Cold outreach is still one of the most effective B2B methods for customer acquisition. Although 21% of emails ever reach your recipients’ attention and get opened, cold emailing is far from the thing of the past. There are a couple of steps you can take to avoid your emails being sent directly to your recipients spam folder.
Table of Contents
- The Importance of Warming Up Your Domain
- How to Get Domain Authentication
- How to Warm Up Your Domain
First of all, you need to warm up your email address and your domain. In this manner, you will improve the deliverability of your campaigns. Also, you will make sure that your open rates are good and protect your online reputation. To do so, it is crucial to know how to break in your email address and your new domain to achieve the best results and make the best of cold email marketing.
Before we continue discussing the reasons and methods for warming up your domain and email address, there are some precautious steps you should take to save yourself from a lot of trouble in the future:
You should use a different domain for your outbound campaigns
It’s a good idea to have a domain that is different than your company domain when sending a cold email campaign. This way, you will save your company from any consequences that can interrupt your regular emailing activities that have nothing to do with your outreach. Not being blacklisted is your priority. This is very important for new and fast-growing companies with expanding sales teams.
Each one of your new sales representatives will get a new email that hasn’t been adequately warmed up. If they all start a cold outreach at the same time, Your ISP will notice unusual activity, and your company’s domain will be blacklisted and reported as spammy. If you set up a new domain, you will eliminate all of these risks. All you have to do now is warm up your outbound domain so it can be used for the cold outreach campaign.
Your new domain and your main one should have similar names
For example, if your main domain is Company.com, use Company.co, Company.us or something similar for your cold outreach domain, so you don’t confuse your recipients.
The Importance of Warming Up Your Domain
It is vital to properly warm up your domain if you want to see high deliverability rates, which means your emails are reaching your recipients’ inbox. By not doing so, you are at risk of burning your domain and making it useless for any email outreach. ISPs will do everything they can to protect their users from those who flood their inboxes with spam emails. Unless you warm up your domain correctly, you may be labeled as a spammer, and all your outbound efforts will be in dramatically diminished. Although there are many different reasons behind reduced deliverability rates, such as the email copy, subject lines, emailing list or email address configuration, your domain reputation carries a significant weight.
Maintaining a Good domain Reputation
The first and most important thing in maintaining a good domain reputation is not to bore people. If you are boring your audience, they will report you for spam, simple as that. Other factors can affect your domain reputation:
Personalization
You have to make sure that your emails are highly personalized. You don’t want your recipient to get that artificial feeling of a generic message.
Relevance
Compose your emails in such a way that they are relevant to your recipients. This means that your email list should always be properly segmented.
Authentication
Before you start your cold outreach, you have to make sure that your domain is authenticated.
Always try to be as natural as possible, so your cold outreach emails have that human touch. Also, don’t send the same message to all the recipients on your list. This means you shouldn’t send all of the emails at once. There are many useful tools to help you schedule your cold outreach. As your domain reputation gets higher, you will see the rise in your deliverability and open/click-through rates. On the other hand, if your domain has been burned, there is practically nothing you can do to fix its reputation.
How to Get Domain Authentication
This is one of the essential steps to reach your recipients’ inbox. To get the authentication from email providers, you need to set up Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM).
Sender Policy Framework is a validation system that verifies the sender’s email address to prevent spam.
DomainKeys Identified Mail is an additional layer of protection from the spam to indicate that an email has been sent by you and not somebody impersonating you.
How to Warm Up Your Domain
As we have already said, the most critical thing is composing your emails to sound as natural as possible. Act as if you are reaching out to a friend, and don’t overwhelm your recipients with ten emails a day. Don’t send any emails right after you register your domain. It is better to wait for two or three weeks before you initiate any activity. Warming up your domain is a process, and it can take three months or even more. At the beginning of this process, you should set up no more than one email address. You want the warm-up to be smooth and not raise any red flags.
Warming up domain process
Start manually. Send no more than 20 emails per day during the first week, than gradually increase the number. During your second week, you can send between 20 and 40 emails, and between 40 and 80 during the third week. It is important to gradually increase the number and do it consistently. Although this process is time-consuming, it won’t raise any suspicion, and it will help you properly warm up your domain and email address.
Personalize and tailor your outreach. Take your time and invest your energy into creating a meaningful message and subject line. It is essential not to appear as a spammer who sends irrelevant messages.
Message your friends. Another important factor is your reply rate. If nobody opens and replies to your messages, then your outreach will come off as irrelevant, and you will be in trouble. This is why it is important to message your friends and get a decent reply rate. Gmail, in particular, pays great attention to that metric.
Reach out to business addresses. This is important if you want to use cold outreach in the business-to-business industry. If you get responses from business addresses that belong to some reputable domains, it will be a sigh to providers that your emails are valuable and that you are not a spammer.
Your domain reputation plays a significant role, and it takes time to establish and cement it. So, be patient, don’t rush things, and never forget – this is a process!
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