It's essential to build and maintain an excellent reputation for your branded domain (Custom from address) because mailbox providers, such as Gmail, Microsoft, and Yahoo, analyse your email campaigns to determine your sender reputation.
When you start sending emails from a new Custom from address, careful planning and a well-defined strategy are vital in achieving the best inbox placement. If mailbox providers see unusual and sporadic changes to your email marketing, they view you as a risky sender. We recommend waiting 30 days before sending from a new domain.
This doesn’t apply to a subdomain. Learn more in branded domains or sending with a custom from address.
If you want to make changes, whether it's adding volume, or changing the sending domain or IP address, you must carefully plan your strategy beforehand. Mailbox providers must recognise that your contacts are happy to receive your email campaigns.
Mailbox providers and IP addresses
Mailbox providers don’t only filter by IP addresses. They also analyse who you’re emailing, your volume of emails, how contacts interact with your email campaigns, and your email campaign content to form a reputation unique to the domain you are sending from.
Improve your sending reputation
To improve your sending reputation:
1. Create a sending strategy
If you start emailing your contact list all at once with no sending strategy it's likely your email campaigns will be sent to your contacts' junk folders. Fixing this can be hard and sometimes costly, and it means your intended contacts won't see or interact with your email campaigns. This causes a loss in revenue. In order to maximise the chances of your success, you need to start small with your most engaged subscribers and follow these guidelines:
Make sure your contacts are active and have given permission to receive your emails. Sending to engaged and active contacts who have given permission, preferably using double opt-in, is key for inbox placement.
Suppress all unsubscribes, hard and soft bounces, and invalid email addresses, so these contacts aren’t emailed anymore.
Make sure you never double your sending volume from day to day. We recommend using the throttling feature to help with this.
When creating a sending strategy, make sure you consider the following points:
Any contact that hasn’t opened, clicked, or engaged with your email campaigns in over a year should be considered as high risk. Assess the value the contact adds and the potential risk of not getting to those who have a higher value, based on their interactions with your email campaign.
If you decide to send to unengaged contacts, be aware that this often leads to increased abuse complaints or sending to email spam traps, which could cause block listings, which ultimately causes your email campaigns to soft or hard bounce.
Learn more
2. Monitor your email reports
Good email deliverability depends on clean, active data, excellent content, and a solid brand domain reputation.
The best way to develop a good sending reputation while increasing your sending volume is by monitoring your email campaign reports in Dotdigital. To effectively monitor your email reports:
Make sure your email campaign opens are high, and bounces and complaints are low.
Examine the engagement of any new contacts and consider how they affect your overall sending reputation.
By doing all of the above, and starting with your most engaged contacts, you can gradually increase your sending volume over time.
Learn more about email reporting.
When you put your sending strategy into action, you can expect to see a drop in inbox placement. This drop is only temporary while mailbox providers adjust to your new email traffic and become more confident that your contacts want to receive your email campaigns.