Maintaining a healthy domain reputation is essential when sending outreach emails. Poor sending practices can affect your email deliverability and increase the risk of your emails being marked as spam.
In this article, we'll explain what affects your domain health and cover the key steps you can take to protect your domain reputation and send emails safely with Dripify.
What affects domain health
Domain health reflects how trustworthy your domain appears to email providers and can affect whether your emails reach recipients' inboxes, are sent to spam, or are rejected.
Several factors can affect your domain health:
Email authentication — missing or incorrectly configured SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records can affect how receiving providers handle your emails.
Domain age — new domains (under 2-3 months) are flagged as high risk by inbox providers.
Blacklist status — if your domain or sending IP appears on an email blocklist (such as Spamhaus, Barracuda, etc.), your messages may be rejected or routed to spam automatically.
Bounce rate — a high bounce rate signals you're sending to invalid addresses, damaging sender reputation.
Spam complaints — recipients marking your emails as spam is a strong negative signal to email providers. For example, Google recommends keeping spam rates below 0.1% and avoiding rates of 0.3% or higher.
Sending patterns — sudden increases in email volume, particularly from a new or previously inactive domain, can trigger spam filters.
Custom tracking domain — using the platform's default tracking domain (shared with thousands of users) hurts reputation; a custom subdomain isolates your traffic.
Sending from primary domain — using your main company domain for cold outreach puts all company email at risk if the domain gets flagged.
Your domain reputation develops over time and can be difficult to restore once damaged. The steps below can help you manage these factors and protect your domain while sending outreach emails.
Before you start sending
Before launching an email campaign, there are a few important steps you should take to protect your domain and establish a healthy sending reputation.
Use a separate domain for email outreach
We recommend not using your primary company domain for cold email outreach.
Email sending activity contributes to the reputation of your domain. If your outreach generates a high number of bounces or spam complaints, your domain reputation can suffer. This may also affect other emails sent from the same domain.
Instead, consider using a separate domain dedicated to outreach. For example, if your primary domain is company.com, you could use a related domain such as getcompany.com.
Set up email authentication
Make sure your domain is properly authenticated before you start sending emails.
Email providers use authentication records to verify that emails sent from your domain are legitimate. The main records to configure are:
SPF (Sender Policy Framework) — specifies which mail servers are authorized to send emails on behalf of your domain.
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) —- adds a cryptographic signature to outgoing emails so receivers can verify they weren't tampered with.
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) — defines what to do when SPF or DKIM fail (ignore, quarantine, or reject), and enables spam reporting back to the domain owner.
MX (Mail Exchange) — specifies where incoming emails for your domain should be delivered, allowing your inbox to receive replies.
Missing or incorrectly configured authentication records can affect how email providers handle your messages and contribute to deliverability issues.
The exact setup depends on your email and domain providers. If you're unsure how to configure these records, check the documentation provided by your email provider or domain registrar.
Warm up your inbox before starting outreach
If you're using a new or previously inactive inbox, warm it up before starting regular outreach. Warming up an inbox means gradually establishing a history of legitimate sending and receiving activity so email providers can begin building a reputation for it.
Start by sending a small number of genuine emails manually to people you know, such as colleagues or business contacts. Space the emails throughout the day rather than sending them all at once, and send to recipients using different email providers, such as Gmail and Outlook.
Warm-up should include normal two-way communication, not just outgoing emails. Have genuine conversations where recipients open and reply to your messages, and reply back when appropriate. Continue using the inbox consistently while gradually increasing your activity rather than introducing a sudden spike in volume.
There is no universal number of emails or warm-up period that guarantees good deliverability. The goal is to establish a natural and consistent sending history before using the inbox for regular outreach.
Start with a low sending volume
Avoid sending a large number of outreach emails immediately, especially from a new or previously inactive inbox.
Start with a low sending volume and gradually increase the number of emails you send per day. As your inbox establishes a consistent sending history, you can slowly scale your outreach. We recommend keeping your sending volume at around 30 outreach emails per day.
Sudden increases in sending activity can look suspicious to email providers and negatively affect your deliverability.
Keep your bounce rate low
A bounce occurs when an email can't be delivered to the recipient. A high bounce rate can signal poor recipient data to email providers and negatively affect your sender reputation.
To keep your bounce rate low:
Verify email addresses before importing them. If you upload leads to Dripify via a CSV file that includes their email addresses, make sure the addresses are valid and up to date. Alternatively, you can use Dripify's Find email feature to find leads' business email addresses.
Keep your lead data up to date. Email addresses can become invalid over time as people change jobs, companies change domains, or inboxes are deactivated. Review your lead data before using older lists for new campaigns.
Avoid purchased or scraped email lists. Lists purchased from third-party vendors or collected from unverified sources may contain outdated, invalid, or low-quality addresses, increasing the likelihood of bounces and putting your sender reputation at risk.
Don't continue sending to bounced addresses. Repeatedly sending to an address that has already bounced can negatively affect your sender reputation.
💡Dripify automatically handles bounced addresses for active campaigns. When an email address bounces, the lead will skip all following email steps in the campaign. Any LinkedIn steps in the sequence will still be performed. If you add a bounced lead to another Dripify campaign with Send email actions, Dripify will use another email address from the lead's card, if one is available.
Monitor your bounce rate and act on warnings. Dripify monitors your bounce rate, and we're working on adding a warning to the Dashboard when it approaches the 2% threshold. If your bounce rate is high, review the quality and source of the email addresses you're using and consider pausing your email outreach while you identify and resolve the cause.
Keeping your lead data clean and acting on bounce warnings early can help prevent your bounce rate from increasing and protect your sender reputation.
Keep spam complaints to a minimum
A spam complaint occurs when a recipient marks your email as spam. Unlike a bounce, which usually indicates a delivery problem, a spam complaint tells email providers that recipients don't want or don't trust the emails they're receiving. A high complaint rate can quickly damage your sender reputation and affect the deliverability of future emails.
Google recommends keeping spam rates below 0.1% and avoiding rates of 0.3% or higher.
To minimize spam complaints:
Target your outreach carefully. Sending emails to large, poorly targeted lists increases the likelihood that recipients will consider your messages irrelevant or unsolicited. Build campaigns around recipients who are genuinely relevant to your offer rather than maximizing the number of emails you send.
Keep your outreach relevant to the recipient. Generic messages sent at scale are more likely to be ignored or reported as spam. Use the information available about your leads to make your emails relevant to their role, company, or reason for being contacted.
Give recipients a clear way to opt out. Make it easy for recipients to indicate that they don't want to receive further emails. If someone asks you to stop contacting them, don't include them in future email outreach.
If your spam complaint rate starts increasing, review your targeting, messaging, and sending practices before continuing or scaling your outreach.
Following these practices can't guarantee that every email will reach the recipient's inbox, as email providers ultimately determine how incoming messages are handled. However, they can help protect your domain reputation and reduce avoidable deliverability issues when sending outreach emails with Dripify.