Lessons in IT: How I Broke (and Fixed) My Email Outreach
When you are a voice actor or another type of small business owner, coaches and mentors will tell you how you’re the marketing and sales departments, but they will always forget to mention (or gloss over) a very important domain that you are also in charge of.
The IT department.
This ties into everything you do. You are the tech. You troubleshoot your website. You set up your emails, servers, domains, protocols, etc. And you have to monitor them regularly. Especially if you are doing cold outreach through email campaigns.
By overlooking this detail, we, in the smallest business, a business of one, can shoot ourselves in both feet and not know why (or how) to fix this. Discovering that your IT is in rough shape is a miracle in itself, but you can do this. It’s also your first step to solving the problem.
I did one of the dumbest IT no-nos for years, and recently solved it. Despite countless coaching sessions and marketing calls, no one asked the question about my IT (and why would they?). We always figured a lack of bookings were something else, but never thought about the fundamentals.
Here is that story.
Highlights & Insights
Small business owners handle marketing and sales, but often overlook technical infrastructure. This leads to unmonitored email protocols and poor deliverability.
High open rates can be deceptive; automated security bots skewed metrics while an unmonitored Spam Confidence Level (SCL) routed 60% of cold emails directly to junk.
Mass cold emailing from a primary website domain puts your main domain at risk; using secondary variant domains insulates your primary domain from deliverability damage.
Restructuring outreach requires setting up secondary domains, configuring SPF/DKIM/DMARC authentication, disabling tracking pixels, and warming up inboxes to safe daily caps (20–25 emails/day).
Looking for a voice actor who won’t get caught in your spam filter? Get in touch today!
The Cold Email Trap and Why Doing "Everything Right" Still Failed
In the voice over industry, we don’t see a ton of replies because the gigs call for VO at the eleventh hour, when the project is 90% finished. At best, we get added to a roster, or get a “We’ll keep you in mind.” Most of the time, the email gets seen or opened, and we go into some creative director or producer’s folder until they need a voice actor for a project.
In the world of voice over, the last couple of years have been pretty wacky. AI got its tentacles into the business, a ton of talent emerged, fled, and re-emerged, trends changed and changed again.
That wackiness includes cold email outreach. In my case, my open rates were good (sometimes very good) reply rates were low. Replies used to be much better, but times change, and this seemed normal for VO. Over time, I tried changing up emails over time to boost those responses. That didn’t help.
I wondered why bookings were going down despite seeing open rates between 25% and 56% in my cold outreach tool. Some of those opens were bots, and some of it was timing (aka they knew who I was and what I did, but there wasn’t an opening. The first thing I did was ask around in voice over groups, then took some marketing sessions with coaches. When I told them my approach and what’s happening (or not happening), I kept getting the same head-scratching response.
“I don’t know. It seems like you’re doing all the right things.”
I am not Charlie Bucket, and this is not candy, so it needs to have a point.
How I Discovered My Emails Were Spam
Somewhere along the way, I was reviewing email trends earlier this year, and somewhere in a webinar, someone asked a question about their domain health and mentioned how they didn’t want their emails going into spam.
A light bulb went off, and that little, British voice in my head spoke.
“Mr. Holmes-er…Butera, you don’t suppose your IT is out of order?”
Elementary, dear Watson.
I have a regular blacklist checker, so I knew I wasn’t on a black list. A blacklist checker checks the spamminess of your domain to let you know if you’re in bad shape. I checked my domain health. It was in good standing, so I wondered what had caused the problem.
The thing about blacklist monitors: they do not check the spamminess of your emails. That is a separate check. That being said, I figured if my domain was OK, but the emails were not what they were, let’s see if the problems are with the emails themselves.
So, I did a few spam tests. Despite being in denial about this, the numbers didn’t lie.
On average, I had a Spam Confidence Level of 5. That means about 60% of my emails were getting classified as “Junk,” bypassing Gmail, Outlook, and a ton of other top inboxes. An SCL is the internet’s way of determining how likely it is that you are spam, on a scale of 1-10 (1 being the most likely). No wonder the traction died!
How I Killed my Email Outreach
What happened was I tried to scale up too heavy in my outreach tool, with 5 email addresses sending 25 emails with slight variation daily (125 total) for at least 2 years (I also briefly used Sendgrid to scale to a bunch more at one point, which, surprise, didn’t work how I thought it did).
The kicker: All of these were attached to the PRIMARY DOMAIN, aka the main one set up for your website. You should never do this if you are planning to perform cold email outreach. Mass emailing like this for long enough will tank your spam confidence level and get your domain SHUT DOWN.
When doing cold email outreach, you need a secondary domain that you can send the emails from, keeping your limit of 50 emails or less per day so that you don’t look like a bot or scammer. It’s a backup domain that in the event that you fry that somehow, you can ditch it, get a new one, and start over while keeping your original domain (the primary) intact. It can be a variant of your primary so people still know you’re you. I’ll use myself as an example.
Primary domain: Chrisbuteravoice.com - used to host the site and for day-to-day email comms.
Secondary domain: Chrisbuteravoiceovers.com - used only for email outreach.
It’s amazing my domain health was in good shape and that it didn’t get shut down, but because the SCL was just 5, it left me in limbo and a position where I could fix things. Basically, the internet wasn’t sure if I was legit or not, so it walked away and decided it would come back later.
How I Fixed My Email Debacle
Identifying the problem was the hard part. I now needed to fix it. To do this, I started over with an IT refresher in this exact order:
In one fell swoop, I grabbed a new secondary domain, ditched the 4 emails, turning them into aliases on the primary so anything gets sent to that and I save $.
I then set up the SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the new domain and configured it in my email tool. I left that untouched for a few weeks to 30 days before I started the mailwarming process. Once warmed up, the tool will now only send 20-25 emails per day from the new inboxes.
I also grabbed a second user for the new domain, and set both up for mail forwarding to the primary so that I didn’t have to bounce between 3 different emails every day to see if I got responses.
Turned off all tracking tools in my cold outreach tool to avoid any chance of my emails landing in spam. Although I no longer see every metric, it’s a small price to pay for the peace of mind knowing I will not be winding up in the spam folder any longer.
Mailwarming, by the way, is exactly what it sounds like. You warm up your inbox by slowly scaling up the number of emails you send before you hit a limit you’ve set (e.g., the goal is 25 per day, but you work your way up from 3 a day to 10 to 15 to over the course of a month until you are steadily sending 25).
How I Knew I Fixed The IT Problem
After grabbing a secondary domain and re-warming the primary (which I was using and frying for years, killing my cold outreach in the process), I tested emails to verify how spammy they now were.
Using 3 or 4 different tools, including Mailgenius, I now scored 10 on almost all of them. At my worst, I sunk to 4/10 on one of the tools, which was VERY bad.
The good new is that the primary domain is now fixed. I’m keeping that as the small day to day emails it was always supposed to be. The better news is that it’s working. I’ve had some good back and forth with a few prospects that I both reached out to or found me through the wonderful means of SEO.
This was a tough lesson in IT and cold email outreach. I figured some of you folks with small businesses might be doing this by accident, too. So I learned the hard way and decided to document this so that you don’t have to.
My biggest lesson: I will never have more than 2 inboxes on the same domain again, and outside of day to day operations, I will never send any cold emails from the primary domain again. I will also turn off all tracking buttons in my tool, as the only one that matters is Reply rates (especially now that Apple will just have a bot open your email, which skews the numbers and causes less people to actually open).
The moral of the story: Know your IT before you accidentally hose yourself. If I knew about the primary/secondary domain thing a few years ago, I might be a lot closer to full time, but that’s OK. It’s a lesson I’ll only ever have to learn once, so better to learn it now than never at all!
