Setting up your email domain for success is an absolute necessity in today's digital ecosystem. While Outreach Campaigns are a great way to manage relationships in Loxo, the overall success of your outreach will largely depend on your domain and the way you have set up your outreach sequence. Campaigns are designed to be very customizable, so you can streamline communication with your contacts and candidates, and even manage tasks, based on a sequence that works best for you.
Here, we will walk you through the proven practices to give your outreach the most impact.
You can watch our Outreach Proven Practices video below and scroll down for a summary.
For quick reference, time stamps are listed below so you can easily skip to the content that's relevant to you.
Creating Campaigns (00:00 - 19:30)
Managing Recipients (19:30 - 23:56)
Managing Campaigns (23:56 - 28:38)
Set Up and Process Proven Practices
Check Your Email Authentication
One of the best standard practices is ensuring that your Domain Name System (DNS) records are complete and accurate. These records are typically created when purchasing a new domain, but they are not necessarily complete, so it is worth investigating before you hit the ground running.
The records that are most influential to successful email sending are:
SPF (Sender Policy Framework) - This record defines the servers and domains that are allowed to send using your domain. In short, it offers legitimacy to your domain when communicating with other domains. When your email is protected by the SPF framework, the possibility of your emails getting blacklisted by spam filters is greatly reduced.
DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) - This record is checked by the recipient's domain to determine if you are truly the sender of the email and not a nefarious sender. Think of this as your email knocking on a door, and DKIM is the recipient's domain using the peephole to check that it's really you.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance) - This record is a protective layer for your domain to avoid your emails being compromised, but can also update you on your email deliverability and receipt, if you so choose. This record is also seen by recipient domains as a sign of a friendly sender.
While these email-sending components can get quite technical, there are many resources online, including your own email host (i.e. GoDaddy, Wix, etc.), that can provide you with further insights as to checking, updating or adding to these records. It is best to work with your email administrator or IT department to ensure these records have been configured correctly for your domain.
Setting Up DNS Records for Email Authentication
To properly configure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records for your domain:
Log in to Your Domain Provider’s DNS Settings: Locate the DNS management section of your domain provider (e.g., Namecheap, Wix, 101Domain).
Add SPF Record: Include the IP addresses of mail servers authorized to send emails on your domain's behalf. Ensure no duplication of SPF records to avoid potential conflicts.
Add DKIM Record: Generate a DKIM record through your email service provider or domain host, and add it to your DNS settings.
Add DMARC Record: Specify the handling policy (e.g., none, quarantine, reject) for emails failing SPF or DKIM checks.
Verify Your Records: Use tools like MXToolBox or EasyDMARC to confirm proper setup and check your domain’s overall email health.
Send Consistently
One of the most recent, consequential factors that has emails ending up in spam or email accounts/domains being blacklisted are spikes in the number of outgoing emails. It is recommended to make any changes in your outgoing volume gradually. For example, do not increase the number of emails you are sending by more than 10% a day.
If your sending patterns are typically 50 emails a day, you would want to avoid having a random day where you suddenly send 500 emails. Spikes in your outgoing activity can be a signal to your domain, and recipient domains, that there is uncharacteristic activity coming from your account - which is one of the biggest indicators of spam or an account being compromised.
Sending patterns such as the spikes shown in the graph below will cause significant damage to your domain reputation:
Pro Tip: You can use Loxo Reports to pull an overview of outgoing email volume to identify any potential spikes. To do so, use an "Activities" Report filtered by the Activity Types for "Sent Email" and "Outreach Email Sent." You can run the report for a specific team member using the "Logged by" filter. We recommend setting a date range to at least the last month so you can get a more comprehensive overview of the average daily volume for that particular sender.
Send in Small Batches
While more time consuming, the proven practice is to send your bulk emails in smaller batches. If you are working with a brand new domain, the recommendation would be to start with 10-15 emails at a time, going out every couple of hours. You can slowly increase the outgoing amount, and ensuring that you stay within a 10% increase of the send volume on the previous day will lead to the best results. Ideally, you can spend 2-3 days sending around the same number of emails as you gradually increase overall volume.
Increasing gradually allows you to set up a consistent pattern and gain the trust of your recipients' domain hosts (i.e. Gmail, Outlook, etc.), especially if you are sending from a new domain or email account with little to no known reputation.
Clean Your Database
You can add to the value of your database by flagging invalid or inactive emails within Loxo. To do this, utilize the black flag next to any email provided to you by Loxo's Contact Finding Agent.
The black flag icon will only be available for information found by Loxo. To access the black flag icon, you can click on the email or phone icons from the main People page.
From the Card view, look for the email and phone icons next to the "Add to..." button:
From the List view, hover over the profile to show the email and phone icons:
Alternatively, you can use the phone or email icon on the person's full profile to reveal the black flag icon.
Once you click on the phone or the email icon, it will show you the actual contact information on file. If the information was found by Loxo, there will see the black flag on the right that you can use to report inaccurate data.
This not only alerts our team that the data was inaccurate, but it will also remove that contact information from your system. You won't see the option to flag inaccurate data if the information was not found by Loxo's Contact Finding Agent. If you are bringing in your own contact information, be sure to delete any outdated or inaccurate emails as soon as you become aware of them.
Other Outreach Tips
When you first create a Loxo Outreach Campaign™, you can create one from scratch, use one of our pre-made templates, or use your team's templates if any have been added to the database.
Remember: You can adjust Outreach Campaign text at any time. However, changes to Campaign setup or settings must occur before candidates are added to the Campaign. Once prospects are added, you will lose the option to delete stages or change messaging for prospects currently in that stage.
Check out our podcast for other tips concerning cold outreach!
Rename the Campaign
When you first create a Campaign from a template, it will keep the template name. If you create an Outreach Campaign directly from a Job Pipeline, it will carry over the name of the job. To update the name of a Campaign, you can navigate to the Settings tab by clicking the Gear icon in the upper right corner of your Campaign, where you'll be able to modify the Campaign name. Be sure to rename your Campaign something you can easily find later!
Customize Text
Loxo's pre-made templates are meant to offer a starting point for your Campaigns. We have several Campaigns to help you get started with candidate and contact outreach, but the most successful Campaigns are the ones that our customers customize to reflect their own businesses. Adding details about how you can personally help potential clients meet their hiring goals or about how the job is a perfect match for a candidate can go a long way.
Replace Capitalized Text if Using Templates
There are several places in all of the Loxo templates that require you to update certain text. Make sure to replace any text that is in all caps with brackets. For example, in the Biz Dev templates, there are several references to "[FIRM NAME]." Make sure you replace the capitalized text with your own agency's information.
Consider Stages
Think about what stages will be the most meaningful for you. Some recruiters prefer to be on the phone engaging in live conversations with their contacts and candidates. Whereas other recruiters may prefer to do most of the talking over email or text. Remove any stage types you know you won't use, and add more of the stage types that you prefer.
Think About Timing
What is your runway for this campaign? Do you want to bombard candidates with several emails and texts in a short time frame, or do you want to make sure you are checking in every couple of weeks on prospective clients? The template timings are just a recommendation. Be sure you know what timing works for you when setting your Stage Delays and consider utilizing your Campaign Operating Hours.
Review, review, review!
Once you add people to your Campaign, your ability to add, delete, and edit stage types and messaging is limited. Make sure you have double-checked all of the stages before adding any people.
Be sure to click the Gear icon in the upper right corner to look over other Campaign settings, such as email or phone type priority, retry settings, and more!