Companies love Microsoft’s Outlook and Office 365 for their email communication, but when it comes to cold email, these often fall short. While Microsoft is great for internal communication and client management, it isn’t built for cold email outreach, particularly at scale.
Thinking about switching to a Microsoft cold email alternative? It’s important to understand the specific limitations of using Microsoft for cold outreach and how to address them effectively.
Microsoft's email servers have stringent spam filtering to protect your recipients from unsolicited messages. If Microsoft determines that you’re either sending too many emails or the wrong kinds of emails, they will push your sending into poor IP pools.
Because of these filters, many cold emails you send from Microsoft accounts may end up in spam folders or get blocked altogether. Plus, using Microsoft servers for mass cold emailing can hurt your sender reputation, increase bounce rates, and get your domain blacklisted.
We’ve built a robust Microsoft cold email alternative that keeps your deliverability in check and your reputation strong. Called Senders Protocol, our solution helps you switch from Microsoft for your cold email campaigns to more viable, industry-approved platforms, while using effective precautions to ensure good campaign performance.
Protocol can help you enhance inbox placement, reach more prospects safely, and preserve your sender reputation — all without relying directly on Microsoft.
Founded by chef David Chang, Momofuku is a renowned culinary brand with a nation-wide presence, including restaurants and an online store with delicious goods. They ran into an issue with their email sending – high bounce rates and blocked sending.
With hundreds of thousands of people on their email lists eager to stay informed, and an impeccable reputation to uphold, Momofuku wanted to nip this problem in the bud quickly.
Up for coffee with a health kick, sans the jitters? Try Everyday Dose – a brand on a mission to provide coffee lovers with a healthy alternative packed with all kinds of goodies. The Founder, Jack Savage, learned through personal experience that we needed an option that doesn’t lead to a slew of possible side-effects. That’s how this mushroom-based blend with nootropics and collagen protein came to be, helping boost focus, energy, and reduce stress in one go.
The Everyday Dose team prides itself on excellent customer support, in addition to their delicious set of products. So when they spotted DNS propagation issues setting up their customer experience platform, they reached out to Senders to find the best way to sort it out.
Myrina.ai stands out as a trailblazer in empowering women entrepreneurs through technology and a supportive community.
Myrina.ai offers a cutting-edge range of AI-powered SaaS marketing and sales tools that cater specifically to female entrepreneurs and women-led businesses. Myrina.ai enables users to automate marketing and sales, while helping them scale their authentic selves while saving time and boosting conversions. Their Myrina’s Army community fosters a supportive platform that champions female entrepreneurs and their values, empowering them to conquer barriers and achieve their business goals. The company's dedication to providing not only top-notch technological solutions but also a platform for networking and mentorship underscores their commitment to fostering success among women in the entrepreneurial space.
Naturally, they wanted to make sure their email sending infrastructure was set up correctly to protect their reputation and successfully reach their recipients. Our deliverability team worked with the client’s team on:
Sometimes the sheer number of options of any product can be daunting – how on earth do you pick the right one? This is especially true with supplements, as we can find them just about anywhere, but we can rarely understand a third of the ingredients listed. Unlike most, Physician’s Choice provides supplements with pure, potent ingredients that work. No fillers or “proprietary” blends with unidentified ingredients. They do the research, so you don’t have to.
Integrity and transparency are part of their core values, so when their team ran into sending issues, they were referred to Senders.
Unlike most other companies, we don’t use Google or Microsoft to send, which reduces the risk of reputation damage or your emails landing in spam.
Apollo enables us to use Sendgrid and other proprietary tech tools for safe sending, without having to rely on Google’s infrastructure.
We work with small to medium-sized B2B companies across various industries (many of our clients are SaaS), mainly in the US, Canada, and the EU.
Our pricing varies depending on each client’s needs, but our deliverability service starts at $1200. You can learn more about our pricing here.
We manage the infrastructure without owning the sending platform. Instead, we connect with platforms like SendGrid.
With our warming protocols to protect deliverability, it takes 7 weeks or more depending on the time of year – holidays may extend the process.
No, your Strategist/Account Manager does that manually.
Among other things, warming entails gradually increasing the volume of emails sent from a new email domain/subdomain to build a positive sending reputation with Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
We have defined the Strategy service in a way to provide maximum value for each client despite the number of senders you may have. While the Strategist will dedicate their expertise to one sender, you can always leverage that knowledge to optimize performance for the other senders, as well.
Apollo automatically disqualifies (removes) anyone that either replied, bounced or unsubscribed from the email sequence.
We always provide at least two email variants for the most important steps in your sequence (such as step one and step three), so that we can track their performance and spot best-performing email variants for different target groups. We also test out different subject lines and react quickly if we notice any drops in performance, so we can adjust the copy while campaigns are running.
An email sequence is a series of emails (at least two, usually no more than five) that we send out to a specific target group, several days apart, depending on our agreement with you. We call the first email “the first step” of the sequence, while the second email is called “a nudge” and is usually a short follow-up we send a couple of days after the first. The number of steps (emails) in a sequence depends on your industry, target audience, and your goal, so we adapt the approach specifically to your business and outreach goals.
We have done extensive experiments, and over time, we have seen that the best, safest way forward is slowly and gradually ramping up by increasing the sending volume by 25 emails per day. We do not recommend ramping up faster, as it may affect your reputation and overall deliverability.
Usually, forwarded emails tend to “break” the technical backend such as SPF, DKIM (your email authentication methods) and that can send emails to spam. To prevent that, we make sure that any email that is forwarded from our system to your mailbox will end in your inbox – this is where setting up those filters correctly makes all the difference.
We have a discovery form you can fill out to give us specific information that you’d like us to include in the strategy and the copy. That also includes your targeting goals, as well as examples of emails you like or have had success with in the past. We combine that information with our own internal best practices based on the thousands of emails we’ve written and sent over the years. On top of that, we pick out the best-performing approaches for your industry, customize them to your needs, and test them out for you, as well.
We always go through as many rounds of edits and changes as we need to create the kind of emails you will be happy with. However, we also track your campaigns’ performance to jump in and adapt the copy over time so that we can maximize your results.
We don’t. To maximize deliverability and to make sure each target group receives the kind of message they will be most likely to respond to, we tailor the emails to each of your target groups. Sometimes, there will be some overlaps in the core message and your value proposition, but we will vary the language for better deliverability.
In some emails and some steps, we can include links to your website and to specific pages you want people to visit (such as sign-up pages). However, we strive to create a balance between emails with and without links to see which ones perform better for your specific target audience. And of course, we always want to include unsubscribe/opt-out links in emails.
Email copy is an important part of ensuring high deliverability for your campaigns, but it is definitely not the only segment we’re taking care of and tracking. The better the copy is and the better your product-market fit, the greater the engagement will be, so we do our best to create engaging copy that will improve open rates, click-through rates, and replies.
No, we don’t use AI for writing our emails. We have a team of exceptional strategists and writers that work together with you to create the kind of copy you will be happy with, aligned with our best practices and years of experience.
Email copywriting is considered an add-on. While it is included in the strategy service, it is not part of our deliverability-only service tier called Protocol. If you need help with copywriting, however, but you don’t want the full strategy service, we can provide a dedicated copywriter for as many sessions as you need, either to write the copy for you from scratch, or to review/adjust your existing copy to make it deliverability-friendly. You can learn more about all the available add-ons on our Pricing page.
We typically don’t do whitelabel partnerships, unless it is the only solution that makes sense for everyone involved.
You can reach out to us via our Partnerships page to express interest and meet our Partnership Manager, Aurora. During that call, you can share your goals, get a better idea of the criteria for joining and learn more about the program itself. If there’s a fit, you can proceed with the application. We also like our partners to stay engaged for ongoing collaboration, to make sure everyone can benefit from the relationship.