There's a lot of misunderstanding around domain reputation when it comes to email sending and email deliverability. Domain reputation is a thing, and it does relate to email and email deliverability, and it is important. For example, it is absolutely the case that if example.com starts spamming, inbox providers are going to start putting example.com's email in the junk folder, or maybe even block it altogether. But still, domain reputation is not what a lot of people think that it is.
Sending email from a decoy, pass-through email domain which forwards to a primary domain is never a good idea. (Some people call this a 'dummy domain', but that's actually something different.) What they do is set up a decoy domain and send their cold email from it, with links in the cold email which point to their primary domain. They do it this way in an effort to protect the reputation of their primary domain, aren't they so clever? Here's the thing; actually two things: 1. It doesn't work, it will still drag down their primary domain's reputation, and 2. it doesn't work because they are spamming. Calling it "cold email" when what you've done is scraped or purchased an email address and put it on a mailing list without consent is spam, no matter how much you try to polish it up and call it something else.
Every business email sender knows about the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, but did you know that CAN-SPAM compliance isn't enough? By "not enough" we mean that if you consider compliance with CAN-SPAM to be all that you have to do to also be in compliance with your email sending platform, and in compliance with the inbox providers hosting the email inboxes to which you are sending email, well, you need to keep reading.
Properly conducting an email reengagement campaign, and following reengagement campaign best practices, is critical to your email deliverability. One misstep and all of your email can start going to the spam folder, if not being outright blocked as "spam". In our knowledge article about How to Revive, Warm Up, and Re-Engage an Old Mailing List without Getting Into Trouble we highlight six points that are key to conducting an effective reengagement campaign: remove non-opening email addresses, make sure your authentication is set up correctly, minimal formatting, compelling subject line, brief content, and be consistent. Below is a real-life reengagement email campaign example, showing how doing this carefully, correctly, and following these points, can lead to success.
We have a customer who sends email out on behalf of a very large, very well known institution in the financial investment world. Some of these mailings lists are paid mailing lists. By which I mean that the users paid to receive these emails. And yet, they still report it as spam. Why would they do this? Here's why.
A fascinating, and a bit shocking, study was released today, rating how well online commerce sites do when it comes to responding to prospect and customer email queries. Not very, it turns out.
We've talked previously about why all the email addresses you send from (i.e. your email's "return address") should really exist. It's because if they don't, you're email is going to get junk foldered, both due to spam complaints, and because ISPs actually test whether your from address exists. But there are some email addresses - used as "From:" addresses - that even if you create them on your system - even if they really do exist - you should just never use.
The results of two studies which looked at whether people are less inclined to be honest in email are out, and the answer is a big "yes". Based on these studies, at least, people tend to lie a lot in email. In fact, the two studies, published jointly as a paper entitled "Being Honest Online: The Finer Points of Lying in Online Ultimatum Bargaining", found that in their tests, subjects were likely to lie as much as 92% of the time!
