Outlook's tightened spam rules are disrupting B2B cold outreach. Learn the signs you're affected and the best practices to fix Outlook deliverability issues.
The world of email deliverability seems to be undergoing a major transformation, with the new Outlook email deliverability issues causing concern among B2B email marketers and businesses that rely on cold outreach for client acquisition. This is a significant development, since Google has started strengthening its spam policy (post the last email spam update) and Zoho too, has been anti-cold emails in the past year.
Given Outlook’s previous reputation as a reliable ESP for email deliverability, here’s everything we know about the Outlook email deliverability issues, and how you can counter it more effectively.
So let’s find out.
The recent Outlook email deliverability issues are significant since last year, Zoho had a major crackdown on cold emailing, prompting users to migrate to Outlook. This and the Google email spam update are clear indicators that the industry is moving towards stricter email deliverability standards enforced by the bigger service providers.
Jesse Oullette, a renowned outbound expert, earlier last month mentioned that his company had been seeing a sudden spike in bounce rates – a number that’s reaching a whopping 15-25% before email deliverability shuts down entirely. This pattern, confirmed by a variety of sources including Instantly and Smartlead, is causing widespread concerns.
The reasons behind this are yet not clear, and even companies who follow best practices are facing the wrath when it comes to Outlook's email deliverability issues.
Now that we’ve got some level of understanding about the Outlook email deliverability issues, a common question is: “How do you really figure out if your Outlook accounts for outreach are being affected?”
According to Vaibhav Namburi from Smartlead, some of the most common signs they’ve seen in recent weeks include:
It must be noted that the Outlook email deliverability issues are affecting both personal and business accounts, and though not everyone might be experiencing this, Namburi believes that the problem could be related to tenant or reseller accounts.
“With the Outlook email deliverability issues coming to light, should I stop doing outbound?” — a client asked us at Cleverviral recently. Well no, you shouldn’t.
If you’re someone who wants to send 100,000 cold emails per month and scale your outreach, here’s what you need to do:
One of the first things you need to solve the Outlook email deliverability issue is to send less than 40 emails per day from each account. Doing this helps to avoid spam triggers & rate limits set by your ESP (Outlook in this case).
High volume sending, while useful, is often associated with spammy behavior, which can lead to your IP getting blacklisted & deliverability getting reduced. With a gradual increase in volume, you can maintain a lower profile and reduce the risk of being flagged as a spammer.
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According to outbound experts like Vaibhav & Alex Berman, sending plain text emails is another key tactic to avoid Outlook email deliverability issues. Rather than sending out HTML emails replete with images, links and tracking codes.
It must also be noted that since open tracking & link tracking have become common spam indicators since 2021, avoiding them can actually help improve deliverability for your Outlook account.
In case your tenant is showing issues related to being blocked, contacting Microsoft support can be a good starting point. Their technical support team can provide specific guidance or recommend remedial actions, such as unblocking your tenant or providing insights into why the block occurred in the first place.
If you’re adhering to best practices and still facing Outlook email deliverability issues, connecting directly with the source can be an ideal solution – helping restore email operations quicker.
According to Namburi from Smartlead, if your emails are bouncing back with a “low reputation” message, it indicates that your IP address has been flagged. In order to solve this, one must connect with Microsoft support for guidance on rotating your IP address. Doing this can be useful to reset your sender reputation.
Microsoft typically auto-rotates IPs every 2 weeks, but a manual request can expedite the process & turn things around faster.
Another key method to avoid Outlook email deliverability issues is to split your mailboxes for outreach. By using different email service providers (ESPs), you mitigate the risk of deliverability affecting your outreach entirely. In case one provider experiences problems (such as high bounce rates and IP blacklisting), you can supplement it with the other to deliver emails effectively.
Splitting your mailboxes into Google & Outlook is also beneficial since they use different algorithms and have different spam filtering criteria, it becomes easier to analyze what type of emails work well on which platform.
Ensuring your IP address has a good reputation is vital because email service providers (ESPs) like Outlook use IP reputation to determine whether to deliver an email to the inbox or spam folder.
A blacklisted IP can significantly reduce your deliverability rates, and hence it is recommended to regularly perform reverse DNS checks that can identify if your IP has been blacklisted. Doing this will ensure that your emails are better placed inside the recipient’s inbox.
Another underrated strategy experts have suggested includes using ESP matching. Unlike before, where you’re sending emails from a Gmail account to say a Yahoo or Outlook account, ESP matching focuses on sending emails from one ESP account to another.
This method is useful since it leverages the internal filtering preferences of each ESP to improve deliverability.
Shared infrastructure in reseller tenants can lead to cross-contamination of reputational issues, affecting all users on that tenant. This is where you should opt for direct accounts rather than reseller tenants, since it ensures that you’re not sharing infrastructure with potentially problematic senders.
In addition, direct accounts typically receive better support from ESPs, allowing quicker resolution of issues.
Now while there’s not a lot of clarity around the Outlook email deliverability issues, it's better to be prepared to counter any threats going forward. By following the above tips (as suggested by multiple industry experts) – you can easily mitigate the risk and split the email infrastructure to scale your outbound effectively.
We’re closely following the changing trends & will update our readers with additional insights about the Outlook email deliverability issue soon.
Until then, if you’re a B2B business looking to scale your cold outreach efforts, feel free to connect with Cleverviral, where we help you start engaging conversations with your ideal customers through a combination of AI-powered personalization, data scraping & automation!
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