How To Check and Improve Your Domain Reputation?
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Reading Time: 5 min
Deliverability, spam filters, and email reputation are likely topics you have heard about, whether you are new to email authentication or an expert. As it turns out, several factors affect whether an email gets to the reader’s inbox. While the email’s content has the power to make or break your campaign, it’s not the only factor at play.
When you send an email, the mailbox service first encounters the domain and the IP.
Maintaining a solid domain reputation is crucial if you rely on cold email outreach for company goals, including sales outreach, marketing, link building, or appearing on other people’s podcasts.
Key Takeaways
- Maintaining a solid domain reputation is crucial for successful email outreach and campaign performance.
- Email service providers evaluate your domain reputation based on a scale of 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating greater trustworthiness.
- Implementing email authentication protocols such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC is essential to enhance your domain’s reputation and reduce spam risks.
- Consistent email sending habits and regular campaign schedules can positively influence your sender rating.
- Monitoring your sender score and utilizing email verification tools can help sustain a good domain reputation and improve overall email deliverability.
What Is Domain Reputation?
Your sending email domain’s reputation functions similarly to a credit score. It is the overall opinion of a part based on the number and quality of links pointing to that domain. Your domain reputation is evaluated by email service providers on a scale of 0 to 100.
Receiving email servers will trust your emails more if they are closer to 100 on the domain score scale.
A good email reputation means that you can send emails to your customers through the most appropriate channels. When someone receives an email from you, they are more likely to trust it if they know you have a good reputation with other companies in your industry.
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How To Check and Improve Your Domain Reputation?
The reputation of your domain significantly impacts your email marketing performance. Email service providers utilize your domain’s reputation to gauge your emails’ reliability.
Therefore, a bad domain site reputation could send your communications to the spam folder instead of the inbox.
Additionally, if your domain’s reputation is poor, even transactional emails like order confirmations and delivery updates may land in the spam folder. In other words, sending emails from a domain with a poor reputation could eliminate your company’s customers.
Checking the Domain Reputation
Each email service provider (ESP) determines its reputation for your email domain when determining your domain’s reputation. Gmail thus has a single domain reputation. Yahoo uses a distinct reputation score! There is one for Microsoft Mail. The list keeps on.
This is because email service providers can only gauge the reputation of a domain based on the emails they get from it. The emails sent to other inbox providers are hidden from email service providers.
The tool will compile reputation scores from the various email providers when conducting a domain reputation lookup to offer an average score.
For example, Google Postmaster Tools can help you assess your domain reputation.
Improving Domain Reputation
Your email-sending habits have the most significant impact on the reputation of your domain. Your reputation should be good if you deliver engaging emails that readers desire to read.
But these are the particular things you need to pay attention to.
IP Address Warm-Up
When you receive a new IP address, it has no history. Additionally, spammers frequently change their IP addresses to avoid being added to blocklists and spam filters. Therefore, ESPs and ISPs (internet service providers) will perceive this as spammy email behavior if you suddenly begin sending many emails from a new IP address.
Increase your email send volume gradually over a few weeks to resolve this issue. Start with 100 emails daily and gradually increase that amount until you send the maximum number of emails daily. This process takes roughly 15 days.
Put Email Authentication Procedures in Place
Email servers use authentication technologies to confirm that your emails are not spam or harmful. Email authentication is an essential part of domain reputation. When a spammer sends an email to a legitimate domain owner, the email will often look similar to the official release from that domain. This is why legitimate parts need to use email authentication as much as possible.
To further enhance your domain reputation, aim to reduce bounce rates by ensuring your email lists are up to date and by segmenting your audience effectively. Utilizing tools to get emails from LinkedIn Sales Navigator or other reliable sources can significantly aid in targeting and personalizing your outreach, ensuring that your emails reach the inbox of interested parties and reducing the likelihood of being marked as spam.
You can contact us if you need assistance setting these up.
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SPF
SPF authentication makes it easier to confirm that the email sender is who they say they are. The sender’s identity is verified. SPF safeguards email recipients from being duped into believing a malicious email comes from a reliable source.
Free tools for creating and verifying SPF records:
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DKIM
Emails cannot be edited while in transit, thanks to DKIM authentication. DKIM aids in defending against man-in-the-middle attacks and other malicious email assaults that involve tampering with emails while they are sent from one party to another.
Free tools for creating and verifying DKIM records:
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DMARC
Receiving mail servers are instructed on how to authenticate emails through DMARC authentication. Mailbox providers will then be aware of the appropriate authentication protocols. The absence of an authentication standard alerts mail servers that the email is not truly yours.
Free tools for creating and verifying DMARC records:
Establish a Regular Campaign Schedule
Another factor contributing to the erratic nature of your sender rating is your sending schedule. The lack of consistency also annoys your audience, so use a regular frequency for your email marketing efforts.
Thus, you will establish a relationship with your readers, ensure that they regularly read your newsletters, and prevent sending spikes that harm the sender’s score.
Verify Your Subscribers
Use validation tools or seek the assistance of qualified validation specialists to purge inactive and passive users from your sending lists. You may ensure you only work with receptive clients this way, protecting some companies from spam-related problems.
Avoid Shortening Links
They appear clean and well-kept, but spammers and hackers have taken advantage of them. It’s straightforward to construct deceptive material and persuade recipients to click on a link they had no intention of connecting to when using a shortened URL. Because of this, spam filters are suspicious of such relations.
Watch Your Sender Rating
The leading cause of low sender ratings is that marketers don’t spend enough time carefully monitoring email reputation. The sender score KPIs for each email can be found using various internet tools. A sender score typically ranges from 0 to 100; ideally, you should work to keep it over 90.
Final Words
Email reputation may appear mysterious and like a complex problem to solve, but it follows logic and common sense. Knowing the different sender reputations, ensuring your content is pertinent to your domain category. It meets readers’ expectations, and keeping track of campaign analytics can help ensure every reader receives your email.
Domain & Email Security Expert at PowerDMARC
Yunes is an Operations Team Lead at PowerDMARC with expert knowledge in email authentication and security. Yunes is a Microsoft-certified Azure Administrator Associate with certifications in CompTIA A+ and many more.
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