“Premium inboxes” is another term for hosted email systems that offer additional benefits and optimization. These systems are typically used by businesses to achieve better deliverability and engagement, helping them to run more efficient and fruitful outbound campaigns.

Historically, sales teams have always struggled with the limitations of legacy email systems, such as spam filters, delivery issues and running out of storage. This isn’t ideal when you’re running several outbound campaigns at once, all with the hope of driving new leads into your pipeline.

Fast-scaling, modern businesses need a more agile alternative – one that removes the headaches of traditional email systems and delivers more consistent outcomes.

This is where premium inboxes come in. Optimized email systems like Topo will simplify your outreach processes and ensure better results from all your campaigns while ensuring your messaging remains relevant and valuable.

In this article, we’ll explain the importance of premium inboxes and show you how to set them up for yourself. We’ll also introduce Topo, an AI-powered sales tool that can automate time-consuming tasks like selecting and warming up your email domains.

Why Premium Inboxes Are Crucial in 2024

Email is still the most popular outbound sales channel in 2024, and with good reason. Thanks to developments in artificial intelligence, most of the boring (but essential) manual tasks involved in email campaigns can now be automated, making outreach smoother and more efficient than ever.

In cold email outreach, where first impressions are crucial, premium inboxes will help your company establish domain authority and bypass spam filters — essentially making sure your message lands in the right inboxes at the right times.

While spam filters exist for an important reason (to prevent people’s inboxes from being flooded with irrelevant, unsolicited emails or malware), they can often be triggered incorrectly, no matter how hard you’ve worked on crafting genuinely helpful and relevant emails for your subscribers.

Good email software will prevent your emails incorrectly being labeled as spam, while also implementing authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

Common Sales Email System Challenges For Premium Inboxes

Managing inboxes without professional tools can present significant challenges for sales teams, many of which are tricky to put right once campaigns have begun.

This is why we recommend using premium inboxes, so your outbound strategy has the best chance of success from the beginning.

Premium inboxes help prevent pain points such as:

Premium Inboxes: Delivery Problems

Inaccurate and outdated data will result in high bounce rates, which can lead to frustration, skewed metrics and wasted resources. Spam traps can also lead to domain blacklisting, which will hurt your sender reputation and land your emails in spam folders — which is the last thing you want when you’ve worked hard on an email campaign.

You should also refrain from using these common AI words and phrases whether or not you’re using AI tools to write your emails. These words can trigger spam filters due to the proliferation of AI-generated advertising and spam.

Manual Processes

Without proper email infrastructure, your team will waste valuable time on manual processes like setup and warmup, maintaining domain health and monitoring blacklists – all tasks that could easily be automated. Managing multiple inboxes for scaling campaigns will also be difficult and time-intensive, and can lead to employee churn and burnout.

Inability to Scale

Scaling your campaigns without AI tools is incredibly difficult. You want to grow, but you don’t want to lose the voice, tone and unique proposition that makes your company different.

Premium inboxes will help you balance these needs with advanced personalization options and a layer of human oversight. Using AI infrastructure will also help you overcome the sender limits of standard email providers.

Generic Messaging

Traditional cold email copywriting techniques just don’t cut it in 2024, and legacy systems make it difficult to automate without personalization, leaving you stuck with generic messaging.

If you’re sending emails to multiple audiences or running multiple campaigns at once, you need to make sure the copy is personalized, otherwise you’ll end up with overly generic content that doesn’t serve your users’ needs, or it will be irrelevant. Neither of these are good options!

Using premium inboxes, you should be able to generate (and automate) personalized responses using AIs that have been trained on your company documents.

How to Set Up Your Premium Inboxes

Setting up your premium inbox software should be easy, but doing it manually can be complex and time-intensive. Nevertheless, these best practices are essential when it comes to email sales.

These are the steps you’ll need to follow:

Choosing Your Domain

Your domain is the foundation of your email campaign, so it’s important to get this step right. Ideally, you should select a domain that matches your business name so that recipients know who is sending them mail, and that they can trust you. Make sure you don’t choose anything too generic or misspell your domain name — these are red flags that can get you blacklisted.

For extra security, you could register a separate domain for each sales campaign. This will help you protect the reputation of your primary domain if something goes wrong, but it is time-consuming.

Configuring DNS Records

Next, you’ll need to configure your DNS (Domain Name System) records to make sure your emails are authenticated and to prevent them from being flagged as spam.

Key DNS records to configure include SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance).

Warming Up Your Domains and Premium Inboxes

Warming up your inboxes and domains means sending 20-50 emails per day to a small but engaged audience to establish trust and authority with email service providers.

You can then increase the volume of emails over the next few days and weeks, making sure your engagement metrics remain strong.

Tracking Essential Metrics

Once your campaigns are active, you’ll need to consistently monitor key metrics like open rates, sender scores, click-through rates, response rates and bounces. This will help you to adjust campaigns for maximum engagement and keep track of your progress.

You should also track spam complaints, as these can hurt your sender reputation. Using this data, you should be able to see why your emails were marked as spam so you can fix the problem for future campaigns.

Scaling Your Email Campaigns

Once your email inboxes are warmed up and you’re seeing consistent engagement, you can start to increase the volume of your emails. You can even use rotation systems to set up additional mailboxes, but again this takes time.

To improve the relevance and performance of your campaigns, you’ll want to segment your email lists based on customer demographics and behavior. You should also continually test and optimize different content formats, sending times and subject lines to improve campaign performance.

Setting up premium inboxes can be complex and time-consuming, especially for small businesses with limited time and resources. This is where AI tooks like Topo come in!

Topo: Revolutionizing Email Infrastructure Management

Topo is the solution to all of your legacy email challenges. There are many AI sales outreach alternatives, but none of them offer our unique customization options that help you leverage artificial intelligence without diluting your core messaging or sounding like a spammer!

We provide automatic setup of premium inboxes, including finding a domain, configuring DNS records, warming up and monitoring your email campaigns.

We’ll even perform advanced targeting based on lead signals rather than typical demographic filters and build dynamic exclusion lists, so you’re never wasting time or resources on duplicate outreach or irrelevant leads.

Topo eliminates manual processes but still retains a layer of human oversight for personalization and quality control. Your AI should assist you, not replace you.

If you want to avoid the demands of traditional email setup while optimizing your campaigns, try our holistic AI-powered sales tool. Explore Topo’s features or book a free demo to get started.