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Technical Setup

Technical Setup

Sending cold emails in 2024 requires a solid technical foundation to ensure you’re not landing in spam. Nothing too difficult to setup, but it’s easy to miss some steps or not be aware of it.

It’s then wasted sales efforts as no one is actually seeing your emails..

Here’s what you need to do to get started with cold emails the right way.

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Note: this setup can be a bit technical so if you have a technical person that can set that up for you, you can leverage that. Otherwise, it will take a few hours to educate yourself on this but it’s 100% worth it!

Buy a secondary domain

You will be sending cold emails. Those are per definition very sensitive to send, as the line between a cold email and a spam email is only a matter of appreciation of the relevancy of your email from the recipient.

Especially if you’re getting started, you’re unlikely to get it right 100% of the time - which means you sometimes will be reported as spam. That can affect your domain reputation which is a score attributed to your domain (eg. company.com) by email service providers to decide to trust emails from you or not (and therefore, if you land in spam or not).

Spam reports decrease that score. If you get reported for spam due to your cold emails, that means your overall email deliverability will suffer. The email your CEO is sending won’t land to the investors’ inbox. Customers won’t receive the marketing newsletter. In short… not good.

That’s why to protect your main domain reputation, the best practice is to separate cold email activity by purchasing one or more secondary domains that will be used exclusively for outbound sales.

For example, if your company is company.com you might want to buy:

  • getcompany.com
  • trycompany.com
  • etc.

And use those domains to send emails instead of your main domain.

You can purchase domains from different providers such as:

Redirect your domain

Currently if someone visits your secondary domain getcompany.com they will land on an error page. That’s not what we want them to see if they’re checking things out.

You need to redirect your secondary domain to your main website so that someone visiting getcompany.com lands on company.com and can discover what you are offering.

This setup depends on where you bought your domain initially. A Google search “redirect domain + {where you bought the domain}” should give you some useful guides.

And here’s how to do it on those I’ve mentioned above.

  • Cloudflare:
    • Go to Rules > Page rules. Create a new page rule:
    • Go to DNS > Click Add Record
      • Type: A
      • Name: @
      • Ipv4 address: 192.0.2.1
  • Namecheap: head over to the Advanced DNS section and add a new URL Redirect Record to your primary domain

Purchase an inbox

Once you’ve bought a domain, you need to create an email address on it to be able to send/receive emails.

To ensure you get a good deliverability, you should use a trusted email provider such as:

  • Microsoft (Office 365)
  • Google (Google Workspace)

Microsoft setup:

  • Go to Microsoft Office 365 page
  • Select Microsoft 365 Business Basic and complete the account registration
  • Once on the admin panel, go to the domains page
  • Click “Add domain” and complete the necessary DNS setup
    • Depending on where you bought the domain, what you need to do will vary
    • If for example you bought your domain with Cloudflare, everything should be done automatically
  • Go back to the Admin homepage, click “Add user” and fill the details (name, password, domain)
  • On the left sidebar menu, click Users > Active Users
  • Click on your newly created user. A sidebar opens on the right
  • Inside that sidebar, click “Mail” and check “IMAP” and “Authenticated SMTP” (and save changes)
  • done 🎉
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Pro tip: Are you a startup founder? You can apply to the Microsoft for Startups program. Benefits include (among other things) 10 Microsoft 365 seats that you can use for cold emails.

Google setup:

  • Go to Google workspace page
  • Select Business Starter and complete the account registration
  • Once on the admin panel, go to the domains page by clicking Account > Domains > Manage domains
  • Click Add a domain
  • Enter the domain name, select Secondary domain and click on “Add domain & start verification”
  • Depending on where you bought the domain, what you need to do to verify your ownership will vary. Usually, you will be asked to sign in to the website where you bought the domain to complete the verification.
  • Once verified, go back to the domains page (Account > Domains > Manage domains) and click Activate Gmail
  • Select Set up MX Record and click next
  • Complete the automatic setup
  • Go back to the Admin homepage and click Add a user
  • Fill the details (name, password, domain)
  • done 🎉

Setup your domain security

To make sure your emails are properly authenticated, we need to configure a few things on our domain: SPF & DKIM records.

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If you setup your inbox like described in the previous section, those security settings are already done and you can skip this section 👍️

Depending on where you bought your domain, what you will need to configure step by step will vary so it’s out of scope for this guide to show you every step for every provider.

However, doing a Google search like “setup spf dkim {website where you bought the domain}” should give you detailed step by step tutorials on what you need to do.

Warm up your domain

Warming up your domain means generate progressively seemingly legitimate activity so that your inbox does not start sending cold emails out of the blue, as that’s a spammy looking behavior.

First, we will build some trust with Google & other email providers by generating “good” email activity. This is done by joining a network of email accounts that will send emails to each other. Email providers will see that you behave correctly, that your emails do get replies and that one is reporting you for spam, so they will slowly begin to trust you as a legitimate actor.

I recommend warming up your inbox for at least 2 weeks before using it for cold emails.

For this step, you can use tools such as:

Those will also be the tools we will use to send the actual email sequences.

Get an account there and add your inbox there. They both extensive help documentation on how to connect your email account to their system. Depending, on your email provider etc. you may have a few more steps to do to ensure you can connect to an external application like this.

Sending volume

To not land in spam, I recommend to send up to 20-25 emails per day per inbox. On top of that, you should also let the warm up system run during your campaign, even after the first 2 weeks.

Try to not change volume drastically (either up or down), it’s better to slowly increase the volume every week rather than doing 0→25 /day in a day.

If you want to scale your email sending volume, just buy more domains and more inboxes.

Done 🎉

Congrats you’ve setup your first cold email domain! Fortunately we don’t have to do this often and it gets quicker once you know what to do.

So now, we have the leads and an email inbox, we just have to write good cold emails and send them. Coming up next page 👉️