Be sure to protect yourself when doing cold email marketing

Be sure to protect yourself when doing cold email marketing

Whenever a business gets into email marketing it could be really enticing to purchase a list and send emails out to everyone you can.  Well, you'll quickly understand that people aren't always a fan of unsolicited emails and you could see your domain getting blacklisted by everything around the world.  

So, is cold emailing a spammy thing to do or is it a legitimate way to do marketing.  The short answer is YES, the longer answer is that there's a grey area when it comes to cold email marketing and you should always protect yourself in case you run into a disgruntled recipient who wants to burn your email to the ground, which is why I've written this discussion


Set up a dummy domain and email address
One thing you'll want to start off doing is going to NameCheap, Godaddy, or your favorite registrar and purchase a domain that sounds similar to yours.  A good idea for this is to add a word or number to your main domain, so it's almost identical but a completely different domain/website/email.  Your main site could be www.Example.com, and your mailing domain could be www.Example1.com or whatever you want it to be.  

Why do this when you could simply use your main domain and run an email campaign through it?  Well, remember when I talked about those people who aren't always happy to get emails from you?  They're the reason you'll use a secondary domain for sending purposes.  If you burn the domain/email, you can swap it out for a new one, and your main site isn't hurt at all.  

Have a professional design with capture/contact form
This step is optional, because you don't really need a website to send emails from a domain, but it will help collect angry responses instead of them going to a 3rd party and reporting you.  

All you have to do is get a landing page set up, add a contact form to it, and let it be your entire website.  This will allow people to submit angry messages to your website, message you won't bother reading, and the people on the other end might feel like that's enough to deter you from sending out any more emails (it's not, but they'll feel better).

Most people won't take this step because it takes a little extra time, but it could be worth it if you want your sending website to be legitimate and capture angry messages lol

Be sure to filter emails based on auto-responses and bounces
One thing you'll need to remember is that you're sending emails to a lot of people who will have auto-responders set up to let you know they'll get back to you or they're out of the office.  Another thing you'll need to think about are the bounced email notifications, if you're not cleaning your lists, because there could be a lot of them.

If you set up filters to send bounced emails to a certain folder, keep your auto-responses in another folder, and have your Re: emails in your inbox then you'll be much happier when you don't have to sift through 1,000+ emails a day trying to figure out who responded.

Forward interested parties to your main site
You might be thinking "How do I capture leads if I'm sending from a domain that isn't the main site?" and that's an easy question to answer!  

Your sending domain will be the "From" in your recipients' inbox, which means they can respond to it, and you will see what they've said.  If you've set up your filters correctly, you can forward all of those emails to your main site/email, and respond to them from there.  Another thing you can do is link to your main site, within the signature of your emails, and people will click through if they want.  Sure, they'll see your money site in the email but they can't complain to you because anyone can set up an emailing service like this to try and hurt a competitor!  The good thing about this is that you can claim you don't know what this is about, ask for the email they received, and then show them the email isn't really from you but a domain that is trying to be you.  If they're still upset, offer them a discount on your services for the irritation, and they might come back at a later date to make a purchase lol


Final Thoughts,
Email marketing isn't the most difficult thing to do if you're cleaning your lists, protecting your main domains, and not spamming iPhone CPAs.  You can build a legitimate business solely from email marketing like this but you'll still have to protect yourself as much as possible even if you think you're 100% legitimate.  Anyone can complain, they can hurt your sending domain, and that means you should never send from your main site but use a secondary site/email and link back when possible


Thanks for reading

- Tommy Carey
https://www.seoclerks.com/user/TommyCarey