Most searchers assume the hardest part of proprietary outreach is the message. What do I say to a business owner? How do I sound credible? How do I avoid the "spammy buyer" trap?
Those things matter. But none of it works if your email never makes it to the inbox.
Email deliverability is the silent deal killer in search.
Why Deliverability Is a Bigger Challenge Than You Think
Small business owners are inundated. On average, people receive more than 120 emails per day. Owners see messages from lenders, brokers, vendors, recruiters, and buyers constantly. Most of it gets ignored. A meaningful portion never even shows up.
Industry data paints a blunt picture:
- Average email deliverability sits around 82%
- ~8% of emails land in spam folders
- Another 10% disappear entirely, never reaching inbox or spam
In other words, nearly 1 in 4 emails you send may never be seen at all.
That's not a messaging problem. That's a visibility problem.
Inbox providers like Google and Microsoft have tightened the screws. They aggressively filter anything that looks automated, mass-sent, poorly authenticated, or suspicious.
Once your domain gets flagged, recovery is slow and painful. Every email you send after that is fighting an uphill battle.
When these stack up, owners don't ignore you. They never see you.
And if an owner never sees your message, they never get the chance to consider you as a successor.
A Client Who Learned the Hard Way
One of our clients came to us for this reason alone. They weren't struggling with their story. They weren't struggling to find leads. Their problem was simple: no one was seeing their emails.
Entire campaigns were disappearing into spam folders. Their team thought sellers weren't interested. In reality, the sellers never even knew they existed.
We rebuilt their deliverability from the ground up - fresh domains, proper warmup schedules, authentication records, pacing rules. Replies started coming in almost immediately.
It wasn't a deal flow problem. It was a deliverability problem.
Why This Matters in ETA
Search funds are already facing a supply-demand mismatch. Stanford's 2024 Search Fund Study shows 94 new funds launched in 2023, but only 29 acquisitions closed. The competition for listed deals is brutal. Which is why proprietary outreach matters so much.
But here's the catch: you can only win proprietary deals if you can consistently reach owners. And in today's environment, that means your deliverability game has to be airtight.
Without it, you're invisible. And invisibility is fatal in ETA.
Why Email Still Wins (Even With the Noise)
Some searchers give up on email when they run into deliverability challenges. That's a mistake.
Despite the filters, despite the noise, email is still the most scalable way to reach small business owners.
- No other channel scales. Cold calling doesn't scale. LinkedIn is throttled. Ads are expensive and impersonal. Email lets you reach hundreds or thousands of owners a week.
- Less than 10% of businesses ever hit the open market. Proprietary deals start in inboxes, not on BizBuySell.
- Email builds trust at scale. Done right, it feels one-to-one. Owners don't want jargon or "synergies." They want to hear from someone who respects their legacy. Email is still the fastest way to have that first conversation.
So yes, email deliverability is a challenge. But walking away from email means walking away from the only channel that can realistically generate enough conversations to find a needle-in-a-haystack deal.
What Good Deliverability Looks Like
Here's what a solid setup includes:
This isn't flashy. It's plumbing. But without it, every campaign you send is dead on arrival.
The Bottom Line
Search is hard enough without sabotaging yourself. Business owners are already skeptical, inboxes are already crowded, and your competitors are sending messages too. If your emails don't land, you lose the chance to tell your story, to earn trust, to be seen as a credible successor. That's why deliverability isn't optional - it's the foundation of every proprietary search.
One of our clients came to us for this reason alone. Once we fixed their deliverability, conversations started happening again. That's how big the difference is. Because in ETA, you can't afford to be invisible.
And while outreach channels evolve, email is still the one that scales. It's still the king of proprietary search. But only if you do it right.
