Domain reputation is similar to credit score in the finance sector. If you have a good credit score, the banks will see you as a valuable customer and give you preferential treatment.
The same happens in email marketing. If your domain has a good reputation, it will signal to the email clients that your emails are relevant and valuable to the recipients, improving your email deliverability.
This guide will help you understand what role domain reputation plays in email deliverability and how to check and improve it.
What is domain reputation?
Domain reputation is the health or condition of your email domain as determined by email clients. A strong domain reputation increases the likelihood of emails being delivered to recipients' inboxes, while a poor reputation can result in messages being flagged as spam or blocked.
Why should you monitor your domain reputation?
Monitoring your domain reputation is crucial because it directly impacts your email deliverability. A strong domain reputation increases the likelihood of your emails reaching the recipients’ inboxes. Monitoring your reputation provides insights into engagement metrics, helping refine your marketing strategies. A strong domain reputation gives you a competitive edge in terms of customer trust and online visibility and helps you identify and address feedback from recipients, ISPs, and other stakeholders.
By keeping track of your domain reputation, you can quickly address problems, maintain reliable and effective email communication, and improve your email campaign’s performance.
Factors that affect your email's domain reputation
Several factors may cause a poor domain reputation. Some major contributors are:
1. Blacklisting
An email blacklist or DNSBL (Domain Name System-based Blackhole List) is a list of those domain names or IP addresses that are associated with suspicious or spam content from untrustworthy sources.
Being listed on a blacklist adversely affects your domain's reputation and can decrease your domain's reputation considerably.
2. Spam traps
Spam traps, also called honeypots, are email addresses that mailbox providers (ISPs, email clients, blacklist operators) use to identify people who send spam emails. These email addresses can be old email addresses of actual people or email addresses created just to be used as a spam trap.
Sending your emails to a spam trap signals poor list management and harms your domain reputation.
3. Domain age
Domain age refers to the amount of time that has passed since a domain name was registered. Domains that have existed for a long time without engaging in spammy or malicious behavior are perceived as more trustworthy by ISPs and search engines. New domains often face increased scrutiny because they lack a track record. So you must warm your domain up, by gradually increasing the number of emails you send daily.
4. Spam complaints
Spam complaints have a significant negative impact on a domain's reputation because they signal to email service providers ESPs and ISPs that your emails are unwanted or irrelevant to recipients.
5. Bounce rates
Bounce rates significantly affect domain reputation, as they indicate the quality of your email list and your email-sending practices. A high bounce rate suggests you're sending emails to invalid, inactive, or outdated addresses or you're using unverified lists. ISPs and ESPs interpret this as irresponsible sending behavior, reducing trust in your domain.
6. Poor email engagement
Low engagement rates, such as minimal opens and clicks, indicate to email clients that your emails may not be relevant. High unsubscribe rates send negative signals to email clients about your domain, deteriorating your reputation.
7. Inconsistency in email sending volume
Legitimate marketers grow their subscriber base as the business grows. With time, more emails are shared frequently. The domain's reputation largely depends thus on the consistency and volume of emails sent. If you send many emails too frequently, it will affect your domain reputation.
To avoid that, you should find the right frequency and timings of your emails. You can check out our guide on finding the right email cadence for your next campaign.
How to check domain reputation
Major email clients use advanced algorithms to assign a unique score to your domain, evaluating it to determine the trustworthiness of future messages. However, your domain doesn’t have a single universal reputation. It varies across email clients based on their scoring methods, user engagement, and the content and volume of emails sent to them.
Free and paid tools and softwares are available that let you check your domain reputation and other important deliverability metrics. The next section discusses some of the best-known domain reputation analyzer tools.
5 free tools to check your domain reputation
Given below is a list of 5 free tools to monitor and track the reputation of your domain. Let's take a look at them.
1. Google Postmaster
Google offers a free tool, Google Postmaster Tool, to help you assess your domain and IP reputation along with other key deliverability metrics such as email sender score, spam rate, and encrypted traffic.
This tool acts as ip reputation lookup of your domain with Gmail users. So, if most of your subscribers are Gmail users, you can get an extensive report on improving your domain's reputation. For beginners, navigating it can be a bit complex, so we have written a guide on how to use Google Postmaster tools.
2. Yahoo Postmaster
If your email recipients are Yahoo Mail users, Yahoo Postmaster is a tool designed to help you monitor and enhance your email deliverability. It provides insights into your domain reputation, IP reputation, and other critical metrics such as spam complaint rates, hard bounce rates, etc.
3. MxToolbox
MxToolbox is among the best tools to ascertain the reputation of your domain. All you need to do is enter your domain or IP address, which will run the diagnostic check.
The tool checks for any blacklist and deliverability issues impacting your domain's reputation.
4. Talos Intelligence
Talos Intelligence, an IP and domain reputation tool provided by Cisco, is among the most comprehensive tools to keep an eye on your sender score, domain, and IP and sending reputation.
To use this tool, enter your IP, domain, or network owner for real-time threat data. It will run this through its extensive database and give you a report of your domain's performance.
5. Barracuda
Another tool to use is Barracuda reputation lookup. Barracuda Central maintains a record of IP addresses for known spammers and senders with good email practices. When you enter your IP or domain address, the tool runs it through its database to identify the score of your domain.
Also, you may need to use a domain spam score checker to check the spam score of the domain before you purchase a new domain and do an IP quality check.
How to improve your domain reputation
Improving your domain reputation is essential for better email deliverability and overall online presence. Here's a comprehensive approach to improving your domain reputation:
1. Build high-quality content
Provide relevant, useful, and high-quality content. This builds trust with your audience and search engines. Update your website frequently to keep it relevant. Outdated content can negatively affect your reputation.
(9/10) Learning about recipients' likes can also help in hyper-personalization and segmentation which are essential for inbox placement. However, you must also make unsubscribing easier. That way, you'll only send emails to active users and improve your domain reputation
— Aquibur | Mailmodo (@AR_Bits) April 8, 2022
2. Maintain a clean email list
Maintain email list hygiene by following these tips:
Always use double opt-in for email subscriptions to ensure that users genuinely want to receive emails from you.
Implement a sunset policy to remove invalid or unengaged users. This improves email deliverability and maintains email list hygiene.
Target inactive users with special offers or reminders, or remove them if they don’t respond.
3. Be consistent with your email sending frequency
Maintain the right email cadence by finding the right time, frequency, and intervals to maintain your domain reputation. Don’t suddenly increase email frequency, as this can trigger spam filters. Stick to a regular sending schedule and increase your frequency or number of emails over time.
4. Comply with email authentication protocols
Authenticate the sender domain with protocols such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Review and monitor your DNS records regularly. This ensures that everything is technically configured and enhances your deliverability efforts.
Key takeaways
When you have a bad domain reputation, it is a must to keep a domain reputation check and follow all the authentication protocols. Maintaining your email reputation and increasing your email deliverability rate is not easy, but it's achievable. One easy way to ensure it is by having a good domain reputation. Use domain reputation checkers to keep a tab on how well your domain responds on the web.
Email deliverability and excellent domain reputation mean you are undertaking best practices and can get more conversions, better email performance, make money, and generate more leads.
