Making Money On-line: Talking Domain Reputation And What Email Marketers Need To Know

Friday 10 February 2017

Talking Domain Reputation And What Email Marketers Need To Know

Reputation is a word that means many different things to many different people in the world of Deliverability. The idea of what reputation is and how you should apply it to your business is a big topic that we will continue to explore.

Today however, I wanted to talk about a specific phenomenon that we are seeing more and more over the past few months. We’re going to talk about domain reputation as it applies to customers who are moving to a new ESP, and how that reputation impacts the warm-up and ramp-up periods.

Just Warming Up

One of the new trends that we’re seeing in Deliverability, involves new clients who are warming-up their new domain reputation. Recently, we have worked with some clients who were having trouble with their warm-up. Mail was bulking at a much higher rate than you would normally see with a sender in the warm-up stages.

What we’ve discovered is there is a correlation between traffic that you are sending from your old ESP, and the speed in which you can reboot with your new ESP partner.

We found that some senders were moving to OMC, because they were planning on getting more sophisticated with their marketing. Unfortunately, they were still using some of the old batch and blast methods on their previous provider during the new warm-up.

Interestingly enough, we saw much lower inboxing at Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo for these senders. They were following all the correct guidance on the new domain/IP, but still experienced tepid results.

With a very few exceptions, we are finding that senders who continue to use these bad practices, have trouble experiencing a quick and clean warm-up. That’s a very interesting finding, and speaks to the sophistication of Google and other sophisticated receivers. The senders are all using a new sub-domain, but it points to what we’ve been preaching for years. ISP’s are able to roll your domain to a parent level, and apply your reputation accordingly.

IP Reputation = The Determining Factor

This goes beyond just the domain. It shows why the idea of IP reputation is just not that important anymore. We like to think of IP reputation as the determining factor, but what this tells me is that ISP’s are way smarter. You can’t snowshoe (use lots of IPs), you can’t get new IPs if you have a bad rep and solve the problem, and getting new domains doesn’t hide you either. It’s all about the practice folks, Google will hunt you down!

The opposite also holds true in our research. Senders who are doing well, and sending to engaged audiences at their old ESP during the warm-up, experienced a shorter total time to normality. They were able to ramp-up quicker, and get back to one system quicker.

One of the first questions all new customers want to know is how quickly they can stop double dipping, and stop paying for two ESP’s. That answer in the new reality of domain reputation is, it turns out much more a part of that that the industry previously believed.

The moral of the story is, that if you burn down your old house, in hopes of squeezing out a few more dollars, you are likely to feel that burning in your new house as well. The warm-up process begins even before you send that first email from your new home.

To find out how to achieve email deliverability that really delivers, download Email Deliverability: Guide For Modern Marketers.