Understanding your email domain reputation is crucial for ensuring your messages reach their intended inboxes. Think of it as a credit score for your email domain, reflecting how email service providers view your emails. A good reputation helps your emails avoid the spam folder, while a poor one can hinder your communication efforts.
This guide will show you how to check your domain’s standing and offer practical steps to manage and possibly improve it. By staying informed and proactive, you can help ensure your emails are received and read by your audience.
How Is Domain Reputation Calculated?
Domain reputation is a metric that impacts whether your emails reach their intended inboxes. Email service providers (ESPs) assign a score on a scale from 0 to 100, where a higher score is better and increases the likelihood of successful email delivery.
Each email receiver has its own way of measuring domain reputation. While not all the evaluation criteria are public—some are kept under wraps to prevent misuse by spammers—the underlying process is fairly consistent. Receivers track how your domain is used within your email messages and observe how their users interact with these messages. Whether they’re marked as spam or opened frequently can influence your score.
The impact of your emails, whether positive or negative, accumulates over time, influencing future message deliverability. Different email receivers will have different scores for your domain because not all have the same amount of interaction data. For instance, if you send most of your emails to Gmail users, Google’s data on your domain will be extensive, while fewer emails to Outlook means less data for Outlook to assess your reputation.
Factors Influencing Email Domain Reputation
Email domain reputation is shaped by a myriad of factors that signal to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and email service providers (ESPs) how trustworthy an email sender is. Understanding these elements can help maintain a positive domain reputation.
Blacklisting
One of the most significant negative impacts comes from blacklisting. This happens when recipients mark an email as spam. Consequently, ISPs and mailbox providers may blacklist the domain or IPs associated with it to prevent further spamming.
User Engagement
The level of engagement your emails receive — such as open rates and click-through rates — plays a crucial role. High engagement suggests that recipients value your content, boosting your reputation.
Email Content Quality
The content of the emails themselves is critical. Email filters scrutinize content to identify spammy material or malicious links. High-quality, relevant content is less likely to be marked as spam and is more likely to contribute positively to domain reputation.
Volume and Consistency
Sending consistent volumes of emails can establish a pattern that ISPs recognize as legitimate. Sudden spikes in volume, however, can raise red flags and potentially harm your reputation.
Deliverability Track Record
A domain’s deliverability history, which includes successful deliveries minus bounces and spam complaints, affects its reputation. Domains with a proven record of good deliverability are more likely to have their emails land in the inbox.
How to Check Email Domain Reputation
Several free and paid online tools are available to check your email domain’s reputation. The exact methods email services use to judge a domain are kept secret to stop spammers from gaming the system.
They assess if your emails are likely to be seen as spam or trustworthy. By entering your domain into these tools, you can see a summary of its reputation. Keeping tabs on this helps make sure your emails reach people’s inboxes. Regular checks are a smart move to avoid delivery issues.
Tools for Checking Email Domain Reputation
When checking and managing your email domain reputation, various tools are at your disposal, each with unique features, pros, and cons. Some are free, while others offer more advanced features for a fee.
Free Tools
1. Google Postmaster Tools
Google provides insights into your domain’s reputation, specifically for Gmail. This tool is best for those with a high volume of email traffic. It requires adding a DNS record but gives a basic 4-step scale reputation overview, useful for those heavily reliant on Gmail deliverability.
2. Talos Intelligence
Cisco’s Talos Intelligence correlates “web reputation” with messages across various IPs. It gives a basic rating of Good, Neutral, or Poor, with ‘Good’ indicating no problems, ‘Neutral’ suggesting there’s room for improvement, and ‘Poor’ meaning many emails won’t reach inboxes.
3. Microsoft SNDS
Similar to Google’s Postmaster Tools, Microsoft’s Smart Network Data Services (SDNS) provides insights into your domain’s reputation within the Microsoft email ecosystem, such as Outlook and Hotmail. It offers data on spam complaints and deliveries to spam traps.
4. Sender Score
Validity’s Sender Score reflects your IP’s email reputation on a scale from 0 to 100. It’s calculated on a 30-day rolling average and ranks your IP among others.
Paid Tools
5. MailTester
MailTester checks your content, mail server, and IP address and offers a comprehensive report. The free version keeps results for seven days, while the paid version extends this to 30 days. It’s a simple and low-cost option for email quality analysis.
6. SendForensics
SendForensics offers a detailed deliverability analysis compared to industry standards and client lists. It breaks down the email into components, providing a clear path for reputation improvement. It’s a more reliable tool for a comprehensive deliverability profile.
7. Barracuda Central
Barracuda provides IP and domain reputation lookups through its real-time database. It categorizes IP addresses as ‘poor’ or ‘good’ and is beneficial for quickly checking if your domain is seen as legitimate or spam.
8. McAfee’s Customer URL Ticketing System
McAfee’s tool offers insights into your domain’s email and web reputations, as well as domain history and associations. It’s part of the SmartFilter network or WebWasher URL Filter Database, offering a range of data on your domain.
Should You Use a Free or a Paid Tool?
The free tools are a great starting point for understanding your domain’s reputation but may not offer the depth of analysis provided by paid tools. Paid tools often provide more detailed reports, historical data, and actionable insights, which can be invaluable for businesses that depend heavily on email deliverability. However, they may be overkill for smaller senders or those just beginning to monitor their email reputation.
Choosing the Right Tool
The choice of tool depends on your specific needs:
- Volume of Emails: If you send large volumes of emails, especially through Gmail or Microsoft’s email services, tools like Google Postmaster Tools and Microsoft SNDS are particularly relevant.
- Budget: Free tools like Sender Score and Talos Intelligence can provide a snapshot of your reputation without any investment.
- Depth of Analysis: For a more detailed breakdown and advice on improving your reputation, consider investing in a paid service like SendForensics or MailTester.
By regularly using these tools to monitor your email domain reputation, you can stay ahead of potential issues that could compromise your email deliverability and take proactive steps to maintain a positive reputation with email service providers.
How to Improve Your Email Domain Reputation
Here are detailed steps to help enhance your domain’s standing:
1. Subject Line Optimization
Your email’s subject line is the first impression recipients get. Using spam-associated words like urgent, free, don’t delete, etc. can lead to email service providers marking your emails as spam. Instead, focus on creating engaging, clear, and concise subject lines that reflect the content of your email.
Personalization and relevance can increase open rates, which in turn can positively impact your domain reputation.
2. List Hygiene
You should regularly clean your email list by removing subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails for a long period. This is not just about removing uninterested parties; it also helps to avoid spam traps, which are email addresses used by service providers to catch spammers.
A clean list ensures a higher engagement rate, which is a positive signal to email service providers.
3. Consent-Based Emailing
Sending emails only to users who have opted in is a fundamental practice. This consent ensures that recipients are interested in your content, which reduces the likelihood of them marking your emails as spam. It’s essential for building a list of engaged subscribers and maintaining a solid domain reputation.
4. Email Content Quality
The actual content of your emails plays a significant role in deliverability and reputation. Avoid using aggressive sales language, excessive punctuation, or anything that might be construed as spammy. Instead, focus on providing value, relevant information, and a clear call to action.
Utilize tools like spam checkers to evaluate your emails’ content before sending them.
5. Domain Warmup
If you have a relatively new domain, you should start by sending a limited number of emails to your most engaged users. This process, known as ‘warming up‘ the domain, helps ISPs to gradually recognize and trust your sending patterns.
Over time, as your reputation builds, you can increase the volume without significant risk of being marked as spam.
6. Industry Alignment
Make sure the content you’re sending aligns with the industry classification of your domain. ISPs may become suspicious if there’s a mismatch, which can lead to deliverability issues. This also extends to the consent you’ve obtained; for instance, if users signed up for news on local events, don’t send them unrelated promotional content.
7. Subdomain Strategy
Deploying subdomains can help you manage different aspects of your email program separately. For example, you could use one subdomain for transactional emails and another for marketing. If there’s an issue with one subdomain, it won’t necessarily affect the reputation of the others, allowing for better control and isolation of any deliverability problems.
8. Authentication and Alignment
Implementing DKIM, SPF, and DMARC records helps authenticate your emails, showing ISPs that your messages are legitimate and should be trusted. This not only improves deliverability but also enhances your domain reputation. It’s also important that the information on these records is accurate and up-to-date.
These steps require ongoing attention to detail and a proactive approach to managing your email strategy. By following these practices, you can significantly improve your emails’ chances to reach your audience’s inboxes and maintain a strong email domain reputation.
IP Reputation vs Domain Reputation
Understanding the nuances of sender reputation involves looking at both domain and IP reputations. These terms are often used interchangeably, yet they highlight different aspects of the email-sending process.
IP Reputation: This ties to the specific IP address you send your emails from. ISPs (Internet Service Providers) use the IP reputation to gauge the trustworthiness of the sender. If an IP address is consistently used to send good quality content that recipients engage with, its reputation increases. Conversely, sending spam or getting blacklisted can tarnish the IP’s reputation.
Domain Reputation: Unlike IP reputation, which is about the ‘where,’ domain reputation is about the ‘who.’ It’s linked to your domain name and builds over time based on the quality of your email campaigns. High engagement rates, low spam complaints, and no history of blacklisting contribute to a good domain reputation.
It’s important to note that these two reputations are interconnected, and both contribute to your overall sender reputation. A poor domain reputation can undermine a stellar IP reputation, and vice versa. Internet Service Providers might prioritize IP reputation, but mailbox providers and Email Service Providers (ESPs) often focus on domain reputation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is your domain reputation bad?
A domain reputation can be poor due to several factors, such as getting blacklisted by ISPs, hitting spam traps, having poor email engagement like high unsubscribe rates, inconsistency in email sending volumes, or having a newly established domain that hasn’t been properly warmed up.
What causes a bad domain reputation?
Spammy email behavior is the biggest cause of a bad domain reputation. Spammy behavior can include spam traps, having emails frequently marked as spam by recipients, experiencing high rates of hard bounces, and sending out emails with low engagement or high unsubscribe rates.
How long does it take to fix domain reputation?
Fixing a domain reputation varies in time, depending on the extent of the issues and the corrective actions taken. It can take from a few weeks to several months to improve your domain reputation.
A reasonable period for improvement is approximately 30-45 days, but this is contingent upon how effectively the implemented changes improve your domain’s metrics and are perceived by mailbox providers.
The Importance of Checking and Managing Your Email Domain Reputation
Managing your email domain reputation is key to any successful email marketing. By understanding the factors that can damage your reputation, such as blacklisting and low engagement, and using tools like Google Postmaster and Talos Intelligence, you can get a sense of your current standing.
From there, applying best practices like email list hygiene, proper sending frequencies, and authentication protocols can help improve and maintain a healthy domain reputation. Remember, rehabilitation of your domain’s reputation takes time and consistent effort, but the payoff is improved email deliverability and engagement.
References
https://moosend.com/blog/email-reputation-score-calculator/
https://www.courier.com/guides/email-ip-domain-reputation-check-tools/
