Technical Setup

Tech setup - the most boring but absolutely critical part of doing cold email outreach.

You can do every aspect of cold emailing perfectly, but if you do not have your domains and emails set up perfectly you will face major deliverability issues that can ruin your whole outreach.

On top of covering how to set up your domains and email accounts for sending, we will also tell you why these things matter, so you can understand their importance.

We will go through:

1. Buying domains and creating email accounts.

2. Setting up SPF, DKIM & DMARC.

3. Setting up your own Custom Tracking Domain.

4. Setting up forwarding to your main domain.

The good thing about technical setup is that it’s the easiest part of the cold email process to outsource because it is the exact same process every time. Once you understand it yourself, you can delegate it to VA’s who can just follow guides and set this up for you while you work on other tasks like copywriting, lead sourcing and campaign optimization.

Let’s get into it.

Before getting into the actual technical specifics, we strongly advise you to go with the biggest and most popular domain and email service providers.

Time and time again we see people trying to save money by opting for alternative services only to face problems and lackluster support, making the already daunting process of technical setup much more difficult and sometimes even impossible.

We strongly recommend getting your domains from Google or Godaddy and your email accounts from Google or Zoho. We consistently see cold emailers face the least amount of problems using these providers.

Now let’s go over how many domains you should buy and how many email accounts you should create.

The first thing you should ask yourself is how many cold emails per day you would like to send. This usually comes down to how many leads you think you can find and how much resources you have at hand to deal with replies, meetings and potential customers.

A person with a lead list of 100,000 people will need to send more emails per day to cover the list in a reasonable amount of time compared to someone who only wants to reach out to 1000 people.

Here’s a general guideline:

1. The recommended amount of emails you can send per day per email account is about 50.

2. If you want to send 1000 emails per day, you will need 1000/50=20 email accounts.

3. It is recommended to create 3-5 email accounts per domain, which means for 20 email accounts you need about 4-7 domains.

This means that the generic formula to calculate how many email accounts and domains you need is:

Total required emails per day / 50 = Number of needed email accounts

Number of needed email accounts / 5 = Number of needed domains

Keep in mind that these numbers are not set in stone, that’s why we are giving you a range of 3-5 email accounts per domain. Lower end numbers are always safer.

Here’s 3 examples of how you can approach this:

However, it is always recommended to buy extra domains and create extra accounts just in case. If you want to increase your sending volume, you can do it right away. If something happens to your existing domains/accounts, you can swap them out right away.

If you have any previous experience with cold emailing then you have probably heard these terms a million times, but barely anyone knows what they mean and what they actually do. They are all entries in your domain’s DNS settings, which can be accessed in your domain provider’s settings.

The most popular domain providers are:

GoDaddy

Namecheap

Google Domains

Understanding the importance of SPF, DKIM and DMARC requires you to also understand what they are.

SPF stands for “Sender Policy Framework” and it is used to specify which servers are allowed to send emails on your domain’s behalf. It is simply an entry in your domain provider’s DNS records.

If you are using Google Workspace as your email provider, having Google’s SPF records set up for your domain will signal that Google’s servers are authorized to send emails on your domain’s behalf. This assures other email servers that emails from your domain coming through Google’s servers are legitimate and should be put into the main inbox for the recipient to see.

DKIM stands for “Domain Keys Identified Mail” and it is used to ensure that an email was sent and authorized by your domain by adding a signature to all of your emails. Again, DKIM is simply an entry in your domain provider’s DNS records.

Once your recipient’s email servers verify that your email is signed with a valid DKIM signature, it is then more likely to be put into the inbox as it is seen as low risk.

DMARC stands for “Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance”. A DMARC record allows a sender to indicate that their messages are protected by SPF and DKIM and remove the guesswork from your recipient’s email servers, making them more likely to be put into the inbox.

Put simply, you need all four of the above records for your email account to function well. As a matter of fact, email providers like Google may scrutinize your account if you don't have those set up.