If your email ends up in spam, it’s a serious reason to work on your mistakes. It’s important to remember that the mechanics of how mail providers process traffic are constantly changing. In its current form, it can best be described by the phrase “there are no minor problems.”
How to avoid these problems? And what to do if you fail to avoid them? This is what our article today is about.
What is domain reputation
Domain reputation is the opinion of the mail provider (mail.ru, yandex.ru, gmail.com, etc.) about the domain that sends emails. It affects whether emails get to the Inbox, and therefore the effectiveness of email marketing in general.
How does this work in practice?
Let’s say you launch a mailing for 10 thousand subscribers. The mail service checks: how many people opened the letter, how many complained about spam, how many letters did not arrive. If more than half of the addresses do not exist, or people unsubscribe en masse – this is an alarm signal. The mailer decides: something is wrong with your domain. Next time, it will not look into it and will send all your letters to spam or block them altogether.
What makes up a domain’s reputation?
Domain reputation depends on specific actions and errors when sending emails. Mail services evaluate you based on four main criteria.
Spam Complaints
When people click “This is spam,” the system immediately registers it. If there are too many such complaints, you are in trouble. Even if your emails are useful, but subscribers did not expect them, you are at risk. For example, if 2% of users complained, this is already an alarming signal. And if there are more than 5% of complaints, your emails will end up in spam.
Sending to non-existent addresses
Every time you send a letter to a non-existent address, the system sees it. Such errors, called hard bounces, show that you are poorly managing your database. The more such addresses, the faster your reputation falls. If you are sending letters to an old database full of “dead” addresses, prepare for problems.
Authentication of letters
If you don’t set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, the system doesn’t trust your email. It’s not sure that it’s you and not a scammer. As a result, your email is more likely to be blocked or sent to spam. Authentication is your passport in the world of email newsletters.
Volume and dynamics of mailings
If you suddenly increase your mailing from 1,000 letters to 100,000, the mailer will be wary. It will decide that there is something wrong with your domain. If you consistently send the same volume of letters, your reputation will remain in order.
Why is it important to monitor your domain reputation?
Monitoring your domain reputation is important for one simple reason: it directly affects whether the recipient will see your email. If your domain reputation is bad, your emails will stop reaching the Inbox. Mail services will simply send them to spam or block them altogether. This kills any marketing campaign right at the start.
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What happens when a domain’s reputation drops?
You send an email with an important offer or promotion. The mail service checks your reputation. If it decides that your domain buy job seekers database cannot be trusted, the email is sent to spam. The recipient will not even know that you tried to contact them. This is a problem not only for your current mailing list, but for future emails as well. Each time, the chances of getting into the “Inbox” decrease.
Let’s say you have 10,000 subscribers to your mailing list. Of those, only 2,000 open your emails. The other 8,000 don’t see your messages because they automatically go to spam. You’re losing potential customers who could have clicked on the link, read the offer, and made a purchase.
Why is this critical for business?
Every email that doesn’t make it to the inbox is a missed opportunity. For example, you’re having a sale. You send out a newsletter with exclusive discounts, but most of your emails end up in spam. Customers don’t see the discounts, you lose sales. And if this happens regularly, your domain takes an even bigger hit to its reputation, and ultimately all your campaigns become ineffective.
Factors of a good phone list forum domain reputation
There can be an infinite number of reasons for the deterioration of reputation, and it is physically impossible to foresee them all. As an example, a standard story.
A girl named Lena registered in an online store using her work email and subscribed to its mailing lists. After that, she changed her place of work, but letters continued to arrive in her mailbox. The corporate antispam noticed this and automatically complained about the domain.
There is no way to prevent such a situation
The only thing left to do is to regularly monitor your reputation and promptly respond to emerging problems, which we will discuss in detail below.
An important factor of a good reputation is a correct subscriber base. It is necessary to carefully monitor how “live” it is, i.e. validate it. This is done with the help of special email validators, for example, Mailvalidator.ru.
Validators help eliminate addresses with errors (for example, @mali.ru and @yandex.ry), duplicates, disposable mailboxes and other possible sources of problems. Subscribers should be validated as often as possible, preferably every day.
In addition, to protect your email database
From getting addresses with typos, you should use double opt-in — a two-step subscription. Before adding a user to your database, send them a link by which they must confirm their desire to receive emails.
The content of the letters can also cause a decrease in the reputation level. You should not use shortened links in them, because this is a favorite tool of hackers and spammers to hide the real purpose of the transition. For this reason, they are not loved by mail provider filters. Also, refrain from words in your mailings that raise suspicions of the presence of prohibited adult content. Filters often do not get along with them either.
As we have already said
It is impossible to foresee all situations that may affect the deterioration of the domain’s reputation, so the only thing left to do is to avoid being repeatedly targeted by anti-spam agents and regularly monitor your status.
