Blog / Guide / / 7 min read

Deliverability basics before your first cold email

Domains, warmup, authentication and monitoring. The unglamorous work that decides whether any of the rest matters.

The short version
  • Deliverability is your groundwork. It happens on your domains and mailboxes, before any tool sends.
  • Protect your primary domain. Send from a separate domain so a problem never touches your main one.
  • Authenticate, warm up, then watch. SPF, DKIM and DMARC, a slow ramp, and ongoing monitoring.

Use a separate sending domain

The first rule of cold email is to keep it away from the domain you run your business on. Register a separate domain for outreach, so that if its reputation takes a hit, your primary email is untouched.

This is groundwork you own. Sellora runs outreach through mailboxes you connect, which means the domains and their reputation are yours to set up and protect.

Authenticate everything

Three records decide whether a receiving server trusts your mail. SPF says which servers may send for your domain. DKIM signs the message so it cannot be tampered with. DMARC tells receivers what to do when a message fails the first two.

Set all three before you send anything. Missing authentication is one of the fastest routes to the spam folder, and it is entirely avoidable.

Warm up and ramp slowly

A brand new mailbox that sends a hundred cold emails on day one looks exactly like a spammer. Warmup is the process of building a sending reputation gradually, starting with low volume and increasing it over weeks.

Patience here is not optional. The reputation you build slowly is the thing protecting every campaign you run afterwards.

Monitor placement, not just sends

A sent email is not a delivered one, and a delivered one is not necessarily in the inbox. Watch your bounce rate, your spam complaints, and where you can, actual inbox placement rather than assuming the best.

When the numbers slip, slow down and find the cause before you scale back up. Deliverability is maintained, not solved once.

The deliverability layer described here, the domains, warmup and monitoring, sits on your side. Sellora sends through the mailboxes you connect rather than providing this infrastructure for you.

Keep reading.

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