How to Check and Improve Your Email Domain Reputation

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Just as a consumer’s reputation shapes their interactions with others, a domain’s reputation influences how the Email Service Provider (ESP) treats emails from that domain. Email domain reputation directly impacts email deliverability, which is why it’s crucial to understand and manage the reputation in a healthy manner. 

In this article, we’ll uncover the significance of this reputation in the email universe, explore common reputation issues, and provide strategies to improve domain reputation. 

But before you start fixing it, you should understand what it means. 

What is Email Domain Reputation?

Email Domain Reputation is a universal metric that defines the trustworthiness of an email domain. This reputation is built on a domain’s sending behavior and patterns and dictates how future emails from the domain and IP are treated. 

If an Email Service Provider (ESP) perceives your emails as “spam,” your sender reputation will suffer, and future emails will automatically be sent to the spam folder.

Why Does Email Domain Reputation Matter?

How would your mailbox provider know where to direct your emails? Should your emails land in recipients’ inboxes, or in spam folders?

This is where your email domain reputation comes in. It improves as more and more recipients engage with your emails, instructing ESPs to direct your emails in recipients’ inboxes in future. Conversely, if your domain is disreputable for spoofing or phishing attacks, ESPs will discard your emails and direct them to the spam folder.

Now, let’s look at how one of the most popular ESPs evaluates your domain.

What is Gmail Domain Reputation?

Gmail domain reputation reflects how Gmail “sees” you. This, in turn, is decided based on the emails coming from your domain and how customers react to them over time.

This data comes directly from Gmail. It means:

1. It’s accurate for Gmail customers.
2. It does not apply to other ISPs.

This is how Gmail perceives your email domain reputation:

Factors Affecting Email Domain Reputation

Email domain reputation is influenced by several factors, including:

1. Sudden increases in email volumes

If you suddenly increase the volume of emails you’re sending, ESPs will flag and penalize your domain.

2. Emails sent to unengaged customers from a new domain

Gmail, like all other Mailbox Providers, limits the emails from a new IP and does not accept higher volumes from a new domain or IP. 

You need domain warm-up for a good reputation. You can do this by slowly increasing volume limits and acceptance rates. Start by sending highly relevant content to a small batch of engaged customers at a slow pace (low RPM).

3. Emails sent despite declining open/clicks or uptick of spam complaints/unsubscribes

If you ignore negative signals from recipients, Gmail and other ESPs will mark your emails as spam to protect other customers from future spam.

4. A gap in sending patterns followed by the high volume of emails sent

IPs and domains tend to cool off after three weeks of inactivity. So they will slowly lose their reputation and ramped-up state. Any inactivity must be followed by a smaller send to the most engaged customers and a gradual volume increase.

5. Fixed sending patterns that don’t account for engagement

If you’re sending the same fixed number of emails over a long period, it shows ESPs that you’re not reading your customers’ engagement signals. This will cause your domain to be penalized because ESPs want domains to keep customer engagement at the forefront of every email campaign.

6. A lack of suppression for inactive customers

This one’s also closely tied to signals from end customers. If customers are not interacting with your emails, you need to change something about your strategy. You should either stop reaching out to them or change your sending patterns. If your changed strategy still doesn’t elicit a positive response, you should suppress them permanently.

7. Emails sent to purchased lists or customers who did not explicitly sign up to receive emails.

This violates all the basic rules of email list management, and your domain will be heavily penalized if you do this.

How to Check Your Email Domain Reputation Data

Customer engagement platforms like MoEngage display your domain reputation information in the dashboard so you can understand your domain’s health and its impact on the performance of your email campaigns. Email domain reputation is indicated as High, Medium, Low, or Bad.

You can see the domain reputation on the following pages:

• Campaign page: You can filter campaigns based on reputation while creating exports.
• Email settings configuration page: You can see historical trends in your domain reputation.
• Email campaign creation page: When you hover your mouse over a specific domain, you can see more information, such as when the reputation information was last updated. 
• Email Campaign Analytics Page

5 Domain Reputation Checking Tools

Each of the tools listed below uses a different algorithm to determine your domain reputation. But they’re all capable of pointing out any issues affecting your brand’s email deliverability.

1. Spamhaus Project

The Spamhaus Project allows you to track spam, malware, phishing, and other cybersecurity threats. ISPs and email servers filter out unwanted and harmful content using Spamhaus’s DNS-based blocklists (DNSBLs).

2. Sender Score

Developed by Validity, Sender Score is a free domain reputation measurement tool that grades your domain on a score of 0 to 100. The higher your domain’s score (between 85 and 100), the greater your email domain reputation. The tool basically scans your domain to search for SSL certificates and to identify the owner.

3. MxToolbox

You can use MxToolbox to check if your domain is mentioned on any email blocklists. It scans your domain for mail servers, DNS records, web servers, and any problems.

4. Google Postmaster Tools (PMT)

This tool from Google helps you understand how Gmail users are interacting with your high-volume emails. Apart from your domain reputation, you can gain insights on delivery errors and feedback loops.

5. Barracuda Central

Barracuda Central comes with a massive real-time database you can access to check if your domain is blocklisted or not. Your domain’s IP score on this tool will tell you whether or not your emails are being marked as ‘spam’.

How to Improve Your Email Domain Reputation

Here’s a quick checklist of steps to resolve your email domain reputation issues.

1. Pause Violating Campaigns

• Identify all vendors from where you are sending emails through the “Mail: From Domain.”
• Pause all emails (one-time, event triggered, transactional) sent through this. Ideally, you should not send transactional and non-transactional emails from the same domain (domain/IP set). If the compliance requirements are met, there is no need to pause transactional emails. However, you should pause all one-time emails.

2. Reflect and Correct

• Identify the root cause behind the drop in reputation.
• Fix all relevant issues.
• Make sure you check all the right boxes. Take this as a cue to clean your email setup and follow all the email compliance and best practice recommendations.
• Have checkpoints to detect issues immediately so you can always stay on top.
• Raise a ticket to Gmail explaining the cause behind the reputation issues, your changes, and the next steps you plan to follow.
• Set frequency capping to limit the number of emails sent to customers per day/week. Start slow before gradually increasing frequency.
• Use delivery controls to maintain a good email experience.
• Set lower RPM so emails are spread out each minute rather than sending high volumes simultaneously.

 3. Resume and Ramp Up

• Resume your transactional emails first. To reiterate, do not send transactional and promotional emails from the same domains and IPs. If they are, separate them while correcting your email setup.
• Next, resume your personalized event-triggered campaigns.
• Then, slowly send one-time campaigns to email openers and clickers (such as emails that have been opened 5 times in the last 60 days). Send at a lower RPM and send only 2-3 campaigns per week.
• Slowly ramp up the sending frequency and volume after the email domain reputation improves (it could take 6-8 weeks). Be sure you are not emailing customers too frequently. Be cautious as you open up the emails to non-engaged customers. Ramp up slowly.
  

4. Customize Your Sending Patterns

• Learn from the past errors.
• Customize your sending behavior to keep up with the customer’s changing interests. Create lifecycle campaigns to engage your customers. Use dynamic segments, so inactive customers get dropped off automatically. Implement personalization across every aspect of your email.
• Monitor the engagement and reputation regularly, including campaign analytics to review campaign performance. Create dashboards to monitor trends. 
• Take a step back when you spot issues. Resolve, resume, ramp-up.

Maintaining Email Domain Reputation with MoEngage

Managing email domain reputation is crucial for ensuring email deliverability and maintaining a healthy sender reputation. Changing domains or IPs to fix reputation issues is not enough, as this is only a temporary solution that can harm your brand’s overall reputation in the long run. 

Instead, it’s essential to address the underlying issues and follow best practices for email setup, sending patterns, compliance, and customer engagement. By taking these steps and continuously monitoring and adjusting your sending behavior, you can improve domain reputation and enhance the performance of your email campaigns.

To do all this, you’ll need an all-in-one email marketing platform like MoEngage. It’s designed to help you achieve high email deliverability rates, even while sending over 1 billion emails a month. With MoEngage, you can stay on top of how your emails are delivered and received to ensure your email campaign succeeds. See MoEngage in action today.