The first technical decision of any sales campaign is which email provider to use. You have two options to choose from:

1. Use Gmail, Outlook or Zoho
2. Build your own custom servers

Most startups default to option 1 (mostly Gmail). It’s cheaper and faster to set up. We’ve built our own custom servers for reasons which we’ll explain at the end. 

If you are deciding which email provider to use, here are some things to think about. 

• Are you using this purely for outbound, or for other purposes as well?
• Which system are you and your team familiar with?

What servers are your prospects using?

This is an example of the analysis we ran for our clients and their prospects, to identify which email provider their market is predominantly using. Unsure which email provider your prospects are using? You can find out using DNS Checker. Simply add in the domain you are searching for and you will see which email provider they are using. This is what the results look like.

We always recommend to keep your domains for sales outreach separate from domains you use for internal efforts or marketing newsletters. Thinking about your prospects is important - the best way to get high deliverability is to have your campaigns send and receive from the same provider (Gmail to Gmail, Outlook to Outlook). This is a recent phenomenon that sending tools have begun to incorporate for teams with multiple domains using multiple providers.

Generally speaking however, here are the pros and cons to each of these options

Gmail

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Pros

• Massive market proliferation amongst startups
• Intuitive UI/UX
• You are likely familiar with Google Workspace
• Simple DNS setup

Cons

• Most expensive option if you have several accounts on multiple domains
• Slightly underperforms overall compared to Outlook

Outlook

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Pros

• Best deliverability amongst the 3
• Higher sending limits

Cons

• Challenging to set up several accounts with multiple domains correctly

Zoho Mail

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Pros

• Cheap to set up several accounts

Cons

• Least likely to be familiar with their software and ecosystem
• In recent months they have had lots of trouble with deliverability
• Less integrations with email sending tools

There are interesting trends we’ve observed and read about through your of sending activity

• Teams that use warmup services choose Google over Outlook by a factor of 12 to 1
• There was a short phase when many sales teams and agencies all started using Zoho because it was cheaper to get lots of accounts for outreach here. This eventually tanked the reputation of many of its servers when sending to Gmail/Outlook
• Over the past 18 months, every email provider has gotten significantly stricter on the volume of outreach that is viable before getting into trouble 

What does this mean for you? If your target market has a strong preference for using Outlook, it makes sense to use Outlook yourself. Remember, this is just for outreach and your email sending accounts. You can still use Google Workspace with your team internally if you prefer.

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We avoided this decision altogether by using custom-built servers. At the rate of outreach we do, we realized in 2022 that we were far too limited by what Gmail, Outlook and Zoho had to offer. With the prevalence of outreach today, Microsoft and Google have made it increasingly challenging to send outreach at the rates we were aiming for. This meant much lower sending limits (50 emails per day per account) before getting into trouble with suspended accounts and spam filters. 

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For Zevenue, using custom servers means higher sending limits (250 emails per account per day) and better deliverability (70%+ open rates) for our clients. These take time to build however and is not what we would recommend for an individual team to build on their own without the right expertise and sales development process.

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Once you’ve chosen your email provider, buy a subscription. Tools like Gmail have a free and paid offering (Google Workspace). Always pay for the business account. Even if you are only getting started or have a low sending volume, it’s important to have the delivery boost that comes with paid accounts, as well as the ability to have your domain attached. 

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Make sure to send from a separate domain to your main one. Configure your domain name servers to ensure high deliverability throughout your campaign. This process will look different depending on which email provider you select. Warm up your inboxes. The most challenging part of this process is remembering to follow our sending rules to ensure success with outreach campaigns. These metrics change often - this is the latest guidelines we’ve gathered after hundreds of campaigns and lots of measuring across different segments.

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There are other email providers like Sendgrid and Mailgun. These are built for high-volume sending with an audience that has opted in. You can use these if you have a marketing newsletter with a massive audience. Do not use this for your sales outreach to new prospects. You will end up in spam.

Conclusion

This is just the first step of many you will make when starting your sales outreach. It’s important to know your target market well, including the technology they use for emails. When starting your sales development efforts, it’s important that you keep the process to something that you can manage yourself, or to bring in expertise to handle the trickier parts of sales development in 2024.

If you want to schedule more sales meetings, Zevenue can help. Send us a message and we’d be glad to help however we can!