4 Tips to improve your domain reputation

Risk comes from not knowing what you are doing. And in case of email marketing, not knowing what others can and are doing also adds to the risk. MSPs are constantly on the vigil, monitoring your IP and Domain scores and filtering out if found flouting guidelines set by them. A reputation score for your IP and domain is assigned by MSPs and Global Anti-spam bodies depending on user complaints and engagement. Your emails are at risk to landing in the spam folder if you don’t pay attention to this reputation score.

In this blog, we talk about ways to boost the domain reputation and improve deliverability:

Double opt-in: It takes just a single verification mail to separate the genuinely interested subscribers from those bored internet surfers looking for some plain fun. Companies sometimes fear that the person might not click on the confirmation link. It’s better to have a handful of ‘real’ customers than a host of unreal, unknown email addresses. Imagine someone subscribing with an email id as bill.gates@microsoft.com and you sending ‘Bill Gates’ a welcome series! By introducing double opt-in, you can cut down on your unknown user rate leading to minimal bounce rates, which happens to be a big contributor when it comes to securing your domain reputation.

Frequency of mailing: The first day your email is welcome, second a burden and third a nuisance. Have you thought of it that not all subscribers like being bombarded with daily mailers? Give your subscriber the option to decide on the frequency of emails. It could be monthly, weekly or daily depending on your industry and the business model. When you do this, your mails are more welcome as they are expected and your abuse complaints drop drastically.

Unsubscribe option: Just as you allow your subscribers to decide when they want to receive your emails, you should also give them an option to opt out of these mailers if they are no longer interested. If you do not provide an easy to find unsubscribe option, chances are you would be marked as spam. Also with the latest development by Gmail, their own Unsubscribe option gets displayed so vividly that the earlier tactics of some marketers to show unsubscribe option in the smallest of fonts would no longer work and in fact might increase the chances of hampering the domain reputation!

Clean list: Keeping your list clean of bounces, unsubscribe and abuse email ids increases the relevancy of your email campaigns and decreases the chances of being labelled as spammer. Actively perform hygiene check at regular intervals by removing users inactive for last 6 months so that you only reach out to people who want to be engaged, thereby safeguarding your reputation.

Maintaining domain reputation is one of the biggest challenges faced by brands today. There have been instances where so many online brands have ruined themselves due to their incapability to maintain their domain reputation. Following these useful tips can improve your domain reputation and see your emails right into the recipient’s inbox!