1. What is a Cold Email Domain?

A cold email domain is simply one or multiple domains that are dedicated to cold emailing.

2. Why do you need to buy a domain dedicated to cold emailing?

When you send cold emails, you always have a chance that you'll be marked as spam along the way.

Being mark as spammed means that you got blacklisted. There are hundreds of blacklists on the internet.

A list of blacklists from Breakcold Email Warm Up tool

Once you get blacklisted, it's very hard to get removed. Being blacklisted leads to a low domain authority. As a result, your domain reputation will suffer which can cause your SEO to not perform for example.

This is why you need to use a separate domain solely dedicated to cold emailing. That way, you won't get into trouble if your main domain get blacklisted.

Your domain age also influence on your cold email results

Having a domain dedicated to cold emailing is also a way to create a special unit around sales prospecting in your organization. This is why you see so many sales development representatives with the word "get" before their domain name in their email address.

3. How to buy a cold email domain?

To buy a cold email domain, you have different parameters to consider.

Google Workspace vs Outlook

Should you buy your domain in a Gsuite or Outlook environment?

When it comes to B2B, Outlook and Gsuite represent more than 80% of the email addresses on the internet. For deliverability reasons, by default you should host your cold email domain on one of these 2 email clients.

Google Workspace vs Outlook

Some people don't buy their domain on any of them. For example, they will buy a domain on GoDaddy, Namecheap or OVH and only then they will connect it to Google Workspace (formerly Gsuite) or Outlook.

Personally, from my experience, every ways are good as long as they ultimately end up with Gsuite.

Why?

Because everything is easier to manage in the Google environment. With Outlook, we see many customers at Breakcold having troubles to set up their email addresses or having deliverability problems etc.

Outlook has many different versions with multiple service providers which makes the process of using it for cold emails daunting.

If you were to create a cold email domain, best way will be to **directly buy it from Google Domains with a Google Workspace subscription to get access to Gsuite services (see below on how to buy).

Choose the right extension

When you choose a cold email domain, you need to take an authoritative extension. Some extensions just worth more than others in the eyes of Google & Outlok algorithms.

Some other tips about choosing the right extension

Here's a list of authoritative domain extensions:

• .com

• .co.uk

• .fr

• .io

• .co

Here's a list of non authoritative domain extensions:

• .xy

• .yx

• .free

Naming your cold email domain

A final thing to consider before buying your cold email domain is how to name it. Let's take an example with our domain name, Breakcold.com.

For Breakcold, this is what different cold domain could look like:

• getbreakcold.com

• trybreakcold.com

• startbreakcold.com

• joinbreakcold.com

As you can see, you can use the domain to place a call to action word. The more creative, the better. Depending on the name of your company, you can come up with interesting domain names.

For example, the startup Deel made this domain name for its outbound sales: letsdeel.com

They played with the word "Deal" and their brand name "Deel".

Example of Deel creative domain extension

Quick guide with Google Domains

Buying your cold email domain from Google Domain is super easy. This is how you can do it.

1°) Go to Google Domains

Go to the homepage of Google Domain.

2°) Choose the domain you want to buy

Write the domain you want to buy, for this example, I will write playwithbreakcold.com

Example of a cold email domain

3°) Tick Google Workspace and select business starter

If you don't tick custom email, you won't have a profesional email address

Once you're in the checkout phase, make sure to tick custom email with Google Workspace and take the Business Starter plan.

Then, write the email you want to create with your name. Favor the following format: firstname.lastname@yourdomain.com

In my example, it will go like this: arnaud.belinga@playwithbreakcold.com

Use a good name structure for the username

When everything is set, proceed the checkout.

4°) Set-up DMARC once you bought the domain

Buying a cold email domain is only the first step, you also need to protect your email deliverability. For that you have to make some settings called as SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

Lucky for you, SPF and DKIM are set by default when you buy your domain directly from Google Domains. Therefore, you only have to set up DMARC.

Breakcold tells you if you've set up correctly SPF, DKIM and DMARC

Finally, don't forget to warm up your cold email domain once you bought it. You can do it with an email warm up tool or manually.

Bonus tip: using a fake woman sales development representative as cold email address

When you create your email address, I'd recommend you to use a fake woman as sales reps for your cold outreach.

The reasons are simple: it just get you more opens and replies.

You can change your display name easily in Breakcold

Look at the cold emails you receive every day, do you see many woman in the display name of each email? I bet not. There are not many woman who are sales development representative (SDR) or business development representative (BDR). It's an opportunity to stand out.

To give you more data, I A/B tested on 10 different email addresses the same subject line, the same email but the sender was me (Arnaud Belinga) vs a woman (Sophie Dyrdek).

On average, I got more opens (75% against 65%) and more replies (9-11% against 4-5%). When you look at the reply rate, it's pretty mind-blowing.

4. How many cold email domains do you need?

You don't need thousands of cold email domains.

From the data we have at Breakcold, when people are granted access to unlimited cold email inboxes, they rarely go beyond 3 unless they're cold email lead generation agencies.

So 3 domains is enough to get great results at cold emailing, it makes about 90 emails per day (roughly 30 emails per sending email addresses).

I use many cold email domains for my sales outreach

My advice would be to iterate on your copywriting with few cold email domains until you find the best performing one. Then, if you have good results, your job is to scale the number of cold emails you send per day which result in buying more domains.

5. How much does it cost to buy cold email domains?

If you use our recommend way which is with Google Domains, you can expect to pay around $12 to buy the domain for one year and then $5 per month to get access to a custom email with Google Workspace.

Example of prices when you buy a cold email domain