What is domain reputation?

What is "domain reputation"?

One of the most important aspects in email marketing is the reputation of your email as it is the main factor in delivery rates. A bad reputation or lack thereof directly impacts deliverability, causing shipments to miss out on inboxes.

But... What is reputation?

The reputation consists of a quantitative data tracked by the email providers to, through the domain and/or the sending IP, make a ranking of the senders. Each provider has a different algorithm to calculate this data, meaning that there is no formula that works for all providers.

The reputation of a sending domain is similar to the credit rating of banks: all banks look at the same information when granting you a loan, however, they can decide differently about your creditworthiness. And just as with banks, it is built based on the domain owner's own management of his main asset: the database of his clients. A sender that simply generates campaigns without having any focus on the engagement that they generate in their audience, will probably be penalized in a short time with a reputation that is lower every day.

The reputation of IPs

At ICOMM we take care of maintaining our infrastructure to guarantee the quality of deliverability for our clients. It is based on maintaining the highest shipping standards through the implementation of SPF, Domain Keys (DKIM) and DMARC certificates for all our shipments, as well as the monitoring and survey of hundreds of BlackLists of greater or lesser size to relieve the reputation of our sending IPs. We also process all the information provided by the large carriers through their JMRP (Juan Mail Reporting Program) or FBL (Feedback loop) services to act on any claim that a user may have for a shipment generated by any of our clients.

This allows us to guarantee the best indicators for the reputation of our IPs.

Why do we use subdomains?

A new sending domain is typically required when a customer changes ESPs or adds a new brand/mail flow to their current program.

This is important to think about because mailbox providers use the sending domain (and sending IPs) as primary identifiers for sender reputation. This is especially true with Gmail.

For starters, you really want to use a sending domain that clearly identifies your brand as the sender of the email. The easiest way to do this is to use an email subdomain of your main domain.

We advise our clients to use a subdomain (email-domain.domain.com) instead of a root domain (domain.com) to send emails, as this must be delegated to us for link tracking to work.
Senders should avoid using "family domains" at all costs (for example, "email-domain.com" instead of "email-domain.com") because it looks like a phishing attempt.
Subdomains can be used to separate the reputation of different mail flows. Let's say you send transactional messages and you want to isolate that flow from the bulk messages that are more likely to lead to complaints and reputation issues. You can use a different subdomain (for example, "receipts.domain.com" for transactional mail and "email-domain.com" for bulk mail) along with separate IPs to preserve the reputation of transactional mail flow.

Mixing mail flows on the same sending domain is not necessarily a problem. It only becomes problematic when a very clean mail flow is combined with a more problematic one, the sender's reputation gets mixed up and the problematic flow can negatively affect the "good" flow. It's definitely something to consider when planning your setup.
If the reputation of one of the mail flows is really, really bad, this might carry over a bit to other subdomains that use the same root domain.

For more information visit the following link: https://blog.kickbox.com/sending-domains-to-subdomain-or-not-to-subdomain/

Consult our article: Tools to know the reputation of the sending domain

We recommend: What happens if the sending domain appears on a blacklist?

Updated on: 08/09/2023