When you are starting out a cold email outreach program, regardless of whether you are an experienced marketeer or starting out for first time, there are few critical items to know. These items will not only give you a head start in getting the best inbox delivery, it will also set you up for success from platform perspective. A solid foundation, will then allow you to scale your outreach program, maintain healthy open rates and boost sales.
Given below is a short tutorial on how to find the best domain name for your cold email outreach program, and start sending emails, all within an hour and keeping costs under $20.
Let us assume that your primary domain name is MagicEmails.com, obviously, you don’t want to use your main domain for outreach to prevent emails from getting into SPAM penalty box; the next best thing, find a new domain.
There are two school of thoughts here:
- Buy a completely new domain and start from scratch. The jury is still out there on whether you should pick a .com vs non .com domain. We will touch more about that below.
- Buy an “old” domain name and leverage the domain name’s reputation to send cold emails.
What is the best service to buy domain names?
There are multiple domain service providers, GoDaddy, NameCheap, Google Domains and more, each offers a variety of services, pricing options and level of support. Given we want to use this domain as a burner and not a long term relationship, the preferred option is to go with a company that has the lowest pricing; GoDaddy.com is usually the preferred service because it has lots of offers and domains start as low as 1-cent for first year registration.
Most domain name services offer .com and ~250+ different TLDs such as .co, .xyz, and many obscure ones. All said, .com domains are still widely respected by SPAM filters and trackers, and get a high score on delivery. While there are one-off domain TLDs such as .co or .ai that are garnering reputation, its best to not be super innovative here, go with flow and just register a .com domain.
For the purpose of cold email, find a .com domain name that closely matches your website, in our case, we could choose themagicemails.com or some of the recommended options by GoDaddy (above screenshot).
Buying a new vs old (expired) domain name
Let us say that you want to be adventurous and start capturing some SEO juice as well as email reputation. Every domain provider offers a way to buy expired / expiring domains, depending on how much you are willing to splurge, the costs can range from few dollars to thousands.
Typically, our approach is:
- Find a .com domain name the closely resembles at least one keyword of our product offering. In our case, we decided to go with word “email”
- Use a domain catcher service such as DropCatch.com or ExpiredDomains.net (preferred) as a place to quickly browse and find good domains to splurge on.
Visit https://www.expireddomains.net/tld/com/ to see domains ending in .com, some of them are super valuable and it’s opens up new avenues. You will need to sign-up (free) to register and search for specific keywords, in our case, it’s the keyword “email” and TLD being .com
Obviously, the above is a huge list and some of the domains are way expensive, I mean, it’s hard to have $30K lying around to buy OutboundEmail.com.. Let’s filter it bit more:
- Click on Filter
- In listing type, select “Buy Now” as an option.
Browse around, select the domain you like, click on next to available and go ahead, make the purchase.
We ended up buying EmailsForLess.com for under a buck and are actively using it for email campaigns.
Hopefully, this provides you with enough information and head start on picking the right domain for sending cold emails that land directly in Inbox.
Questions? Email us at [email protected]
Happy cold emailing!!