8 min read

How to Create and Warmup a Marketing Email Sending Domain

Picture of Rebecca Gonzalez Rebecca Gonzalez : February 16, 2024

HubSpot B2B Marketing

Do you feel your marketing email is being hammered with unsubscribes and bounces? You are not imagining it. The great email armageddon promised by Yahoo and Google for February 2024 has arrived. And it is real. Just yesterday, a customer who has a reputable monthly newsletter email she sends to 70K opt-in subscribers described to us plummeting subscriber numbers with February's results showing a 3% bounce rate, 1% unsubscribe, and 19 spam reports. Even worse then lousy email results, she is concerned she is damaging her corporate domain because executives in the company have complained that their personal corporate emails aren't getting delivered. This is the actual danger. She needs to urgently separate her marketing email from her corporate email domain ASAP. We promised our customer we would write the exact steps we felt she should take ...

And then we thought (as we often do), "This would make a great blog post." If your marketing email is going in the tank, and you don't have a separate marketing email sending domain, we strongly suggest you create one. And we will show you exactly how to do it. So buckle up. The following is technical and hard to follow. Let us know, if you need further explanation or assistance.

It's about to get B-O-R-I-N-G. 🙃We are not going to explain technical tasks in detail. It is simply just too many long, awful paragraphs as it is.

Time to complete this task: about 40-60 days. Email is no joke.

Step 1. In the short run, validate your current email domain DNS setup

In a prior blog article, we told you how to setup your email DNS properly for the new rules. Please do that if you haven't.

Then, validate your setup. HubSpot will validate it and say it's okay.

However, don't trust HubSpot. Run an MXToolbox verification. Or use a third-party tool that comes with ZeroBounce.com or Revli.com, which we will discuss later.

For example, our customer at the beginning of the story, ran MXToolbox against her sending domain and spotted some SPF record problems that HubSpot was not seeing.

Check your MX, SPF, and DMARC records. You can also check your HubSpot DKIM records (advanced skills but a good idea). You can see our screens below. It is more or less good results with one warning on DMARC. We are fine with this warning.

mx2

mx1

mx3

Step 2. Setup a New email sending domain

If your bulk email results are tanking, we suggest it won't hurt to put a pause on email while you execute our steps.

Get a new email-sending domain.

a) Either - buy another domain from GoDaddy like "goorangemarketing.com. However, it has to be a .com -- HubSpot CMS Enterprise users can have 10 domains OR

MORE LIKELY FOR HUBSPOT PRO USERS

b) Set up a subdomain like go.orangemarketing.com where "go" is called a subdomain. There are some schools of thought that like the subdomain route, and others that like the brand new domain. Sometimes, when dealing with corporate I.T., a subdomain is the easiest way to go. ALSO - on HubSpot at the Pro level, you are only allowed one domain. So subdomain it will have to be! Now go setup and configure in HubSpot. Excellent article by HubSpot walking you though your domain configuration step-by-step.

Here is our real sending email setup.

email sending2

Step 3. Get a live email box (or boxes) on new Sending Domain or Subdomain

You need to tell your I.T. you need a real live email running off this domain. They may balk. If you are more of an entrepreneur or startup and use Google tools it is easy enough for you to establish all of this yourself. GoDaddy will also give you an office 365 email box attached to a new domain. Finally, some third-party providers will buy your domain and set up the boxes on your new domain. It's far less hassle to go that way.

For marketing noreplies, we like hello as in "hello at go dot orangemarketing dot com"

Step 4. Run an inbox warmup process (automated inbox validation)

We like Revli.com for a $15/inbox product. You also may need your I.T. help to set this up, as you have to hook Revli up to your email inbox. And honestly, your I.T. may not let you do this. Some third-party vendors will buy the domain, set up the mailbox, and warm it up. Often, these are vendors associated with cold email strategies (I am not going to lie, and I am not going to explain this). But, you are trying to set up an excellent opt-in email domain and email box for HubSpot to send real live opt-in marketing email.

Once you have your new email domain and box warming up on revli.com.you need to let it go for 2-4 weeks. Revli will also validate your domain setup.

sending schedule-1

score-1

Note the RED warning on Days Warming up on my new sending domain go.orangemarketing.com. Revli recommends 30 days of warming up before using the box.

Also, note the results of a Revli Emal Spam Test for our brand new orange marketing email domain of go.orangemarkteing.com. This domains has only been setup for a few days at the point of this post, but it is a 100% legit email box. It is fascinating to observe that 100% of emails from this new email domain are landing in SPAM to Yahoo. We are beginning to believe that Yahoo has become incredibly punitive. There is no reason for these results. We will test this new domain in three months and update this post to see if the results below have changed materially.

revli2

Step 5. Parse your emails into "sendable email" and "non-sendable email"

1) Create a static list in HubSpot called: Non-sendable email

2) Create a workflow to get all your bounced, unsubscribed, and poor verification emails into this static list.

Here is an example:

workflow1

workflow2

Step 6. Send your "sendable email" list to a third party for validation

Your sendable email is a list that you create of your whole email database which excludes the list you created in Step 5. You must export this list as a CSV and send it to a third party to validate the emails. We like two products above all others: zerobounce.com and neverbounce.com. Both products validate emails very cheaply, like $0.008 per 10,000 emails. We are going with ZeroBounce more because it includes other helpful email validation tools. Also, ZeroBounce returns many codes that help you understand what is happening with your database's emails.

Main codes are Valid, Invalid, Catch-all, Spamtrap, Abuse, Do_not_mail and Unknown.

Lately, we are only emailing VALID. Catch-all can be potentially good email, but you segment them into a separate group and test them later After you have warmed up your email-sending domain.

Both products have a HubSpot integration which allows you to select a list and verify it. Neither product returns the codes correctly into HubSpot (boo) so you have to upload them yourself.

Step 7. Upload the email validation results back into HubSpot

We typically create a property in HubSpot and put all the codes into it, so we can upload the results later to run lists and workflows off the property.

zero

You could also create and load properties on ZeroBounce free_email yes/no and ZeroBounce Sub-Status Code for granular knowledge on your mail database.

Once you get these codes back into your HubSpot (we load only HubSpot record ID and the validation codes), ensure that your "unmailable" list workflow includes the codes of "Invalid, Spamtrap, Abuse, and Unknown". To see how you feel, you must read the "Do_not_mail" sub-codes. Note that the client in the example above has nearly 100,000 emails in this category. They deliberately send a lot of mail to administrator accounts like accounting@company.com. These are considered Do_not_mail by ZeroBounce standards.

Now, you have two comprehensive extensive lists of bad and good emails.

In this example of 3,054 emails that haven't bounced or unsubscribed, only 2,092 qualify as "VALID" or 69%. There is another 15% that are "CATCH-ALL" which is likely okay, but a higher bounce rate.

results

files

Step 8. Create a list of only your Valid emails

This is exactly like what it sounds. Select your email validation code of "valid" and create a list. You also need to ensure these are Marketing Contacts in HubSpot. If you have a ton of Google and Yahoo emails on your list, you may want to leave them off this special super-valid list. Google and Yahoo are being ill-behaved right now. You can create a valid list with Gmail and Yahoo later for a separate run-through process. so you may have possible lists for email warm-up of

VALID - no Google and Yahoo
VALID - only Google and Yahoo
CATCHALL

Step 9. Number your Valid list for warmup and Upload to HubSpot

I won't go into the gross details. But at this point, we exported the valid list to Excel. Then, we create a column called "Email List Count." We also create a numeric property in your HubSpot called "Email List Count."

We number the entire list in batches for warm-up. The first five batches are groups of 50. And then five groups of 100. Then we get brave and start doing groups of 250. Then if a small list, like 10,000 or less, we will leave groups of 500. If we have a lot of email to validate, we will create groups of 1000.

email groups

We upload the list back to HubSpot using a record-id match, and then the Email List Count field is populated. None of this process is scientifically validated. It is just what we are comfortable doing based on B2B email experience.

Step 10. Create a super Friendly Warm-up Email

We will create an email we will use for the warmup process. We like to create an extremely friendly email that gives away a piece of content, and isn't overly riddled with marketing nonsense. It encourages clicks and opens but doesn't scream spam or be annoying. We have had clients make the warm-up email more of an offer, but that was their choice.

Here is a pretty normal one:

warmup bridge

Step 11. Send the warmup email to Your Valid Lists

After the inbox warmup has run for 10-20 days, you can start sending your HubSpot marketing email. Using the list count field, you create your sending lists.

Start with email list count 1, create a list, and use this list to send the first email. Add a "seed" list with some friendly emails to every mailing. Tell your friendlies to open, click, and forward the email. They will get this email for the life of the campaign, and if they could remember to do this every day, it would send sound signals to the email gods.

You send the same email to your list by list count number daily. If you feel insane, it could be an email warmup marketing sequence with three friendly emails kicked off every 2-3 business days.

This is an excellent project for an intern to queue up and manage. In the example above, we will send emails for 21 days straight. So between the email inbox warmup and this marketing email send warmup, about 40 days will have elapsed. Watch the emails daily for any weird or unusual activity like too many bounces, spam, or unsubscribes. Dig in and analyze. Something may be wrong or going wrong. Don't be scared, though. You are essentially cleaning your whole list, so don't be scared. Once you go through this and send marketing emails for 3-6 months, you will have a great list and email reputation.

real warmup

And keep an eye on your HubSpot Email Health Metrics. Here are ours. We are warming up a new email-sending domain RIGHT NOW. We don't send a ton of email, but honestly, we can do better.

email health score

conclusion. Ta Da! A Marketing Email Sending Domain

After completing this project, you are ready to send regular marketing emails. However, go easy, and observe it. You have separated your marketing email from your corporate email and put the marketers in their own email space. They can try experiments, do things, and if they screw up, they only hurt themselves versus messing up your corporate.com email-sending domain for the entire company.

DISCLAIMER

We made this process up based on reading articles and trial and error. An experienced volume email sender may have better ways of doing this. We are managing a warmup process manually for our SMB B2B clients, with generally less than 100,000 emails.

And, if someone reading this happens to be an email vendor or an extremely experienced emailer, who has a much better process, please SAVE US FROM OUR SELVES. If you reach out using our contact form, we will get a hold of you, update this article, and give you credit. If we hear from no one, the eleven-step process above for establishing your very own marketing sending email domain and warming up your email list and new domain is what you've got.