What counts as cold email, and how is it different from marketing email?
Cold email is a one-to-one business message sent to a prospect who has not asked to hear from you, usually from a seller to a buyer. It is written personally, sent from a seller mailbox, and expects a reply. Marketing email is one-to-many, sent from a shared marketing domain, and optimizes for opens and clicks. The two are governed by different rules, routed through different infrastructure, and should never share the same sending domain, because one bad marketing send can tank cold reply rates for weeks.
Read the full answer on cold email →
How many touches should a sales cadence have?
Most B2B cadences land between eight and fourteen touches over three to six weeks, mixing email, phone, LinkedIn, and video. Fewer than six touches leaves pipeline on the table, because the majority of replies arrive after the third attempt. More than fifteen touches without a reply usually means the contact is wrong, the message is wrong, or the account is not in-market. Strkr cadences let you set channel order, step spacing, and auto-exit rules so reps stop manually chasing accounts that already converted or disqualified.
Read the full answer on sales cadences →
What is email deliverability and why does it matter for sales?
Deliverability is the percentage of your emails that actually land in the inbox instead of spam, promotions, or a silent drop. For outbound teams it is the single biggest lever on reply rate: a cadence with a sixty percent inbox rate books roughly twice the meetings of one at thirty percent, with the same copy. Mailbox providers judge your sending domain on authentication, complaint rate, bounce rate, engagement, and content signals. Deliverability is earned over weeks, not days, and lost in a single bad blast.
Read the full answer on deliverability →
What are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and do I really need all three?
SPF lists which servers are allowed to send mail for your domain. DKIM adds a cryptographic signature that proves the message was not tampered with in transit. DMARC tells receivers what to do when SPF or DKIM fail, and sends you reports so you can see who is spoofing you. Google and Yahoo now require all three for bulk senders, and most B2B inboxes quietly penalize domains that skip DMARC. All three are free to configure in DNS and take under an hour for a cooperative IT partner.
Read the full answer on SPF, DKIM, and DMARC →
Is cold email legal under CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CASL?
In the United States, cold B2B email is legal under CAN-SPAM as long as you identify yourself, use truthful subject lines and headers, include a physical address, and honor opt-outs within ten business days. In the EU and UK, GDPR allows cold B2B email under legitimate interest, provided the recipient has a clear business reason to hear from you and can object easily. Canada under CASL requires express or implied consent for most sends. Strkr tracks consent basis, suppression lists, and jurisdiction on every contact so reps cannot send into a blocked region.
Read the full answer on CAN-SPAM →
What is a healthy bounce rate and complaint rate for cold email?
Keep hard bounces under two percent and spam complaints under 0.1 percent, measured per sending domain per rolling thirty days. Google will throttle a domain the moment complaints cross 0.3 percent, and most B2B inboxes start filtering well before that. The two best levers are list hygiene (verify every address before the first send) and copy that matches a real buyer problem instead of a generic pitch. If a cadence spikes complaints, pause it, rewrite the first two steps, and relaunch to a smaller segment before scaling.
How do I warm up a new sending domain?
Buy the domain at least four weeks before you plan to send, set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and a branded tracking subdomain on day one, then ramp volume slowly. A healthy curve starts at twenty sends per mailbox per day in week one, forty in week two, eighty in week three, and so on until you hit a sustainable ceiling of roughly 150 sends per mailbox per day. Mix in replies from internal addresses during warmup, and avoid any marketing blast from the parent domain while the subdomain is still earning reputation.
How has Apple Mail Privacy Protection changed outreach metrics?
Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-fetches tracking pixels on behalf of recipients using the Apple Mail client, which means open rates for those users look like a hundred percent whether or not the message was ever read. Open rate is now a vanity signal for most B2B lists, where Apple Mail is forty percent or more of inboxes. Measure cadences on reply rate, meetings booked, and pipeline created instead. Strkr reporting defaults to reply-weighted metrics so SDR coaching does not optimize for a number that no longer means anything.
Should outbound be personalized by hand or generated by AI?
Both, in layers. Hand-written first lines beat AI first lines on reply rate when the rep knows the account, but AI research briefs save thirty to forty minutes of pre-call work per account and make hand-personalization affordable at scale. The pattern that wins is AI-assisted research plus rep-written opener plus a shared cadence body, reviewed weekly against reply data. Fully auto-generated cadences, with no rep in the loop, almost always burn domain reputation within a quarter because they look like templates to both buyers and spam filters.
Read the full answer on A/B testing outreach →
How do I A/B test subject lines and openers without wrecking stats?
Test one variable at a time, split the audience randomly, and wait for at least thirty replies per variant before calling a winner. Reply rate is the metric that matters, not open rate. Keep the test window short, usually one to two weeks, so seasonality does not confound results. Hold the second step of the cadence constant across variants, because changing step two mid-test contaminates the signal. Strkr runs cadence experiments at the step level and reports confidence intervals so reps do not chase a two-reply swing as if it were a strategy change.
What is double opt-in, and does it apply to outbound sales email?
Double opt-in is a marketing practice where a subscriber confirms their address by clicking a link in a verification email before being added to a list. It applies to newsletters, product updates, and nurture tracks, not to cold B2B outreach, which runs on legitimate interest or implied consent depending on jurisdiction. Mixing the two is a common mistake: never upload a double-opt-in marketing list into a cold cadence, and never route cold replies into a marketing nurture without a fresh consent action from the contact.
Read the full answer on double opt-in →
How many mailboxes do I need per SDR for safe sending?
Plan one dedicated outbound mailbox per SDR for every seventy to a hundred sends per day you want them to make, rotated across two or three warmed sending domains that are separate from your corporate marketing domain. Never route sales cadences through the same domain that sends newsletters, receipts, or billing email, because a reputation hit on one blocks the other. Strkr load-balances steps across mailboxes, respects per-mailbox daily caps, and quarantines any mailbox whose bounce or complaint rate drifts outside the threshold you set.
