What would happen to your business if you could no longer send emails?
Let’s tweak this a little bit - what would happen if every single email you sent ended up in a spam folder?
You might be surprised to find that you’re playing Russian Roulette - just by following some of the commonly accepted “best practices” of sending cold outbound emails.
Halloween is coming early to this newsletter
Those messages to your investors, to your customers, to your employees, to the service providers you work with… all going unanswered.
This would be a BIG PROBLEM right?
An existential threat to your business, I’d bet
This is not a hypothetical scenario. This is playing out at companies today.
So today we’re going to talk about why this happens, how you can slap a band-aid on and fix this problem today, as well as the steps you need to take to make a permanent solution going forward.
The root of the problem is sending cold emails from your primary domain.
Your primary domain is your main domain. For Google, it’s www.google.com, for Amazon it’s www.amazon.com. I’m sure you get the picture.
Here’s a best practice guide from Outreach, written last month.
What’s missing?
No mention of the primary domain, and no mention of using multiple sending domains (this is not a feature Outreach offer as far as I’m aware).
The “best practices” (every SDR sending 100-250 emails PER day from your primary domain) are actually the WORST possible practices.
1: Stop any campaigns that are being sent using your primary domain.
2: Buy and set up a secondary domain right now.
Go to GoDaddy (or your preferred domain host) and buy a secondary domain. Make sure they are .com domains (these have the fewest problems and cost $12 a year). Get creative with words and
I own hirenextventure.com, I also have trynextventure.com, yournexthires.com, wheresyournextventure.com and so on and so forth.
3: Set up Email accounts for the secondary domains
Set these up using either Google Workspace or Microsoft Outlook, and make sure you’ve authenticated the emails with MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC records. Make sure you’re forwarding the domains over your primary domain (as you’ll see is the case with the links I put above).
This step isn’t optional: if you don’t set your domains up properly, you’re going to get disabled by Google just as quickly as you set things up.
4: Start warming this new domain up.
I recommend Smartlead (this is not an affiliate link) for your domain warmup. It’s what I use, it’s also what I use to send cold emails. You can also use something like Instantly.ai or Quickmail.
There’s also tools like instantly.ai, but Smartlead has established themself as a trusted vendor for this type of work and Instantly I am less familiar with.
5: Wait two weeks
In two weeks you’ll have your domain warmed up, and can resume sending cold emails.
6. Update your copy to incorporate Spintax
Once you write your campaigns, adding spintax to the copy helps circumvent anti spam measures by google. Sending the same messages with the same words over and over automatically can get you flagged. To avoid this, you use special placeholders in your copy that rotates phrasing. I’ll spintax the following sentence as an example.
{You|Founders|Business owners} {need to|should} be {mindful|cautious|careful} with what you do in terms of {sending cold outbound|cold outbound|outbound email} or you {may|will|likely will} {lose access to your domain|tank your domain reputation|fail to land in your prospects’ inboxes}.
What this does is rotate which word inside the “{_}” is used so that each message maintains the same core message but has slightly different phrasing.
1: Buy more domains. At least 20. Get them all set up
2: Move sending tools to a tool that supports multiple domains.
If you don’t like Smartlead for whatever reason, I think Quickmail is pretty good as well.
3: Crisis averted