Overview

Domain reputation refers to mailbox providers' (MBPs) perception of a domain's health. When a domain maintains a high reputation, MBPs usually deliver emails to recipients' inboxes, assuming they are relevant and valuable. Conversely, if a domain has a low or bad reputation, ISPs may redirect emails to recipients' spam folders or even block them altogether.
A variety of factors influence the domain's reputation. These include aspects such as engagement and conversion rate, spam complaints rate, spam traps rate, unsubscribe rate, and bounce rate.

Adhering to the email best practices, such as setting up authentication, managing opt-in/consent, and sending personalized content, is an effective way to build a positive reputation. This can directly increase the return on investment (ROI) of your email marketing program. However, diverging from these guidelines can lead to negative consequences. The following section discusses the effects of not maintaining a stable domain reputation at high or medium.

Impact of Low or Bad Domain Reputation

Low Reputation

This indicates that Gmail has identified this sender as frequently sending a significant amount of spam. Emails from domains or IPs with low reputations typically land in the spam folder.

Bad Reputation

This indicates that Gmail has identified that this sender consistently sends a high amount of spam. Emails from domains or IPs with a bad reputation will always land in the spam folder or get rejected, which means they are soft bounced.

Impact

If your domain reputation is low or bad, your emails fail to reach the inboxes of Gmail recipients. Consequently, these emails will not achieve the intended objectives of your email campaigns, resulting in ineffective email communication with no conversions.

Thus, preventing your reputation from becoming low or bad is crucial. If it does occur, immediately halt, address all the issues, comply with industry best practices, and then gradually resume and increase the volume of your operations.

Reasons for the Drop in Domain Reputation

The email-sending behaviors mentioned below often lead to a bad or low reputation- either a gradual decline or an abrupt drop.

• Ineffectual warm-up.
  
  • Reputation for all new senders must be built through warm-up and ramp-up over time.
• Targeting unengaged users from a new domain.
  
  • Gmail, similar to all other mailbox providers, applies rate limitations to emails from a new sender and doesn't accommodate high volumes from a new domain or IP.
  • Warm-up is required to establish a positive reputation and gradually raise volume thresholds and acceptance rates.
  • This warm-up is accomplished by sending highly relevant content to a small group of highly engaged users at a slow rate (low RPM) and gradually increasing the volume.
• Sending in fixed patterns without accounting for delivery, engagement metrics, and spam complaints.
  • If you ignore the signals from recipients, Gmail will put your emails in spam to protect those users.
• Creating sudden spikes in volume instead of steadily increasing it. The sudden volume surges almost always cause a reputation drop.
  • A sudden volume spike always raises questions.
    • You would not be ramped up to send higher numbers.
    • Find the 
    • Secondly, from where did such a high number of email users suddenly come from?
      • Did they consent to receiving emails?
        
    • When was the last email sent to these users?
      • Is the prior consent still effective?
• A gap in sending patterns followed by a surge in email volume or irregular high-volume campaigns.
  
  • IPs and domains tend to cool off after two weeks of inactivity.
  • They will slowly lose their reputation and ramped-up state.
  • An inactivity must be followed by a smaller send to the most engaged users and a gradual volume increase.
  • Moreover, after a longer period of inactivity (say 6 months or more), you need to reaffirm the content and manage expectations.
• Not suppressing inactive users.
  • Take into account the signals from end recipients.
  • If users are not interacting with your emails, your sending behavior (frequency, segmentation, content relevancy) needs to be adjusted accordingly. You mustn’t continue to send emails to them in the same pattern. Use dynamic segments to manage this.
  • After a long period, if users continue to remain inactive, then they should be permanently suppressed.
• Sending emails to purchased lists or users who did not explicitly sign up to receive emails.
  • This violates the basic rules of list management and data privacy.

Fix Domain Reputation Issues

As a marketer, you must adhere to the following guidelines to enhance the visibility of your email campaigns, particularly if your domain reputation isn't high.

When Domain Reputation Drops to Medium 

This indicates you can still improve the domain reputation.

• Pause all one-time email campaigns from the affected domain for 3 days.
  • Use this time to figure out why the reputation droppedand charter your plan to fix it.
  • Continue sending event-triggered campaigns as before, unless there’s an issue with event-triggered campaigns.
• Add a frequency capping (FC) of one email to a user in 1 day.
• Make sure to send at least 1 campaign per week.
  • DO NOT target customers who have not engaged in the past 6 months.
  • Use RPM if 1k.
• Create event-based triggered or life-cycle campaign use cases.
  • Use content personalization and reduce one-time campaigns.

When the domain reputation improves to High, revise the sending criteria for the unengaged cohorts as listed below:

• For the cohorts of customers who have not engaged in the last 45 days:
  • Send targeted content.
  • Conduct surveys to analyze the lack of engagement.
  • Reduce the frequency of sending emails.
• For the cohorts of customers who have not engaged in the last 9 months:
  • Suppress the customers permanently.

When Domain Reputation Drops to Low

This indicates your sending behavior is already suspicious.

• Pause all one-time email campaigns from the affected domain for 10 days.
  • Use this time to figure out why the reputation dropped and charter your plan to fix it.
  • Continue sending event-triggered campaigns as before, unless there’s an issue with event-triggered campaigns.
• Add a frequency capping (FC) of 1 email to a user in 3 days or less.
• Send a maximum of two to three email campaigns weekly and at least one email per week to your most engaged users.
  Note: Most engaged customers are customers: has executed email open at least 2 times in the last 30 days AND has executed app/site opened at least 2 times in the last 30 days
  • Do not target customers who have not engaged in the past 6 months.
  • Use RPM of 1000.

When the domain reputation improves to Medium, revise the sending criteria for the less engaged cohorts as listed below:

• Expand the audience criteria to include other openers and app/site openers.
• Increase the send frequency if required.
• Create event-based triggered or life-cycle campaign use cases.
  • Use content personalization and reduce one-time campaigns.

When Domain Reputation Drops to Bad 

This indicates that Gmail has already flagged you as a bad sender and all your emails are likely going to spam if they are delivered at all.

• Pause all email campaigns (one-time, event-triggered, flows, business events) from the affected domain for 20 days.
  •  Use this time to figure out why the reputation dropped and charter your plan to fix it.
• Add a frequency capping (FC) of 1 email to a user in 7 days.
• If there are any issues concerning your audience quality, or if reputation issues persist for over six months, send a confirmation email to reaffirm consent.
• Send a maximum of two email campaigns weekly, and at least one email per week to your most engaged users.
  Note: Most engaged customers are customers: has executed email open at least 5 times in the last 30 days AND has executed app/site opened at least 5 times in the last 30 days
  • Use RPM of 1000.
  • Do not target customers who have not engaged in the past 6 months.

When the domain reputation improves from bad to low, revise the sending criteria for the less engaged cohorts as listed below:

• Expand the audience criteria to include other openers of the last 30 days.
• Increase the send frequency to 2-3 campaigns per week if required.
• Resume smart triggered campaigns.
  • Create event-based triggered or life-cycle campaign use cases.
  • Use content personalization and reduce one-time campaigns.