Building Email Infrastructure: Detailed Guideline

The current outbound lead generation climate implies more thorough work with technical infrastructure if you want your messages delivered, which has its ups and downs. On the pro side - the inboxes (and potentially spam folders as well) will be less noisy and as soon as your messaging is relevant it will be noticed; on the con side - the outreach process becomes even more complicated and time-consuming.

One of the essentials for successful outbound lead generation is having multiple email domains with similar naming (so-called lookalikes) to be able to rotate the mailboxes whenever issues arise. In this bit, we’re going to help you sort everything out and hit the inboxes with a network of lookalikes. Let’s get to it:

Creating The Domains

The domain name is an important indicator of the company you represent, so make them brief and clear. Avoid long names and mind the context of the organization - stick to mentioning your company name or its abbreviation, as it will also influence how the providers’ firewalls will treat your mailboxes.

Also, ward off suspicious wording that would sound spammy in the domain name: COMPANYoffer.com, COMPANYforyou.com, freeCOMPANY.com, etc. You can also play around with TLDs (top-level domains), as commonly it’s possible to create some variation without changing the body: COMPANY.com, COMPANY.co, COMPANY.io, etc. A couple of additional lookalike suggestions from us: COMPANYco.com; COMPANYgrowth.com; COMPANYteam.com.

Preparation for the Outreach

Okay, so you’ve purchased a bunch of lookalikes and created mailboxes within each of them - are you good to launch the campaigns? Not yet. Now it’s crucial to ensure proper maintenance for those domains, which starts with setting up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and PTR records and enabling TLS compliance. Sounds like much probably, but it’s easily accessible through your Admin Console.

Getting closer to sending first messages from your new mailboxes start with a warmup. The warmup is an automated process executed through a platform of your choice (there’s a bunch out there) that allows you to build up your domain reputation, thus minimizing the chances of landing in a spam folder.

It’s better to start with 3-5 messages, while every next day you can add 5 extra. As soon as you reach 70-80 warmup messages per day treat it as a top cap. You can maintain this volume for some time but don’t get it dragged, as such practice can harm the domains, just like medication can damage your health if you’re taking it more or for longer than it’s recommended.

Regarding the warmup tools, roughly two categories can be outlined - the ones that allow you to use custom templates and the ones that utilize canned warmup sequences that are rather neutral in their style. On the launch, the second category can be good enough, but as soon as you’re at the rotation stage - we recommend switching to the first category, as this way the email systems will get used to the most common topics of your campaigns.

Rotation Stage

After a few weeks of warmup, your mailboxes should be ready for the outreach. However, just like with the warmup - start small and grow your effort exponentially. 20-30 messages in a first day with +5 for every next one would allow you to further reach 80-100 daily first contacts without damaging the reputation (still, though, to keep your mailbox safe aim at 50 first contacts per day max).?

This means that if you would like to target 5000 people within one month you would need to have at least 5 main domains and 5 backup domains that will be in the rotation queue. If you’d like, you can maintain your backup domains on low-volume warmup in the meantime.

Conduct spam checks at least once a week using products like Glockapps and you will be able to identify the triggers at an early stage and properly address the issues. If the inbox rate of one of your domains is below 85% - put it on active warmup (40-70 daily messages) and replace it with one of the backups.

If this rotation practice is not followed chances of your domain reputation degradation are high, and the longer this problem persists the higher the risk of making it to multiple blocklists. It’s better to avoid such outcomes as after you’re in - it’s too expensive to take the domain name off these databases.

Considering it’s recommended to have your domains older than 6 months working with a fresh batch of lookalikes is a very scrupulous process, so keep in mind the above advice and maintain these practices all along. And if you don’t have time and resources for this - our tech professionals can back you up with our continuous deliverability support service, use a link in the comments to book a time for a consultation.