What is Domain Sending Reputation? 5 Hacks to take care of it
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Jasmine Handa
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What is Domain Sending Reputation? 5 Hacks to take care of it

Published : May 10, 2020

Businesses struggle about their email deliverability a lot and they always find it difficult on how to improve it. Little did they know that an important factor that decides whether your email will go in inbox or not is your domain sending reputation. This article talks about what is domain sending reputation and how can you take care of it so that you do not have to struggle to get a powerful email campaign.

While we are all focused on our emails hitting the customers’ inbox, we really need to find the root cause of why would it land in spam? When we actually start doing reverse engineering, we will come across the different factors that are affecting the email deliverability, that is a simple solution to any problem that you see in your business and it is always better to have a proactive approach in finding the root cause before it gets too late.

First, let’s get our basics clear and understand what exactly the domain reputation is!

What is Domain Sending Reputation?

Essentially, there are two types of email reputation which can affect your deliverability.

One is known as the IP Reputation and the other is called Domain Reputation. You might be knowing that Emails are sent from your device or server that has a unique identification address, called  IP addresses, so when your reputation is based out on the IP level, it’s called IP reputation, where you can consider using a brand new IP address, a shared IP, or a dedicated IP.

Similarly when your reputation is based out on the domain level, then it is called a domain reputation. When you signup with Pepipost, your domain goes through a check first before it is approved to send emails. It is your domain sending reputation which is the ultimate deciding factor of your deliverability rates because the mailbox provider like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc considers it to determine whether or not your email should go to the inbox or not

Understand it like this, every mailbox provider has some algorithm on the basis of which it takes the final decision of delivering your email to either folder which is spam or inbox! So, if your emails are getting delivered to Yahoo but landing in the spam folder with Outlook, then it is all the different algorithms that you can pass the buck at, but not completely!

You need to take care of your email sending activities so that your domain sending reputation passes through their email delivery parameters. If you are wondering where to start from? Then don’t worry, we will take you through each and every hack and try to explain it so that you can implement it better.

First of all, monitor your email deliverability on all the mailing streams whether it is the main domain or subdomain. Do monitor the brand reputation as well because the mailbox service providers collect data from all sources including social signals and search engines.

Do not worry if you find out that your domain sending reputation needs to get better, because there’s always a way to redeem yourself.

Now, let’s see what are the things that you can take care of in your daily email marketing activities that will not only help you to get a better domain reputation but also the ways to maintain it.

5 Hacks to take care of your Domain Sending Reputation

1. Email list quality

It seems quite simple to purchase the email list for your email campaign, after all, there are many money-making businesses that are selling the same. But is it the correct way of strategizing your email campaign?

Absolutely not! Our email experts say that you should never ever have a purchased list, that is a big reason which will hamper your domain sending reputation.

It is always recommended to build and grow your own email list. You can always try ways so that you end up getting and sending emails to the valid email addresses. Some of the ways can be using an email validation tool if you are collecting the email address with a single opt-in process or the best way is to use double opt-in process, which pretty much confirms and agrees on getting your emails in customer’s inbox. This keeps your hard bounces low and improves your open and click-through rate. 

2. Maintain the email list hygiene

If your subscribers are not engaging with your emails, then this will impact your reputation and in turn your deliverability too. Constantly assessing the engagement of the users and pruning your email list to only the users that are genuinely getting involved with your brand is the best way to keep your domain sending reputation healthy.

Here are some points that you should take care of!

  1. Remember to remove the subscriber who has made complaints or have unsubscribed. 
  2. Keep monitoring so that you get the number and data on bounces and invalid emails.
  3. Perform email list segmentation according to the different metrics for greater responses to your emails.

Although it is not easy to say goodbye to those hard-earned subscribers,but it is an important step for higher inbox placement. In short, implement a proper sunset policy so that your list hygiene is maintained and your domain health is not suffered.

3. Stick to your domain classification

Email Consent is an important aspect that businesses should not miss!

If you are wondering what is it then let us give you an example, if someone has signed up to get emails from you about the latest marketing trends, news, etc but later you send them emails selling and talking about electronic gadgets, then, in this case, you have lost that consent.

Your stipulated business industry is very essential and therefore always remember to stick to the category that you have identified your business in. Hence, The emails sent by you should be consistent with the domain classification.

4. Domain warm-up

You might have heard of warming up of your IP which involves slowly and gradually increasing the volume of emails that are sent each day so that the mailbox service providers do not become dubious about you being a spammer. Similar is the case with the domain sending reputation!

If you’re working with a fresh domain then start by sending a small volume of emails only to the most engaged recipients. With this high engagement, your domain reputation will be built much more quickly. To get started with this, monitor Google postmaster for the delivery metrics and keep the user reported spam complaints down to enhance inboxing and maintain domain reputation.

Again, remember to have a consistent warm-up process so that the mailbox providers don’t become cautious and flag your domain.

5. Use of Subdomains for easier reputation tracking

Using a subdomain instead of your company’s main domain will provide easier reputation tracking because it is separate from other domains and subdomains which are being used. Although your subdomain can affect your main domain’s reputation, it can only affect the other subdomain’s reputation indirectly. 

Let’s understand it like this, if you send the emails using the subdomains info.healthcare.com and mail.healthcare.com and you goof up your campaign that is sent with domain mail.healthcare.com for some reason, then you can expect a small dip in your main domain that is healthcare.com (along with of course mail.healthcare.com). However, you can still send some important emails using info.healthcare.com as it won’t suffer a reputation decline directly (but indirectly by the smaller reputation decline to the main domain) and would have high chances of landing in the inbox folder.

Now, this clearly means that in most cases subdomains can have wildly varying reputations, which is often essential to act as a shield for the reputation of your main domain.

And finally, here we are at the end of it!

Quick notes

So, a few points to remember

  1. Avoid domain and IP blacklists. Check if your domain is blacklisted with Email Blacklist checker tool 
  2. Monitor anti-spam blacklists and Mailbox Service Provider spam messages to keep your domain and delivery IPs safe. 
  3. Send email to active users for a period of time till the domain reputation is upgraded.
  4. Implement a proper sunset policy.
  5. Do not purchase the email list.

We hope that you will make sure that these hacks are kept in mind so that your deliverability issues are sorted.

Well, we try our best to research the factors that can make your domain reputation better and help you to have a remarkable email campaign ahead. 

Till then Happy Emailing!

#fortheloveofemails

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Written By: Jasmine Handa