Using your primary business domain (e.g., company.com) for cold emailing is risky and can negatively impact your main business operations. Here's why and how to avoid it:
1. Risk of Domain Reputation Damage
When sending cold emails, recipients may mark your emails as spam. Even legitimate cold outreach frequently encounters spam reports or high bounce rates. If you're using your main domain, these negative signals directly harm its reputation.
2. Impact on Email Deliverability
Email service providers (Gmail, Microsoft, Yahoo) rely heavily on domain reputation. A poor reputation means your regular transactional emails, customer support emails, and internal communications from your primary domain may end up in spam folders, disrupting normal business operations.
3. Difficult Recovery
If your primary domain becomes blacklisted or marked as spam, restoring its reputation can be difficult, time-consuming, and costly. Your entire business email system could suffer downtime or severely reduced deliverability during this recovery.
Recommended Best Practice:
Use a secondary domain specifically dedicated to cold email campaigns.
Examples:
trycompany.com,mailcompany.com,getcompany.com
Benefits of Using a Secondary Domain:
Protects the primary domain reputation.
Easier to manage and monitor email reputation separately.
Minimal disruption if the secondary domain gets blacklisted.
Easier recovery process by simply replacing the affected secondary domain with a new one, if necessary.
Quick Tips for Managing Secondary Domains:
Warm up new domains gradually before sending bulk emails.
Regularly monitor email deliverability and reputation scores.
Avoid aggressive or spammy email practices even with secondary domains.
Following this approach ensures your primary domain remains reliable, trustworthy, and effective for core business communications while safely leveraging cold emailing as a growth strategy.