Intro: Setting up domains and email accounts

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This is the introduction to Chapter 2 of the free cold email course. During this chapter, you’ll learn how to set up the technical foundation for a successful cold email campaign.

We’ll cover the essential steps of cold email technical setup – including why using separate domains matters, how to protect your sender reputation, and the importance of warming up your email accounts. You’ll also learn how to save time by working on your offer, ICP, and prospect list while your infrastructure warms up.

With the right cold email setup in place, you’ll be ready to scale your lead generation efforts without risking deliverability.

If you’re not sure how to set up a cold email campaign from a technical perspective, this chapter is the perfect starting point.

In this lesson, you’ll learn:

• Why sending cold email from your main business domain is a risk most professionals avoid, and how dedicated domains and email accounts protect your day-to-day communications from being flagged as spam
• How email service providers treat new domains as suspicious by default, and why a warm-up period of several weeks to months is necessary to build the trust needed for reliable inbox delivery
• Why infrastructure setup kicks off the entire process – so that while your domains warm up, you can work in parallel on your ideal customer profile, prospect list, offer, and copy
• That owning your email channel means no algorithm or platform can shut down your lead generation overnight – as long as you follow the right technical practices covered throughout the course

Hello and welcome to the technical setup chapter.

We are starting with the technical setup because getting the infrastructure ready takes time.

During that time we will focus on other things so everything is ready at the same time.

Time invested in infrastructure is important as it will lay the foundation for healthy long-term sending.

Also, remember with cold email:

• You can get get leads for as low as $1.6 per lead as shown in the previous chapter
• You can target your potential prospects with much greater control. This is especially true for small segments to run lookalike campaigns. 
  • ads -> require thousands of existing customers 
  • cold email -> just a couple of examples

And lastly, no one owns email. This means you are not at risk of having your whole lead generation channel taken away suddenly (as long as you follow our best practices).

So let’s get right into the infrastructure setup and first you need email accounts and domains.

It is generally not recommended to use your main business domain to send cold emails. 

Doing so you risk damaging the reputation of your main business domain.

If your domain reputation is low your normal day to day business communication will go to spam. This will result in missing out on important messages from existing customers and losing trust.

Almost all professionals use dedicated domains and email accounts just for cold emailing. 

They then forward any visitors to those domains right back to their main domain.

There is one important aspect though.

New domains are seen as suspicious when they start sending emails in larger volumes from day 1. 

The reason for this is that spammers and scammers typically show this type of pattern. 

So, in order to keep users safe, email service providers treat new domains as suspicious by default.

We don’t want to look like scammers and spammers.

That means, we need to build trust with the email service providers of our prospects. 

This is done by sending and receiving emails that create positive interactions, so called warm-up. 

Positive interactions are:

• responses to your emails
• opening your emails
• taking your emails out of spam
• and so forth. 

This process takes a few weeks to several months. But don’t worry we will cover it in more detail later. 

So now you may understand why we are starting with the infrastructure part. 

We will get the infrastructure set up and let that run.

At the same time work on the other parts we need such as:

• defining your ideal customer profile
• defining your value proposition and offer
• researching and assembling your prospect list

and… lastly write your copy. 

One last thing, if terms like reputation, warm-up, and so forth are new to you, don’t worry we will cover them in more depth in the coming lessons. 

Once you complete the course you will be navigating this space with absolute confidence.

See you in the next lesson!