Cold outreach steps you should never skip for a successful outcome

Your company domain vs. complementary domains for cold outreach

The first thing that comes to our minds when we started with our cold outreach is all the harm we did to our main company domain for testing. We’ve learned from our mistakes and what to share our experience with everyone that is planning to introduce cold outreach as part of their sales strategy.

The golden rule is: Never, ever, use your main company domain for cold outreach.

Here is why: 

The philosophy behind cold emailing, or cold outreach, in general, is to examine possible interest from new prospects for your product or service, based on the legitimate interest of the recipients. 

In simpler words, you are trying to get in contact with people that are not familiar with your brand or product and trying to engage in a conversation where the possible outcome could be a newly acquired client. 

However, we all know that cold prospecting when done manually is an impossible, time-consuming, and highly ineffective task for sales teams and sales representatives, so we all seek an automated solution to execute the cold emailing process. 

So far so good, but now imagine when you start sending a couple of hundred emails per day to people that are not highly likely to respond to your right after your firstly sent email, or ever. 

This is the part where you need to think of your domain’s reputation and future deliverability. Email providers, who are most of the time fighting against spammers, scammers, and all sorts of automated emailing are doing hard work to keep relations and limitations in place, and this is where your domain will instantly be flagged or marked as a spammer, and your emails won’t see the light of day in your prospect’s inbox. 

What’s even far worse is that you now won’t be able to do your daily communication with others from your business network since email providers don’t distinguish between prospects and your usual contacts that you are in constant communication with. Your company domain will be flagged for all it’ll be almost impossible to reach others in their inbox, even though you’ve had regular email communication with them. 

In addition to you not being able to reach people, everyone that uses the same company domain, like colleagues and partners will have the same problem, not being able to reach anyone using the main company domain. 

You most certainly get the frightening idea of how harmful using your company domain for cold outreach can be.

Now let us give you a solution to it: Getting alternative domains for cold outreach.

Nowadays, it’s fairly easy to get multiple domains, in correlation to your company domain for a fraction of the cost. What we mean by getting alternative domains is the following: 

Let’s take our main company domain sales.rocks as an example. We’ve done cold outreach with our company emails before and suffered the same faith we’ve explained earlier, which took us almost 2 years to fully recover from.

An alternative domain can be any available domain for purchasing that contains your company name with a combination of prefixes and suffixes of your liking. 

For example salesrocks.eu, salesrocks.com sales-rocks.info, and so on, combinations are limitless.

After getting your alternative domains and claiming ownership of them, you can easily get a well-performing email provider (we’ve tried a dozen of them, and Zoho Mail Lite is still our go-to for performing cold outreach), and your first step for cold outreach is done.

Warming up your domains and emails for cold outreach

Having our domain set up with alternative domains doesn’t mean we should immediately start our outreach.

Imagine opening a new email address and immediately sending hundreds of emails manually to prospects, for which you can’t determine the open and reply rates. We’ve already seen that email providers and not fond of such an email activity, as this is considered spamming, and chances are your email will get blocked. 

Instead, you should warm up your email address first by sending a small number of emails daily, but also you should get replies, to mimic the human behavior of email communication. 

You could do the warm-up of your email manually, however, the most convenient way is to use an email warming tool, such as the one we use on Sales.Rocks to warm up the newly created alternative emails for your cold outreach. 

We usually see a good result after a month of warming with a usual increment of additional 2 to 5 emails sent per day, however, if you don’t have much time to wait before your actual cold outreach campaign, you could run both processes in parallel to accelerate the warming process. 

Either way, we’ve seen it as a must-do practice before starting cold outreach to make sure you won’t get stuck right at the beginning of your outreach.

Daily enrollment of new contacts in your cold outreach campaign

Having a high-quality lead list is one part of the “concerns” when it comes to cold outreach, and planning out the execution of the cold outreach sequence, that will reach those leads is the other part, both highly important for the success of your campaign. 

Unlike newsletters, announcements, and promotions sent through a transactional way and a transactional email sending tool, your cold outreach should work differently, with a 1 on 1 sending logic. 

So, you can’t just go and send 3000 emails to a prospecting list at once and expect that your outreach will be a success. The reason behind this potential “failure” is the execution of the campaign itself. 

Cold outreach shouldn’t be executed through email-sending tools that are meant for transactional emails sent in bulk as this will cause your emails to land in the promotions or other folders in your prospect’s inbox, not being directly conceived as “you trying to explore the possibility of a collaboration or potential interest from the prospect towards your product”. 

To reach your prospects in your inbox and be able to still mimic human interaction with automated cold outreach, you’ll need to use an email-sending tool that works on sending the emails like a human would, one by one. 

With cold outreach tools based on this logic, you also have to plan out your campaign well. 

Sending emails to too many contacts daily will be a threat to your email reputation, and sending a very low number of emails will cost you a lot of time before your cold outreach sequence finishes. 

So what would be the golden, common ground? You could start with 20 to 30 new contacts that will enroll in the campaign per day. This combined with your follow-up emails from the sequence according to the triggers and delays might reach a volume of 40-60 emails that will be sent out each day from your email, which will keep you on the safe side of email provider limits. 

You could increase this number after some time, however changing the volume of sent emails from your domain, all of a sudden, will raise a red flag with the providers, so plan out your campaign accordingly.

Closing “steps”

Cold outreach is a crucial strategy for businesses to expand their reach and connect with potential clients. However, success in cold outreach requires careful planning and execution.

Before even focusing on researching the target audience and tailoring the message to their specific needs and interests, you need to go a couple of steps back to set a solid base of email domains, plan out your sequence and make sure your campaign execution will run smoothly.

Only after you can lean back and watch freshly warmed-up prospects pop up in your CRM every day.