Domain Age: How It Affects Cold Email Deliverability

What Is the Importance of the Email Domain Age?

The term “domain age” references how long a domain has been active. For example, a domain activated in 2010 would have turned ten in 2020.

Along with the length of time a specific domain has been registered, search engines also account for how long the website attached to the domain has been active. When a search engine ranks results for a particular query, they tend to favor websites that have been active longer because these websites have built a credible reputation. An older website with an older domain shows more credibility than a newly established website with a new domain.

Domain age also impacts email deliverability because trusted domains have a better chance of getting into new inboxes. In fact, domain age is one of the first things that spam filters look at.

But it’s also essential to mention that domain age alone will not determine whether your messages make it to their intended recipients or even that they’ll open the message. Nurturing your domain’s reputation as it gets older and maintaining positive interactions with various users is crucial for landing your messages into inboxes, no matter how old your domain is.

What Is the Importance of Successful Cold Email Deliverability?

To put it simply, a high cold email deliverability rate means that there’s more of a chance that the people receiving your emails will make a purchase. Getting cold emails into people’s inboxes—not just their spam folders or promotions folders—increases the likelihood that they’ll see your email, open it, follow a link to your website, and buy something.

Cold emails allow you to nurture leads because these messages will wait in a customer’s inbox until they’re ready to click on it. Even if they don’t read your message right away, if they see that they got an email from you, your business will be fresh on their mind as they continue with their day. Unless people expect an email from someone, they don’t sift through their spam folder, so your best chance of converting a lead is to land your email front and center.

With a warm domain, you can also use cold emails to reach a broader audience. This can be tricky because you don’t want to have your address mistaken for spam and placed on a blocklist. However, as long as you ramp up the number of emails you send steadily and maintain a good sender reputation, you should have no problem increasing your reach. And if anything, we can help with that.

On top of increasing brand awareness, you can automate the cold emails you send. This allows you to focus your attention on analyzing which aspects of the emails are working and what needs work. Analytics will tell you whether your emails are getting delivered, how many are being opened, and your click-through rate. Depending on the results, you can adjust your content, subject lines, or domain reputation.

How Does Domain Age Affect Cold Email Deliverability?

When ESP and ISP providers determine whether it’s safe to allow an incoming email from a new sender, they look at the age of the domain, among other aspects of a sender’s reputation. As spammers have had to come up with new ways to target people before getting shut down, cybercriminals have adopted the practice of registering a new domain and sending out as many spam emails as possible before the domain is blocklisted.

Being wary of new domains is great for preventing spam, but it can make things difficult for a business trying to reach new customers.

Most Internet users follow the general rule of thumb that the older a domain is, the more trustworthy it will automatically be. And most of the time, this holds true for ESP and ISP providers, but if you have an older domain with a tarnished reputation, you won’t be able to get into your recipients’ inboxes.

Before relying on domain age to carry your messages into inboxes, it’s essential to check the domain’s reputation before beginning a cold email campaign. If you’re using an older domain with a spam or bounce rate above 5%, you’re better off registering a new domain, warming it up, and then beginning the campaign once the domain is warm.

Focusing on a new domain allows you to increase the age while bolstering the reputation. This will enable you to nurture your domain and increase the likelihood that you’ll be able to get your emails into your consumers’ inboxes.

What Are the Benefits of a Good Domain Age?

As we previously mentioned, one of the most significant benefits of a good domain age is that search engines and service providers will instinctively honor that older domains are more trustworthy as long as they have a decent reputation. A higher domain age increases where you’ll rank on a search engine results page and boosts the chance that you’ll land an email in a customer’s inbox.

However, it’s still important to remember that a younger domain with an excellent reputation will be more successful with cold email deliverability than an older domain with a mediocre reputation.

If you’re considering purchasing an aged domain, it’s best to buy a new domain and take the time to warm it up. An older domain from a previous user could come with a bad reputation, use of black hat SEO techniques, and bad credit. Although it requires more work, you’ll have a better chance of successful cold email deliverability if you organically build your domain’s age and reputation.

How to Check Your Domain Age

If you don’t have a record of when your domain was registered, you can use a domain age checker to find out when your domain was activated. Be sure to use a reputable checker such as who.is or Cisco Talos. No matter which application you choose, you’ll begin by copying and pasting the domain you’d like to view. This will usually be your website name, and we used our website to demonstrate how this works.

When we run the search on who.is, we get a results page that details all of the public information about our domain. Under “Important Dates,” it shows that our domain was registered on June 25, 2020. So our domain age is a little over a year.

And that’s it! On Talos, you have to use the “WHOIS” tab to find the creation date, but the application will also show you what your reputation is, whether you’re on any blocklists, your email volume history, and more.