🤝 Your 2025 guide to email deliverability

Hey there, Austin here 👋

Welcome to The Pipeline—the newsletter to help scale your revenue team’s creativity.

I’ve been listening to a ton of sales calls recently at Unify. A popular topic that’s only coming up more often now is email deliverability. It’s not the most fun one, but its critically important.

GTM leaders mention deliverability >50% of the time we hop on calls.

There’s a lot of fear. And a lot of them equate this to "email as a channel doesn't work."

But 99% of the time, there’s some small tweaks to your approach that make a big difference. Today I’m sharing 12 tips to improve your email deliverability overnight. 

Let's get into it.

📒 GTM Playbook

2025 Outbound Deliverability Guide

How to keep your emails in the primary inbox

Every team running outbound knows how hard email deliverability has gotten over the past few months.

With Google and Microsoft rolling out stricter deliverability policies in 2024 and 2025, sales emails are landing in spam more often than ever.

We've seen prospects run into every deliverability issue under the sun. A couple of problems I’ve seen recently just to name a few:

• Company bought from a sketchy contact data vendor that bounced at 20%

• Prospects are sending extremely high volume per mailbox (100+ sends per day)

...just to name a few.

On top of these hygiene issues, outbound teams often send emails with generic copy that read like they were written by a marketing robot from 2010 (or an 'AI SDR' product from 2025 😅).

So even if you get past the spam filters, you're not booking meetings.

Why does this happen? Because personalization at scale is still hard.

Problem is, all of these problems directly crush your domain's deliverability reputation over time.

There is good news, though.

Unify has powered nearly $100M in pipeline via email outreach, so we gathered all of our data and curated a list of simple best practices for developing better sequence copy and improving deliverability.

Nail these, and you'll be one of the companies that can actually make outbound work.

Sequence Copy Best Practices

Sequence copy matters for email deliverability. If your outreach is annoying or clearly automated, you’re going to get marked as spam more often.

1/ Keep an individual sequence to 4 email touches max - Within a four-touch sequence, alternate the structure between 2 new threads and 2 follow-up replies. Follow-up replies can be a simple 1-2 sentences. Example: “Any thoughts on my previous note?”

2/ Alternate your pitch between new threads - This will vary the copy and angle you use to pitch your product. Try speaking to different pain points, or to different personas. Nothing screams “sales email” more in a prospects mind than 5 emails all following onto the same initial email with no response.

3/ Shorten subject lines and use personalization - Keep subject titles concise and add custom variables to increase variability and improve deliverability. Example: “Unify x (Your Company Name)”

4/ Include stats and case studies for social proof - Numbers-driven, concise impact statements, as well as concise blurbs from customer case studies, can catch your prospect’s attention.

5/ Add personalization with snippets - You can use Unify’s smart snippets to personalize copy based on relevant value prop, job title, work description, industry, and more. This will make your sequence copy more compelling with targeted pain points, use cases, or case studies. 

6/ Keep it concise - Don’t try to fit too many points into your email. Stick to the most relevant pain point, avoid all jargon, and keep each email between 50-100 words.

7/ End with a clear CTA (call-to-action) - Each email should end with a clear, specific, and actionable request. This could include scheduling a call, booking a demo, or asking the prospect to reply with a specific piece of information relevant to their needs. You don’t need to push for a call with every email. Focus on getting responses and starting conversations.

Deliverability Tips

1/ Limit the number of links - Don't overload your emails with multiple or duplicate links. This can land you in spam. Keep your first email touch to 1-2 links max.

2/ Check link quality - Links should be to the same domain as you’re sending emails from. Make sure the links you include are secure and no warnings are displayed by the browser when visiting them.

3/ Mix up subject lines - Use template variables to switch up your subject lines. We compiled a list of the 7 highest-converting email templates that generated $21.5M in annualized pipeline in January for Unify. Feel free to steal.

4/ No all caps - Please don’t do this. Using all caps anywhere in your email may trigger spam filters, so stick to regular capitalization. Same goes for excessive exclamation points — they can prevent your email from being seen at all.

5/ Limit sends per day - Try to limit sends per day to 25-40 per mailbox max. When you send from multiple IP addresses and domains, you reduce the risk of being flagged as spam and increase your sending capacity.

Final thoughts

Companies succeeding with email-based outbound have mastered email deliverability.

The technical side matters—proper authentication, IP warming, and bounce protection are non-negotiable foundations.

But the human elements are equally important—sending relevant messages to the right people at the right time.

Once you put these tips into practice (and automate outbound with Unify), you'll be booking meetings in no time.

Hope this was helpful.

P.S. If you want to practice your emails and get direct feedback, you can use Unify's free AI email coach tool on our site. Just write your email and we'll tell you how to improve its impact, clarity, concision, etc.

WHAT’S NEW AT UNIFY

Lookalikes. Use this targeted strategy to find companies that look like your best customers.

1. Create a spreadsheet with your ideal lookalikes' URLs (ChatGPT or Perplexity is great for this. Just ask it to list 30 similar companies.)

2. Upload CSV to your outbound platform (like Unify)

3. Create a "Lookalikes" audience and filter for key decision-makers in the targeted industry

4. Set geographic parameters

5. Build your sequence by pulling in CRM variables (ex: case studies)

6. Test different messaging angles and ship

We've turned this into a repeatable play that's been a winner internally.

Pictured is the finished workflow in Unify—check out a full walkthrough of a lookalikes play here.

BEFORE YOU GO…

Thanks for reading, as always.

Hope today's edition of The Pipeline was helpful.

Happy to answer any questions about email deliverability - just reply to this email and hit me with your questions.

Thanks a ton,

Austin

PS: If you want to use Unify to drive more pipeline in 2025, get in touch here.