Reputation, Reputation

In Part 1 we looked at sending practices generally and got an understanding of what factors can affect deliveries. Overall, even with what we’ve considered here, there are still factors that need to be considered when it comes to reputation. Typically there are two areas of reputation to be considered: Domain Reputation and IP reputation. Each of these are distinct and separate, and whilst there’s no direct link as such between the two, they do work hand in hand and can have impacts on each other in both positive and negative manners.  Let’s look at each of these in turn.

Domain Reputation

This is the reputation that your Domain has on the internet. Note that this also includes your masked domain that you are sending from. The two go hand in hand, and just as one can positively affect the other, they can both equally affect each other negatively as well. Remember when you sign up with us we ask you to set up a subdomain to send from. As an example your storefront might exist at amazingclothesforsale.com . With that in mind you decided to set up two subdomains with us when you signed up with us (oh, yeah, you can do that). They were:
  • news.amazingclothesforsale.com
  • notifications.amazingclothesforsale.com
You decided to use the news subdomain to send out your newsletters and marketing emails, and the notifications subdomain to send out the transactional stuff (purchase receipts, delivery notifications, re-stock notifications, etc.) Looking at the above we can see that the three records in question (amazingclothesforsale.com, news and notifications) all have a common component, namely the domain name amazingclothesforsale.com. This is the domain name and where the domain reputation comes in to play. However because the other two are subdomains of the parent domain there is a relationship that exists between them and the parent.  Therefore it’s in your interest to maintain it to a high standard. And don’t think that if you happen to ruin it in one location, moving it somewhere else is necessarily the solution. It might help, particularly if you’re prepared to work at it with people who have expertise in helping these things improve, and who can provide tools to help with that. And of course, I mean our company can do that with you. We will work with you to maintain a good reputation and can offer advice and assistance in repairing a damaged one, but at the end of the day, the buck will stop (inevitably) with you and what you do to maintain the reputation. Remember as a marketer the rest of the business is relying on you to exercise good judgement and work to the best of your abilities to help retain existing customers and to win new business too! You are the visible face of the organisation, after all.

IP Reputation

Your IP Reputation is the reputation of your sending email IP address. Whether you are using a dedicated or a shared IP address has an effect on your IP Reputation. If you’re a large enough sender you may have a dedicated IP, but if not, you will be within what we term a Pooled IP range. This range has been determined and selected for you based on your current (or recent) campaign results. It’s a joint responsibility for our company and yours to get you a good result.  And in case you’re worried because you’re in a pool and want to be considered for a dedicated IP so it’s all under your control, we can arrange for that for you. There are things you need to consider when it comes to doing this, though. First and foremost will be the volume of emails you send. Oh, don’t go thinking this is an excuse to start sending masses more emails though, because that won’t necessarily help. What we’ll do is analyse the traffic you’ve been sending over time, and work out if a dedicated IP is the best thing for you. If it is, we’ll work with you to get it set up and ready to go. And we’ll always start you off on an IP that already has a good reputation, because otherwise it’s a waste of both our times, and your money. Either way, we’re here to make sure we deliver the best possible results for our clients so we’ll do the obvious things in managing the delivery of the campaign. These may include one or more of the below (and may also include other things we’ve not mentioned here):
  • Sending at the best possible rate as determined by your requested send time.
  • Respecting back-off instructions (where a given ISP has said that your campaign needs to be slowed in speed to allow for a clearer response from the intended recipients as to whether this campaign is wanted or not).
  • Dealing with Feedback from campaign recipients
  • Instructions presented by you for delivery such as Split Content Optimisation, Intelligent Time Sending, etc.
  • Throttling that may have been requested or advised.
The onus of course is still on you to target people responsibly and present them with expected communications, as well as choosing the recipient audience that will get the best reaction for your company (e.g. pre-sale Notification for Loyal customers, etc). Back in the day you used to be able to rely on the old batch and blast technique. That premise of throwing enough of the brown stuff at the wall and some is bound to stick is no longer an acceptable method in any marketing circles you may happen to move in. In email marketing it is actually hugely detrimental. So please don’t do it. Combining these factors should mean the reputation of the IP you’re sending from will be improved and maintained over time – remembering that these things go together should also see your domain reputation be improved and maintained simultaneously. In part 3 we’ll look at what steps we can take to improve reputations.