As KPI-driven email marketers, you want all you’re carefully crafted and designed email campaigns to land in your users’ primary inbox, don’t you?
To ensure high inbox delivery rates, you need to constantly monitor and optimise the factors that affect your email delivery rates. In addition to critical factors such as sender authentication, clean email lists, relevant content, and sending reputation, having a good domain reputation is the most important factor.
Before we delve deeper about the how, let us understand what exactly domain reputation is and why do you really need to worry about it?
What is domain reputation?
Domain reputation is a measure of how trustworthy others believe your domain’s email to be. A strong domain reputation ensures that your emails are delivered to the users’ primary inbox, while a poor domain reputation cause your emails to land in the spam folder.
How do ISPs assign domain reputation?
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) maintain a database of domain reputation, which essentially gives a measure of the health or respectability of sender domains.
Every ISP has its own recipe of tracking domain reputation. This is mostly based on a few key parameters like spam rate, unsubscription rate, open rate etc. of sender domains measured over different intervals of time across different campaigns. A higher reputation ensures better primary inboxing and delivery experience.
It may very well happen that for one campaign, you receive high open rates from your Gmail users, while an average response from your Yahoo users. It can be because Gmail assigned you a higher domain reputation as compared to Yahoo.
Let’s take an example to understand this better.
Mr. John owns a business which is now going online. He wants to communicate this to his half a million strong customer base through an email campaign, so he buys a brand new domain. He designs a creative and rolls out emails to all his customers. He expects the campaign to be a massive success since he has reached out to all his customers.
Unfortunately, the campaign fails miserably and barely 2% of his customers respond.
What could have possibly gone wrong?
Yes, you guessed it right – a poor domains reputation. Like all good things in life, you not only need to earn your domain’s reputation, but also need to maintain it.
Regardless of how relevant and hyper-personalised your email campaigns mightyou’re your campaign performance is unlikely to improve until you understand the importance of domain reputation, and the ways in which you can enhance it.
Related post: 6 Hacks to Reduce User-Reported Spam Rates to Maximise your Email Marketing Strategy
What is domain warm-up and why is it important?
Domain warm-up is the process of building a good reputation for the sending domain before using it to send out high volume emails. A newly acquired domain must go through the process of “warm-up”.
You begin by targeting a small segment of active email openers on the first day, gradually increasing the recipient database over time to ensure that mails land in their primary inbox. Warm-up could take a month or two.
If you send out emails from a domain that hasn’t been properly warmed up yet, it increases the chances of your emails being considered as spam, and hence they may start getting blocked or filtered by ISPs and anti-spam filters. Once the domain has earned its reputation, it is equally important to maintain it.
How does Smartech help build and maintain your domain reputation?
Smartech’s email delivery team plays an industry defining role in helping our clients build high domain reputations by consistently providing superb primary inbox delivery rates. The team monitors different health parameters of a domain and ensures that your domain reputation remains high.
In our endeavour to help you better, we recently upgraded our domain reputation services to – integrated AI based predictive and monitoring systems.
Related post: How PhonePe Leveraged Smartech’s AI-based Email Delivery to Power Customer Engagement by 2X
How does our AI-powered predictive system help?
Industry reports claim that ~70% of customers have Gmail email IDs. This indicates monitoring reputation provided by Google Postmaster is critical to business.
A major problem with monitoring the Google-provided domain reputation is, the delivery team can understand the impact of a particular day’s mailing activities on the reputation only after a gap of 2 days.
During this lag, the mailing activities impact the Google-provided domain reputation, leading to a further downfall in the reputation.
This results in poor campaign performance over a period of time and poses a high risk on your domain getting blacklisted. The need of the hour then is bringing the domain reputation up again.
Related post: How AI-powered Delivery Enabled Myntra Improve Email Campaign Performance by 60%, 2X that of Industry Standards
To meet this challenge, we leveraged our AI expertise to design a system that can pro-actively predict the chances of downgrade in reputation based on the next day’s scheduled campaigns. The predictions are almost 80% accurate.
The system also suggests possible interventions and steps that you can take to prevent the predicted dip in domain reputation. In other words, you can know the effect of mailing activities on the domain reputation even before sending out the campaigns and take the necessary corrective actions.
Related post: Primary Inboxing in Gmail: A Doubled-Edged Sword
These predictions generated by our Domain Downgrade Prediction (DDP) model are monitored by the delivery team and they make necessary changes in the campaign so that the domain’s health does not get affected. This AI-driven innovation not only reduces the efforts on the delivery front, but it also makes prevention of domain reputation downfall easier and more effective.
This path-breaking feature allows you to focus more on email campaign strategy, enabling you to craft highly engaging and hyper-personalised campaigns, while Smartech ensures that these mails get delivered to the primary inbox of relevant user segments.
Higher your domain reputation, greater the chances of primary inboxing. And, better your primary inboxing rates, better the chances of conversion!
To learn more about Smartech’s email marketing capabilities, get in touch with us today!
