Cold Email Domain Variations & Deliverability

Let’s start this out with covering exactly why you need to consider cold email domain variations.

The goal behind cold email domain variations is to increase deliverability, and ultimately accelerate your sales.

There are simple ways to implement variations, from domain suffix to slight changes in the domain spelling.

Again, the ultimate goal here is to increase the number of emails that get delivered to your recipients.

Using a Different Domain Name for Cold Email

Should I use a different domain for cold email?

The short answer is yes, you should definitely use a different domain name for sending cold emails. 

The reality is that you run a high risk of being blacklisted, especially in the beginning when you send cold emails. 

The way to avoid this risk is to set up an additional email domain and use that exclusively for cold emails.

Avoid Spam Filters and Blacklists

There are several major blacklists for email domains, all working hard to improve the user experience for email service providers.

Email blacklists are databases that track IP addresses and domains known for sending spam or exhibiting malicious behavior. 

Email service providers and anti-spam systems reference these lists to help filter and block unwanted messages. Some of the top cold email blacklists include:

1. Spamhaus Project: One of the most popular blacklists, the Spamhaus Project has several lists, including the Spamhaus Block List (SBL), Exploits Block List (XBL), and Policy Block List (PBL).
2. Barracuda Reputation Block List (BRBL): Managed by Barracuda Networks, BRBL is a popular blacklist that focuses on blocking spam and other forms of malicious email.
3. SpamCop: SpamCop is another reputable blacklist service that uses automated algorithms and user reports to identify spam sources and maintain a list of offending IP addresses.

Ways to Create Cold Email Domain Variations

In my experience of sending over 3 million cold emails, I’ve tested many variations. My go to choice of variations are in the following order:

1. Choose an alternate domain suffix: Ie. .co, .net, .org etc.
2. Add a word: Ie. trycoldlytics.com or getcoldlytics.com
3. Add a Hyphen: try-coldlytics.com

These three approaches maintain the brand awareness of your primary domain, without actually risking your primary domain’s reputation. 

You can implement any of these 3 options quite easily by going to your domain name provider, such as namecheap.com and searching for their availability. 

Chances are, your domain name variations you want to use for cold email are available. 

If not, making slight adjustments like I show in the 3rd example opens up limitless possibilities for cold email domain variations.

Setting Up a New Email Account for Cold Emailing

Setting up an email account for cold emails is quite simple. Follow these easy steps to create an email account specifically for sending cold emails:

1. Choose an email provider: Pick a reliable email service provider like Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo Mail.
2. Create a new account: Visit the email provider's website and sign up for a new account. Fill in the required details like your name, desired email address, and a strong password.
3. Choose a professional email address: Use a professional email address that represents you or your business. Avoid using numbers, symbols, or complex characters. For example: firstname.lastname@domain.com
4. Complete your profile: Add your full name, profile picture, and any other relevant information to make your email account look professional and trustworthy.
5. Set up your email signature: Create a professional email signature that includes your name, title, company name, contact information, and a link to your website or LinkedIn profile.
6. Setup SPF, DKIM and DMARK, there are plenty of guides, like this one for Google Workspace that show you how to do this for the email provider you’ve selected.

What is a good open rate for cold emails?

A good open rate for cold emails is 40% or higher based on the 3 million cold emails I have been responsible for sending. 

The majority of my early emails saw an average of 20%, and when I focused on improving my audience and along with testing my subject lines and opening sentence of a cold email, my open rate shot upwards of more than 80% at times.

Cold Email Benchmarks and the KPI Funnel for Optimization

Follow this benchmark guide to easily make improvements to your cold email campaigns. 

This guide was created as a quick reference to make testing easier and more productive.

The KPI funnel, as shown above, presents the order in which to make changes to your campaign. 

Start with ensuring you have the right audience for your campaign, Coldlytics can help you do this.

Simply send us a message on our live chat in the bottom right corner and ask us about how to find your ideal customers!

Once you have a well defined audience, you’ll want to split test your subject line.

You can incorporate the next step, first line optimization simultaneously if you wish.

What is first line optimization?

Glad you asked.

The first line of your cold email is critical, the first sentence in the email is usually previewed in the receiver’s email inbox making it critical in the roll of getting them to open up the email to learn more about your message.

The Audience, Subject and First Line, make up your Open Rate. The Reply Rate comes down to the body of the email and the call to action. 

Make sure your message is concise and easy to read, and that you’ve provided a clear call to action.

Follow these steps and you’re off to the races.

‍How many cold emails per day?

Depending on who you talk to, sending a high volume of emails per day is the best way to get results. The problem is that you can compromise your cold email domain very quickly doing this.

The rule of thumb here is that the more emails you can send, the more results you’ll receive. 

More emails sent means more data to reflect and improve on, ultimately getting you towards your goal of new business, faster. 

This is why I recommend sending up to 40 emails per day, per account.

I use Google Workspace for my cold email accounts and connect them with either Lemlist or SmartReach.

In recent years, oftentimes when I’ve crossed the 40 emails per day threshold, I have seen my accounts disabled for spamming.

How can I send a high volume of cold emails?

You can send a high volume of cold emails by creating multiple domains and cold email accounts.

If you wanted to send 100 emails per day, you would need to set up 3 separate accounts. I like to ensure that each account has its own domain to increase its likelihood of being delivered. 

This means having 3 accounts with a limit of 40 emails per day each enables you to send 120 emails, 40X3=120.

If you wish to send more than 120 emails per day, simply set up additional cold email accounts. It’s easy to connect multiple accounts inside of one user on smartreach.io as discussed in our case study with them here: SmartReach - Coldlytics Case Study