can help. We’ve got ZoomInfo data and email expert Jo Zichterman explaining how your sender behavior can affect if your emails actually land in inboxes, our second signal-based selling tip, the launch of ZI Labs Podcast, and a look at some of our upcoming events.

Take five and read today’s newsletter.

Ask the Expert

Today’s question looks at how your behavior affects email deliverability. If you have a question you’d like us to answer, fill out this form. (Don’t worry, your question will be anonymous!)

Dear ZoomInfo, lately I’ve had a lot of my emails bounce. Can you help me get to the bottom of why this might be happening??

Dear Reader,?

Let’s start with looking at what a bounce is. At the most basic level, a bounce means something went wrong during the sending process. Diagnosing why that happened can be quite complicated.??

A lot of people assume that there is a straight line between sender and recipient - that all you need to worry about is that you have the right email address.?

Unfortunately, that’s not the case. In fact, there are hundreds of authentication, reputation, and engagement factors involved in making sure your email gets to your intended recipient’s inbox.?

Here are a few of the crucial areas you need to look at:?

• Server configuration: Make sure that the server from which you send emails is properly configured.?
• Record currency: Records attached to your outgoing email must be current, up-to-date, and reflect exactly who you are as a sender.
• Sending tool setup: The tool you’re using to send emails must align with the task. Not every marketing automation tool is created equal or can be used for the same purpose. In some cases, the tool you use can directly affect your email deliverability.?
• Record setup: Your DKIM, DMARC, SPF, and DNS need to accurately reflect your identity as a sender.

Once you hit the security protocols on the other end of your email send, your sender reputation and engagement come into play. Your sender reputation is how you're perceived by the world. Your sending behavior is constantly being monitored by third-party companies.?

One type of these companies are blacklist organizations. These folks look for illegitimate senders and use a variety of methods to try to identify them, including tactics like honeypots (which I covered in a previous newsletter) or large send volume fluctuations (e.g. if you send 1,000 emails one week and 20,000 the next, that’s a red flag).?

As a marketer, your sending volume week-to-week may look very different, especially when you’re running campaigns. But this can be enough to deem you an illegitimate sender.

Once these third-party companies have compiled a list of illegitimate senders, they go to email security teams and say, “We have collected a list of illegitimate senders. If you pay a small fee, you can check our list when you are monitoring emails coming into your employees, and if they’re on our list, you can know with confidence that you can automatically reject those emails.”??

The impact of a blacklist organization flag on you as an “illegitimate sender” extends to their customers. Anyone who uses that list will see you as an illegitimate sender and put your emails in peril.

Google and Microsoft together own about 70% of business email activity and they develop their own reputation models based on user behavior. That’s where your email engagement — how people are responding to you — comes into play.?

They will observe how likely users are to open your emails, whether they’re typically sent straight to the trash or opened and scrolled through, and whether your links are clicked.?

If Google or Microsoft start to lose confidence in your reputation as a sender, you'll probably start ending up in spam folders, and eventually get rejected altogether by Google, Microsoft, and other providers.?

There are also tons of email filtration tools like Mimecast and Proofpoint that use similar mechanisms to identify senders. But unfortunately, it’s a pretty vicious circle, because high bounce rates directly impact your sender reputation.?

The point is that your behavior matters. The best thing to do to get your emails into inboxes is to do everything you can to present yourself as a legitimate sender out into the world.

Hope this helps!?

- Jo Zichterman

Signal-Based Selling Tip #2: Project Initiative News

Last week’s newsletter introduced our first signal-based selling tip: how to capitalize on key account visits to your website. Today, we’re looking at tip #2: project initiative news.?

Discovering that a prospect is initiating a significant project, like a master data management transformation, signals a pivotal opportunity. This information could emerge from several channels, such as a public company’s earnings release, press interviews, or exclusive research surveys. For ZoomInfo users, this data is available in the Scoops feature.?

In signal-based selling, identifying these project initiatives early can give you a significant selling advantage.

How to Take Action

A major corporate initiative will likely involve a broad swath of users, decision-makers, and champions — and so should your prospecting. You want to engage with as many of the right people as possible.?

You want to prepare your team with the necessary resources and expertise for meaningful discussions, beyond just basic discovery questions. Be sure to highlight the relevance of your solution to the specifics of the customer’s project to position your team as a strategic partner — not just a vendor. Involving key executives and product specialists will convey a deep commitment to their initiative’s success.?

Key Signal-Based Selling Steps

• Show, don’t tell: Everyone on your team, executives included, should have specific customer proof that shows your team and product have done this work before. It’s not just about showing what you know. You want to make it easy for clients to see your value and build confidence in your solutions.

• Create custom content: Take time to learn how internal conversations with the client are going and consider how your messaging might need to evolve. Focus on assets that directly address their immediate and potential needs as the long sales cycle unfolds.

• Engage specialists early: Engage with the company’s top domain experts early in the project, to show the breadth of assistance available to the project, and signal your deep commitment to customer success.?

Bonus Points

Don’t just book a meeting for your CEO or other top executives. Tell them what they need to achieve from this call: Nail down a specific meeting with someone else? A detailed understanding of budget and timeline??

“I ask my sales reps going into these meetings: What do you want me to get for you?” Henry Schuck, ZoomInfo’s CEO says. “If you don’t know the answer to that, I really shouldn’t be going in for you. I’m not the AE.”?

See ya next week for tip #3 ??

ZoomInfo Labs Podcast

The team at ZI Labs launched a podcast! Ben Salzman ???? and Millie Beetham ???? dive into business strategy, go-to-market innovations, and the impact of AI on go-to-market with industry experts from companies like Canva , Stripe , and OpenAI . Listen in for conversations, advice, and insights on things like signal-based selling and multiparty data. ????

All episodes are now live, so listen and subscribe on Apple or Spotify to never miss an episode.

Upcoming Events

The ZoomInfo calendar has several exciting upcoming events. Find the descriptions and registration links below.

Crafting A Modern Lead Story: Strategies for Effective Lead-to-Pipeline Conversion

Wednesday, July 24 | 12:00 PM ET (Virtual)?

Join us for a webinar with Michelle Blondin, Director of Demand Generation at ZoomInfo, and Jeff Day, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Act-On. They’ll discuss techniques and best practices for nurturing leads, winning customers’ hearts, and converting them into buyers.

You’ll learn how to:

• Evolve lead scoring strategies to optimize for conversion.
• Craft perfect nurture sequences based on account intelligence and funnel stage.?
• Make a successful marketing–sales transfer.
• Report full-funnel circle metrics, identifying what drives opportunities and how to replicate the process.

Register here

Lee's Lessons: 14 Sales Myths Stunting Your Success (Debunked)

Wednesday, July 24 | 12:00 PM ET (Virtual)?

The sales profession is full of myths about sales success limitations — many of which you’re likely familiar with. During this masterclass, Lee Salz, CEO and Founder of Sales Architects, will dismantle common sales misconceptions and equip you with real-world, actionable strategies and techniques to sell better and win faster .?

Register here

15 Minutes to Sales Mastery: How to Write a Perfect Cold Email

Tuesday, July 30 | 12:00 PM ET (Virtual)

When done well, cold emailing is a powerful tool for sales. In this session, Garret Kissel, sales manager at ZoomInfo, will teach you the importance of a well-crafted cold email strategy, how to personalize and segment for maximum impact, and how to craft compelling subject lines and email content that grabs and keeps attention.

Register here

Pulling Back the Curtain: Keys for RevOps Success

Tuesday, July 30 | 1:00 PM ET (Virtual)

Gartner states that by 2025, 75% of the highest-growth companies in the world will employ a Revenue Operations (RevOps) strategy. But today, even the most skilled RevOps professionals struggle with scattered data, cleaning up inaccuracies, and aligning sales and marketing.

Join us for our RevOps Mastery Series kickoff featuring Tessa Whittaker, VP of Revenue Operations at ZoomInfo. This first of a three-part webinar series will share the knowledge and expertise for you to work with AI insights and become an operations hero. We’ll share how RevOps can stay ahead of the latest technology trends, implement effective strategies, and provide hands-on training from our top RevOps experts.

Register here

Have something you’d like us to cover in an upcoming issue? Comment and let us know. We promise, we read all of them.

Subscribe to this newsletter here to make sure you always get notified when we post.