You’ve got some solid inbound leads, but now it’s time to kick things up a notch and start building your outbound presence. Isn’t it as easy as spinning up a new email address and buying a list? Not quite.
There are a few best practices that, if done at the start, will save you a world of trouble. Let’s start with why you need to purchase a dedicated outbound domain.
Why you need a dedicated outbound domain
While I know you plan to offer high-value content within persona-based sequences, you can't always control how folks will react to your emails. If they do happen to be marked as spam enough times, then it will deteriorate the quality of your domain.
On the extreme end of the spectrum, this can even result in your domain being blacklisted. And this is the last thing you want happening to your business domain.
Because of this, it's best practice to keep your business domain completely separate from any prospecting. The prospecting (or outbound) domain will also have completely separate emails and mailboxes.
These separate mailboxes have the added benefit of allowing for easy organization of replies and follow-ups by your BDR team.
Now that you are convinced of the need for a dedicated outbound domain, what are the criteria for evaluation?
Criteria for selecting your outbound domain
1. First, you'll want to have your prospecting domain related to your business domain.
For example, if your business domain is ‘kalungi.com’, then having your outbound domain be ‘kalungi.net’ would be a good choice.
2. You can have your prospecting domain also give some indication of value, action or identification there are a couple of ways to do this:
- Customer Industry - Is there a particular industry that your outbound campaigns will be targeting? As long as it is concise, adding this to your domain could be a great additional source of customer validation.
- Example: Since Kalungi works exclusively with growing B2B SaaS organizations, then ‘kalungi-saas.net’ would be a good choice.
- Action - Purchasing a domain with a motivating verb is another valid route - think short action words that make sense for your company’s situation.
- Example: ‘getkalungi.net’ other motivators could include:
- Get
- Try
- Demo
- Schedule
- Book
- Identification - You can also use your outbound domain to tell a bit more about yourself. Again, being concise is key. Value descriptors are possibilities as well, but be careful that you aren’t coming across as unprofessional.
- Example: ‘kalungi-marketing.net’ will act as a small services descriptor within the domain.
- Value descriptors can be used in conjunction with your company name, but be careful as the wrong combination will give a cheap or unprofessional impression. Some options could be:
- Forecasting
- Reporting
- Security
- Clarity
3. Finally you'll want to keep your endings fairly neutral. '.com' is ideal but you might want to reserve those options for any future main site changes you might want to make. You'll want to avoid such endings as .fun, deals, etc. because they can make an organization less credible.
Common ending include:
Your next steps will be to select three to four possibilities and make the purchase. Then work with your team to warm up your domains and ready them for sending out.
