You want to hit the ground running with your new marketing automation system. You can’t wait to get started, get those fresh leads in, spread the good word.
You’ve got heart, kid. But make sure you cover your bases before you start sending emails.
Brace Yourself
The hard truth about cold emailing through your marketing automation system is that most people just don’t want to get your emails. They think it’s not relevant to their interests, a waste of their time, spam.
That’s a hard pill to swallow. You just want to get your name and your brand out there, test the waters, get some customers. You’re not trying to bother anyone—it’s just business, right?
In the end, it doesn’t matter how well-intentioned your message is. If your prospects are having a bad day, they might flag your message as spam instead of unsubscribing from your list. There’s no way around this, but it can spell doom for your company if you don’t properly cover your bases.
Why Do I Care?
A big mistake many companies make (especially when they use services like HubSpot or Pardot to send cold emails) is that the outreach happens from their company domain. This means people receiving your messages are seeing them from the company itself.
Guess what happens when they report it as spam? That’s right: your domain’s reputation has been lowered. One or two reports is not the end of the world, but garner enough ire from your prospect base and you can be facing some serious trouble.
Soon, your website domain may be blacklisted on a major list or two. This means that emails originating from your website may not be making it to the inboxes of your clients, prospects, or leads. You might be cutting off a major communication channel with your consumer base.
Proper Protection
This is obviously not something you’d like to happen. So what can you do to protect yourself from this?
Do not send cold emails from your own domain.
I’ll repeat that.
Do not. Send cold emails. From your own domain.
It’s perfectly alright to send opt-in newsletters and other information from your own domain. You’ve been given permission to email these people. Services like Mailchimp are great for doing this.
But just hold off on the cold emails, alright? You’re not doing yourself any favors.
Instead, set up a secondary domain that is similar in name to your own (for instance, we’ve set up www.outboundopsmail.com for our outreach efforts). This way, the emails do not originate from your site and any push back does not harm your site’s reputation.
Setting Up a New Domain
Setting up a secondary domain is fairly simple to do and will only cost you about $12 per year (give or take a few bucks). Head on over to your favorite domain retailer and purchase something that is close in name to your domain and makes sense to you.
The Technical Details
Emails that can’t be validated go right to the spam folder. If you’ve ever seen an email that comes in as {your name here} via sendgrid.com at the top of your email, that means that someone other than the owner of that domain is the sender of that email. This makes it really easy for service providers like Infusionsoft to send emails that look like they came from you, but it also means most of your email will go into the spam folder. Why is that?
Most email spammers use a similar technique to extort money and information from their targets. They will say they are CFO BobSmith@Comany.com and ask you to send a wire transfer tomorrow. Because of this, most modern spam filters highly scrutinize any emails where the sending domain and the sender don’t match.
How do you fix this?
There are three ways to verify emails:
- SPF Records (Sender Policy Framework)
- DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail)
- DMARC (Domain Message Authentication Reporting & Conformance)
All of these methods verify that the person who sent the email is a real person. Each of them can be set up on the DNS (Domain Name System) of the provider you registered your domains with. We recommend Google Domains because of the cost and ease of use. Once the three methods above are set up, you have a 90% better chance of your email reaching the inbox.
