Email marketers all have the same goal. They are all trying to land in customer inboxes. This can be a tricky task though. Although email is one of the most established marketing channels on the internet—it’s been around for nearly 50 years—it can still be difficult to navigate the rules that many email marketing platforms follow. Ensuring your email sender’s reputation is the best it can be is the key to successful email marketing. In this post, you will learn why sending emails from an email subdomain is an effective strategy for landing in your customer’s inboxes.
Why Sender Reputation Matters?
In our previous posts about deliverability, you learned that your email reputation can make or break your email marketing. Your email sender reputation is an important factor in determining whether you actually land in your recipient’s inboxes. You can increase your sender reputation—and therefore your deliverability—through a variety of factors including maintaining a clean email list, following spam laws and more.
To learn more about your email deliverability, please check out:
- Email Deliverability 101
- Email Deliverability Best Practices
- What to Do If You Have Poor Deliverability
- Ways to Improve Your Email Deliverability
There is one factor of your email reputation that often gets overlooked though. The domain from which you are sending your email campaigns matters. An industry best practice is to send emails from a subdomain instead of a parent domain. How does this make your email marketing better? You must understand what a subdomain is first in order to understand how it affects your deliverability.
A domain is a unique identifier for your company. You can use it to send out email campaigns from a variety of email marketing platforms. Domains can be used in your website address and your emails as well. For example, at FrescoData our domain is frescodata.com. A subdomain is a ‘child’ of a parent domain and is identified by a prefix. This indicates that it is a subsection of a larger domain. Once you’ve determined your subdomain, you can place whatever you want before the @ symbol of your email addresses. You can now create emails that are formatted info@marketing.frescodata.com or bob@marketing.frescodata.com.
Contact one of our Email Marketing specialists to find out how FrescoData can help you improve your ROI on your email drip campaigns.
Why Use a Subdomain?
- Protects your business’s reputation
In email marketing, reputation is extremely important. The main reason subdomains are important to use in email marketing is that they hold separate reputations from their parent domains. This means if your email subdomain gets marked as spam or is blacklisted, your whole domain is not compromised. Using a subdomain can mitigate some of the negative consequences of being blacklisted. Not all your emails would be blocked by your email marketing platforms from being sent, just the ones from that specific subdomain.
- Separates your subdomain from your parent domain within email marketing platforms
Plus, you can better track the success of your teams using email subdomains. Let’s say that you have a business with two different mailing list manager teams: one handles transactional emails and the other handles marketing and promotional emails. Engagement and click-through rates are usually higher on transactional emails than marketing emails. Using subdomains for these two mailing list manager teams will allow you to see different analytics reports for each subdomain within your email marketing platform. This means you will be able to see the actual engagement rates for just your transactional email team and marketing email team. These details will make it easier to better run your company.
- Helps you understand your reputation better
If your email reputation starts to shift in one of your subdomains, you can more easily identify the root cause of the problem. In this scenario, you have fewer emails to shift through in a specific subdomain than if all your emails were sent out from a parent domain. This can give you a lot more insight into what you are doing wrong so you pinpoint any issues in your email marketing strategy and fix them. The faster you address any issues, the faster you can optimize your strategy, improve your domain email reputation and create real business impact.
Segmenting Promotional Email vs. Transactional Email: Why Subdomains are Crucial For Email Marketing Management?
Segmenting promotional and transactional email messages using a subdomain is crucial to the lifeblood of your business. If your email marketing strategy involves multiple drip campaigns across multiple audience types and your employees send emails back and forth, you must segment them. So, what’s the difference between the two types of email messages? Why does it matter if you use a subdomain or not? We are going to echo the same sentiment we shared earlier in this blog article: subdomains protect your business from being blacklisted and denylisted.
Promotional Email: A promotional email is sent out to the masses. This could be targeted directly at a specific audience or generalized. The problem occurs when email contacts don’t authorize these emails and thus aren’t “opt-in” or “double opt-in.” These two terms relate to permissions that a website visitor, or subscriber, gives you indicating you have the right to send them a message (this is solicited). Many organizations get on the blacklist or denylist because they use databases or marketing email lists that are not opt-in or user permissioned. FrescoData’s email lists are all user permissions.
Transactional Email: transactional emails can be described as day-to-day emails or emails that aren’t promotional in nature. These are usually segmented from promotional emails sent from an email marketing list.
Contact one of our Email Subdomain Experts to find out how FrescoData can help you avoid spam lists and denylists.
Which Companies Use Subdomains?
Modern companies use subdomains to avoid being blacklisted and denylisted when sending promotional emails and drip campaigns. According to Breze, “Wallapop uses subdomains to split out their communication between their standard marketing communication, and their communication with professional car dealerships. That creates a wall between the email reputations for each of these email channels, and ensures that ISPs will judge each on their own merits.” Don’t fall into the trap of sending all of your emails through one parent domain and causing your business irreparable damage.
Conclusion
An email is a powerful tool for businesses. It is powerful for reaching customers and building a relationship with them—that is if your emails reach their destination. If you are looking to build out an effective email marketing strategy for the rest of 2019, start with improving your email deliverability and sender reputation. If you have not created subdomains for your different departments, now is the time to start.
If this is all a bit overwhelming for you to handle on your own, reach out to the experts at FrescoData so we can help you meet your email marketing goals.
References
Using email subdomains like a pro. Braze. (n.d.). https://www.braze.com/resources/articles/email-subdomains
