43: There’s a domain reputation behind every email

What’s up everyone, this is part 2 of our two part episode on email deliverability and getting into the primary tab in Gmail.

If you haven’t yet, start with last week’s episode where we covered 2 crucial classification factors according to Google. The content in your email and how users interact with your emails.

Here’s today’s main takeaway: Most email marketers understand that email domain and IP reputation play a critical role in your ability to land in the inbox. But most email marketers will admit they are easily spooked by all the accompanying fancy authentication acronyms. SPF, DKIM, DMARC, they just mean allowing Gmail and other email clients to verify you as the sender. We’ll break those and many more email deliverability tips right now.

Today’s episode will cover things you can do that would help with other email clients, not just Gmail. We’ll cover sender reputation, authentication as well as tactics in your automation tool to improve deliverability. 

3. Sender rep

We know for sure that factors that influence the spam folder are also factors in the inbox vs promos tab, that’s who the email is from. There’s an IP behind the sender, but there’s a domain behind the IP.

Domain reputation vs sender ip reputation.

There’s two main types of email reputation that can affect your sending:
1) IP Reputation and
2) Domain Reputation.

Both reputation scores are calculated separately but as you’ll see as we unpack things, both scores are closely related as your sending ip is mapped to your domain.

Mailgun has a dope article on this https://www.mailgun.com/blog/domain-ip-reputation-gmail-care-more-about/ Mailgun claims that things like domain age, how the domain identifies across the web and whether it identifies with entertainment, advertising or finance industries can all impact your domain reputation. They believe domain reputation ultimately matters more to Google.

Other suspected factors by rejoiner.com

Domain reputation / Past behavior of the sender
If you’ve been sending heaving promo/spam offers through email to hundreds of thousands of people for x years, you’re bound to have a mountain of recipients that marked you as spam. So just because a subscriber is new, it doesn’t mean you start fresh. A lot of senders actually have a ton of baggage from previous sends.

Google is quite clear about this: When messages from your domain are reported as spam, future messages are more likely to be delivered to the spam folder. Over time, many spam reports can lower your domain’s reputation.

Gmail best practices
Google provides a list of best practices for sending to gmail users, it’s not overly helpful but it has some valuable tips. Aside from the obvious, don’t impersonate another company, don’t test phishing scams and make sure your domain is marked as safe, here’s 3 things Google recommends:

1. Authentication: Allow Gmail to verify the sender by setting up reverse DNS (domain name). This means pointing your email sending IP addresses to your company domain. 
2. Small number of sending IPs: Google recommends you stick to just 1 sending IP. They add that if you must send from multiple IPs, use different IP addresses for different types of messages. Ie; one IP for blog, subscriber emails, one for important product updates, one for upsell and promo. 
   1. I often hear email marketers say that if you are getting stuck in the promo tab, just start a fresh new sending IP. The problem there is that this is a short term benefit. If you don’t make changes to your domain, that new IP is still authenticated to the same source with the same baggage. 
   2. I have heard anecdotely that using separate sending IPs for customers vs leads greatly helps. But I know companies that don’t use this well and still have solid metrics. 
3. Different senders: Along the same lines, Google encourages you to use a different ‘from sender’s for different types of emails and that you don't mix different types of content in the same emails. 
   1. Ie, your purchase confirmation/new customer onboarding flow should be sent by jon@company.com and never include subscriber or promotional content. Your promotional emails should be sent from phil@company.com. So stick to as little sending IPs as possible, but switch up your sender for different types of emails. 

Domain authentication
There’s different ways of setting up authentication for your sending IPs with Gmail. The process will be slightly different depending on your hosting provider and your ESP. 

There’s currently 3 main authentication methods to prevent email spoofing; aka spammers from sending emails that appear to be from your domain:

• SPF record (sender policy framework)
• DKIM keys (DomainKeys Identified Mail) 
• DMARC record (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance)

SPF
Publish an SPF record for your domain.
AKA Pointer (PTR) record. Every SPF has a single TXT file that specifies servers and domains that are allowed to send on behalf of your domain. You do this by uploading your updated TXT file on your domain provider settings.

DKIM
Turn on DKIM signing for your messages.

DKIM lets a company take ownership of an email. This is why the reputation of your company domain (not your sending IP) is the basis for evaluating whether to trust the message for further handling, such as delivery.

DKIM uses a pair of cryptographic keys, one private and one public. A private key aka the secret signature is added to the header of all your emails. A matching public key is added to your DNS record. Email servers that receive your messages use the public key to decrypt the private key in your signature. That’s how they verify the message was not changed after it was sent.

Google has a simple guide for doing this, you start by generating a key for your domain, and just like your SPF record, you add the key to your domain's DNS records.

DMARC

Publish a DMARC record for your domain. DMARC is used in combo with SPF and DKIM, should be setup after.

Specifically helps you prevent spoofing, aka a message that appears to be from your company but is not.
It checks whether the From: header matches the sending domain in your SPF/DKIM check.

Once you start sending after DMARC is setup, you can start to access reports from email servers...