If Email is a key part of your Marketing Strategy, you’ll
know that it can be a troublesome channel at times. Just search “email
marketing” in Google and you’ll see an endless bounty of blog posts, books,
websites, consultants and more that are there to help marketers turn those
emails into conversions.
The element that makes this tricky is that email has been
around for almost 50 years – this has given regulatory bodies more than enough
time to implement rules and regulations which leads us on to the topic of email
reputation.
Your sender reputation plays a large role in determining whether the email you send will ever actually reach the intended inbox. Making sure your sender reputation is up to scratch involves several factors such as following IP warming rules, a clean email list as well as making sure that you’re compliant with legal regulations.
However, one factor of email reputation does not get the credit it deserves, and that is figuring out the domain you’re going to use to send your email. Best industry practice is to send your email from a subdomain rather than the parent domain.
What is a Subdomain?
Your domain is unique and identifies your particular website – for instance ascensor.co.uk and your subdomain is the ‘child’ of the parent domain that is identified by prefix, identifying that it is a subsection of your parent domain. Once you’ve decided what your subdomain is, you can place anything before the @ symbol in your email address. So hello.ascensor.co.uk becomes [email protected].
Why Should I use a Subdomain?
A subdomain has a different reputation than that of their
parent domains, and in email marketing, reputation is the most important
factor. The domain and subdomains that you send from are one of the factors
that affect your reputation. So why is this helpful?
Imagine a scenario that your business has two teams: one
that handles transactional emails and another that handles promotional and
marketing emails. Because people are very likely to engage with password resets
and other messages that are transactional, that team’s emails will see high levels
of engagement, but unfortunately your marketing team is seeing the opposite.
If you’re sending both transactional and marketing emails from one parent domain, you have no way to make sure that those important “order confirmation” emails are reaching your customers’ inboxes and not being sent to the junk folder because they’re affected by the poor engagement of your marketing emails. If you use a subdomain for your marketing emails and a second for your transactional emails, you’ll then be able to disassociate the reputations of the two, allowing your transactional emails to have no deliverability problems.
You're Protected if Something Goes Wrong
Let’s say someone has sent out an email campaign from your
parent domain without offering the option to unsubscribe and in turn, your
company finds itself blacklisted by ISPs. Disaster! Now all company emails are
going to go straight into your recipients spam folders, impacting your marketing
campaign’s effectiveness in the worst way possible.
Using a subdomain to send out all mass communications helps to mitigate the negative consequences of these types of scenarios. If something does go wrong, your parent domain and your company emails aren’t affected. If the email in question had been sent using a subdomain, then only that subdomain would have been blacklisted, limiting the impact on your business significantly.
Help you Better Understand your Reputation
If you’re sending different kinds of emails through a single
parent domain and things go wrong, it can be very difficult to identify the cause.
Splitting out your different types of email into subdomains can give you a much
better understanding into the results you’re seeing by simplifying the process
of identifying which of your emails are struggling and what the cause is.
As soon as you have identified what the issue is, you can
then make the necessary changes to your email program. If you’re seeing a high
bounce rate for example, you may consider implementing a better system of
validation when the user signs up and running your email list through a
validation service. The faster you pinpoint and address issues, the faster you
can optimise your strategy and maximise your domain email reputation – allowing
you to see the kinds of results that have a real business impact.
Email can be an extremely powerful tool for reaching and
building relationships with your customers – but it’s important that your
audience actually gets your message. So, when you start to plan out your email
marketing strategy, make sure that you make subdomains a priority.
Want to make the most of your email marketing? From
individual broadcasts to marketing automation, Ascensor can help you utilise what
is still one of the most cost-effective forms of digital marketing by working
with you to ensure that you’re delivering the best message at the right time
and developing an understanding of what works best for you in your sector, so get in touch today.