5 Ways To Boost Your Email Domain Reputation (2023)

Trying to improve your email domain reputation in 2023?

Think of your email domain reputation like a personal credit score.

When you’re a new email sender, your “email credit score” is low because you haven’t sent too many email “transactions” yet. Every time you hit send, it’s kind of like making a financial transaction.

If you have poor credit, it’s going to be hard to make transactions. The “banks,” or MBPs (like Gmail), will reject your transactions. This means if you try to send a ton of emails too quickly, or you have a poor email credit score due to a weak email domain reputation, the transactions won’t go through and people won’t get your emails.

In this quick guide, you’ll learn exactly how you can boost your email domain reputation in 2023 with a few simple tips.

Let’s begin.

Email Domain Reputation (Why Does It Matter?)

Email domain reputation, as mentioned above, is like a credit score. A poor score will give you poor results while a good score will make your life a lot easier. But, how exactly does this work in the email marketing game?

Simply put, your domain reputation is a key trait of your domain that Mailbox Providers (MBPs) like Gmail and Hotmail use to judge how safe your emails are.

Domain reputation is a great thing for one great reason: it helps protect consumers from spam, phishing, and fraudulent activity. Think about it. If your MBP is flooded with spammy emails all the time, you won’t want to use it, so you’ll go to a competitor.

So, MBPs put a great deal of effort into the user experience on their platforms to ensure people continue using them to send and receive emails.

Your domain reputation is an essential metric of how trustworthy you are to MBPs.

The result of a poor email domain reputation is that your emails may:

• Land in spam

• Land in promotions

• Be flagged to the receiver as harmful

• Be unable to send

Essentially, if you have a poor email domain reputation, your deliverability is going to suffer big time, which means your emails are unlikely to make it to your subscribers’ inboxes.

What Is IP Reputation for Email Sending?

Domain reputation is important to ensure you’re keeping your deliverability up. But, there’s another factor that goes into your email deliverability: IP reputation.

Your IP reputation isn’t linked to your email domain. It’s linked to the server that sends your emails. Your IP can be dynamic, which means it can change frequently. Your email sending IP is made up of four sets of numerals like this: “125.0.0.2”.

Your IP is typically determined by your email service provider (ESP), like beehiiv. Your IP reputation is made up of the activity an ESP has associated with your IP address.

In summary, your domain reputation is linked to your domain and your business, whereas your IP reputation is linked to the server that sends your emails.

How Do I Check My Domain Reputation for Email?

There’s no absolute number for domain reputation. Just as there are different credit scores based on the credit bureau, there are different ways to check your domain reputation.

This is because different MBPs have different criteria for how they evaluate the health of an email domain.

However, there are a few tools you can use to get an estimated email domain reputation, based on different data sources.

Some of the most common email reputation measurement tools are:

• Google Postmaster Tools

• Sender Score

• Barracuda Central

• McAfee Customer URL Ticketing System

How Do I Fix My Domain Reputation Email?

If you want to build up your email domain reputation to earn a higher email credit score, then follow these six tips.

1. Warm Up Your Domain

The first step to boosting your email domain reputation is to properly warm up your domain.

One of the fastest ways to burn your email reputation is to start sending high volume email sends very frequently.

Many MBPs have spam detectors that will get triggered if a new domain starts sending emails to huge email lists in short succession.

Here’s how you can warm up your email domain:

• Start by sending to a smaller list

• Send only to the most engaged readers

• Send infrequently

• Slowly increase how often you send

• Encourage engagement (replies, clicks, etc.)

By following these simple tips, you’ll start to generate a higher credit score with MBPs, as you’ll be seen as trustworthy. Then, over time, you can start to increase how many people you send to and how often you send.

2. Use Double Opt-In

While a major part of building up your domain reputation has to do with how often you send and how many people you send to, it’s not everything.

What’s equally as important is how your readers engage with your emails.

If you’re getting super low open rates and click rates, it’s not a good sign to MBPs and can be harmful to your domain reputation.

One way to increase open and click rates is to use double-opt in. This is where you ask a subscriber two times if they want to be on your email list: when they first sign up on a signup form on your site, and right after they sign up with an email confirmation in their inbox. By enabling double opt-in, you’re giving people a second chance to say whether they really want your emails or not.

There are plenty of fake email addresses, spam accounts, and bots that sign up to email lists that are essentially dead weight. On top of that, some people sign up with temporary email addresses—just to receive your free lead magnet—with no intention of reading your future emails.

Compared to single opt-in, double opt-in acts as a safeguard to filter your subscribers down to real people who intend on reading your emails, thus boosting your opens, clicks, and domain reputation.

3. Create Relevant Content

Engagement isn’t just about who intends on reading your emails based on a double-opt in. That’s really just the start of your relationship with your subscribers.

If you want to ensure you maintain a great domain reputation over the long run, you’ll need to ensure people are consistently reading and engaging with your emails.

What’s the best way to do that?

Create relevant, valuable content.

In short, don’t write bad emails or you’ll get bad results.

However, it’s not just about how good your emails are. Yes, it’s crucial to ensure your quality is high. But, what’s just as important is to make sure the email content is relevant to your subscribers. For instance, the best astrophysics email newsletter in the world will most likely be high quality. But, they wouldn’t necessarily be relevant to the average Joe, which means Joe wouldn’t want to open those emails.

The key is to ensure you’re setting the right expectations from the start when marketing your email newsletter. Clearly describe what kind of content your email newsletter will be about to potential subscribers on your newsletter landing page.

Make promises you can keep. If you’re going to write a daily AI newsletter, then people will expect your emails to be about AI.

4. Avoid Words That Trigger the Spam Filter

One easy win to boost your domain reputation is to avoid spammy words in your subject lines.

MBPs are always on the lookout for spammy emails that are sent to people without opting in.

They’re working night and day to keep irrelevant, spammy, and fraudulent emails from landing in people's inboxes. Unfortunately, their software isn’t perfect.

Even if you’re sending emails to people who opted-in and regularly engage with you, you could land in their spam folder and harm your domain reputation.

You need to make sure you’re avoiding any words in your subject line that could trigger the spam filter. Most of the time, these will be words that have to do with money. Here are a few common spam words you should avoid in your subject line copy:

• Get paid

• Cash

• Dollars

• Money back

• Credit

• Debit

• Price

• Profit

Beyond words, there are a few other symbols you should avoid like exclamation marks (!!!), all caps (DON’T DO THIS), and dollar signs ($$$). Those are all easy paths to land in the spam or promotions folders.

Here are 200+ spam trigger words you should avoid.

5. Regularly Clean Your List

The final key to boosting your email domain reputation is to clean your email list.

You may be the most charming person. But… if you only shower and brush your teeth once a month, chances are, people won’t want to get too close. Regular hygiene may not be fun, but it is important!

The same is true for your email list. You need to maintain the hygiene of your email list if you want to have a healthy domain by regularly cleaning your list.

The way you clean your email list is by removing or suppressing unengaged subscribers. All subscribers aren’t created equal. Just because someone’s on your list doesn’t mean they’re opening your emails. Every person who’s on your list that isn’t engaging with your emails isn’t just dead weight—they’re a zombie eating away at your email domain reputation.

At least once a year (but preferably every quarter), you should clean your list. Suppress or unsubscribe a segment of your list who hasn’t opened or clicked your emails in a set amount of time. A common period of time is 3, 6, or 9 months.

If you don’t feel comfortable just removing these people, then a good idea is to send what’s called a sunset unengaged email. This is essentially a last-chance email that could say something like this:

Subject Line Example: 

Time to say goodbye?

Email Body Copy Example:

Hey name,

I haven’t seen you around in a while, so I’m going to be removing you from this email list.

If you still want to receive my emails and stay subscribed, then make sure to click here (this could be any link, like a link to your website).

But, if you want to be unsubscribed, don’t do anything and I’ll simply remove you from my list.

All the best,

Your name

By removing unengaged people from your list, you’ll increase the percentage of people on your list who are engaged, which is a good domain reputation signal to MBPs.

Email Domain Reputation (Closing Thoughts)

Your domain reputation may not be the sexiest thing to think about when it comes to running an email newsletter.

But, if you want your email newsletter to be a success, you need to have great deliverability, and domain reputation is critical to keeping your deliverability up so your subscribers actually get a chance to read them.

Remember, if your readers aren’t receiving your emails, your efforts will be in vain. If you want to learn more about improving deliverability so more people open your emails, check out our guide: 5 Email Deliverability Best Practices.

And if you want to ensure you’re backed by a trusted email service provider to maintain a high domain reputation, try beehiiv today for free!