The article explains how to set up a new domain and mailbox for cold email outreach to avoid risking the reputation of your main domain. It outlines four steps to derisk cold outreach, including buying a new domain, connecting the domain and email hosting server, setting up a redirect for your outreach domain, and setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. Lastly, it talks about how to warm up your new domain and mailboxes.
Why should I set up a new domain before starting to send marketing emails?
The first thing you need when you are planning to start with cold outreach is to set up a new domain and mailbox that is separate from the existing one you use to communicate with your team and clients. The main reason for doing so is to protect your main domain from any potential impact on its reputation. What happens if a domain’s reputation is bad? Spam filters block emails sent from those domains, land them in spam folders, or even put the sender on a blacklist.
Just imagine how annoying it would be if your employees and customers were not receiving your emails anymore because they were landing in their spam folders. Be smart, don’t risk it, and keep reading! Here are the steps for you to de-risk cold outreach.
1. Buy a new domain
There are endless providers to buy a new domain from. Here are some well-known options:
What does matter is the name you choose. Look for available domains that are close to your main business domain. This reduces the chance of leads being confused by different names. You could for example look for the same domain name but with another top-level domain.
For example, if we use propensity.com as our main business domain, we could use propensity.io for our marketing email campaigns.
You could also use a subdomain, for example, if we use propensity.com as our main business domain, we could use tryabm.propensity.com for our marketing email campaigns.
You can get cookie points for buying a second-hand domain that’s one or more years old. To spam filters, domain age matters. They are especially suspicious of fresh domains used for outreach. This makes a lot of sense since spammers use newly created domains. So in general, the older the domain, the better. But don’t forget to check the domain’s reputation before buying it.
You can use tools like Talos and MX Toolbox to find out the domain’s reputation and whether it’s blacklisted.
2. Connect domain & email hosting server
Now we need to point your new outreach domain to the email server of your choice. If your domain and hosting come from the same provider you can connect them with a few clicks. If you bought your domain from a different provider than your email hosting then you have to follow the steps below:
- Copy the nameservers from your email hoster
- Log into your domain provider
- Go to your DNS settings
- Paste the nameservers and save
Here are some helpful guides:
3. Set up redirect for outreach domain
Contacts might be curious and visit the domain after receiving an email from you. To make sure that they don’t end up on a 404 or that this domain is a parked website you should set up a redirect to our main domain. Here are some guides on how to set up redirects for your domain:
4. Set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are security mechanisms that prevent scammers from sending forged emails on your behalf. Setting these up in the DNS records of your domain will increase the chance that emails from your domain are successfully delivered to leads’ inboxes and your domain’s reputation stays intact.
Setting up SPF
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is a security mechanism created to prevent spammers from sending emails on your behalf. The mechanism is all about communication between DNS servers. For example, let’s say you’ve sent an email to Steve. But how does Steve’s DNS server know that the email was sent by you? Without SPF records it doesn’t have a way to know. SPF defines which IP addresses can be used to send emails from your domain.
Here are some guides for well-known email providers:
Setting up DKIM
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) standard has been created for the same reason as SPF. It’s a way to additionally sign your emails in a way that will allow the recipient’s server to check if the sender was you or not. By setting DKIM on your DNS server, you’re adding a way to tell your receivers “Yes, this email is really from me”. The whole idea is based on encrypting and decrypting the additional signature, put in the header of your message. To make that possible, you need to have two keys:
- The private key (which is unique to your domain and available exclusively to you. It allows you to encrypt your signature in the header of your messages).
- The public key (which you add to your DNS records using the DKIM standard, to allow your recipient’s server to retrieve it and decrypt your hidden signature from the header of your message).
Here are some guides for well-known email providers:
Setting up DMARC
Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) is a protocol that is used to authenticate email messages and prevent domain spoofing and email phishing.
DMARC records are used to instruct email-receiving servers on how to handle emails that fail DMARC authentication. They are added to the DNS (Domain Name System) records of the sender's domain and contain information on how to handle emails that fail SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and/or DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) checks.
Here are some guides for well-known email providers:
5. Warm up your new domain and email address
Newly created domains have a neutral reputation by default. This means that spam filters will keep a close eye on it and could be alarmed when you suddenly send a large number of emails. A domain must earn a good reputation by sending and receiving emails first before you start sending emails at scale.
The process of increasing email communication over time for a new domain is called domain warmup. The idea is to send just a few emails a day from your outbound mailbox to addressees who you know will respond to you (e.g. family, friends, or colleagues). Remember that if you have more than one mailbox on this domain, you have to warm up each of them separately.
We suggest you send 5-10 emails a day and increase the number slowly over time. To be sure that a domain is fully warmed up this domain warmup phase should last about three months.
There are a handful of tools out there that help you with warming up your email mailbox by sending, receiving, and replying to emails within their customer base. This allows them to monitor how many emails end up in spam and adjust the number of emails being sent over time. The tools can speed up the warming process to closer to 30 days.
Here are a few options:
While your domain is warming up, there are a few things you should take care of:
- Building your Primary Audience and In-Market Account Lists
- Setting up your ABM Campaigns with graphics and content
- Drafting email sequences