Sending from a new domain: why the first campaigns should be small

A domain that has never sent a newsletter has no reputation. Not a bad one: none at all. The providers that run your readers' inboxes decide where to put your first email by watching what happens to it, and to the ones right after it. That makes the first two or three weeks of sending the most important ones you will ever have. Get them right and every campaign after that starts from a good place. Get them wrong and you spend months digging out.

What the providers are watching

Three things, mostly. Whether the addresses you send to exist, which shows up as bounces. Whether the people who get the email want it, which shows up as opens, replies and clicks on one side, and as deletions without reading and spam reports on the other. And whether your volume looks like a business or like an attack: a domain that goes from zero to fifty thousand messages in a morning looks like the second one, whatever is inside the messages.

Start with the people who will open

For the first campaign, do not send to everyone. Pick the part of your list that is most likely to open and act: recent signups, customers, people who replied to you before. A few hundred addresses is plenty. Their opens and clicks are the first data the providers have about you, and you want that data to say that people are glad to hear from you.

Then grow the audience over the following sends. Roughly doubling each time works: five hundred, a thousand, two thousand, and so on, while you watch the numbers. If bounces or complaints jump on one send, hold the size there for the next one instead of doubling again.

Clean the list before the first send, not after

Every bounce in the first week weighs more than a bounce later on, because there is nothing else on the record yet. Before that first campaign, remove anything that looks wrong: addresses with typos in the domain, role addresses such as info@ or sales@ that nobody reads, and anything older than a year that has never opened a message from you. If the list came from a previous tool, only bring across the people who were active there.

Make the first email easy to say yes to

• Send it from a real name at your domain, and make sure replies reach a person.
• Say in the first line who you are and why the reader is getting this. Someone who signed up two months ago may not remember.
• Keep it short, with one link that matters. A first email with fifteen links and eight images looks like a catalogue, and catalogues get deleted.
• Put the unsubscribe link where it can be found. A reader who cannot find it presses the spam button instead, and that button costs you far more than losing one subscriber.

Keep a steady rhythm

Providers like senders who behave the same way week after week. Pick a cadence you can keep, weekly or every two weeks, and hold it. A domain that sends once and then goes quiet for two months starts over, in reputation terms, the next time it sends.

In MBX Reach you can send from your own domain once it has been set up and approved, and your sending limits grow with your plan rather than all at once. Segments let you build the first small audience from the people who joined most recently, so the first campaign goes to the readers who are most likely to open it.

MBX Reach is email marketing for small teams: lists, campaigns, automations and reports, in six languages.