What is Domain Reputation and Email Deliverability?

threatcop
4 min readSep 2, 2022

--

Have you ever noticed if your emails are landing in the inbox or getting bounced off at the receiver’s end? Email marketing is extremely important for every organization and these things can hamper the marketing efforts as well as important communication with customers, vendors, and partners. There are numerous parameters to email marketing, such as open rate, bounce rate, response rate, spam rate, etc., which could be improved with a better domain reputation that will eventually result in better email deliverability.

Email deliverability has become a major concern for the marketing and sales teams of any organization. In fact, a report by Scalelab says that 20.4% of all emails either go into spam or bounce off. On the other hand, approximately 80% of marketing emails end up in spam boxes.

What is Email Deliverability?

The concept of email deliverability is to define the ability of an organization’s email domain to send an email to their subscribers and have it land in their inbox. When an email lands in the inbox, it has a better chance of being noticed and read by the recipient. That’s why for organizations that are carrying out email marketing, it is very important that their email domain has excellent email deliverability.

The organization often needs to fix the issues that are associated with email deliverability. The fixation is carried out by identification, reputation, and content. The issues related to identification can be due to the absence of SPF, DKIM, or DMARC. Similarly, the reputation of the domain can decide whether the receiver will mark it as spam or not. And content errors can give the idea that the email is fraudulent.

How to Increase Email Deliverability?

To increase the email deliverability of an email domain, every organization needs to do the following:

  1. Optimize the opt-in process
  2. Properly authenticate your email domain using email authentication protocols (DMARC, SPF, and DKIM)
  3. The subject line should be engaging and not spammy
  4. The emails should be sent at an appropriate frequency from the organization

What is Domain Reputation?

A domain’s ‘reputation’ is a score given by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to all the domains after comprehending the safety of emails. The domain reputation determines the sender’s reputation, which in turn designates a sense of authenticity, determining whether the email will land in spam or inbox. When the domain’s reputation is good, the marketing team can easily send emails to their prospects, resulting in a successful campaign.

There are various parameters that determine the domain’s reputation, such as the quality of the content in the email and previous rates on its deliverability. Thus, email engagement can determine and impact domain reputation, and its rate helps in improving the effectiveness of email marketing. So, the most important parameters that determine the domain’s reputation are reply rate, open rate, bounce rate, click-through rate, number of spam reports, etc.

How to Increase Domain Reputation and Email Deliverability?

We have already understood that having a better domain reputation and email deliverability not only results in better email marketing but also improves communication. There are several cybersecurity practices that can be incorporated by organizations to increase domain reputation and email deliverability. The most important step is implementing email authentication protocols such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. On the other hand, organizations can work on improving content that doesn’t sound spammy so that recipients don’t report it as phishing emails.

Content quality is the prime element that organizations must work upon to improve email engagement. This directly results in a fruitful and positive response. Additionally, the organization can keep better communication with their existing clientele or people through emails to maintain better parameters for the email domain. The email marketing team of the company must have segregated campaigns for sending to a different list of receivers for different purposes. This helps the organization assess the engagement rate and make changes whenever necessary.

How Can TDMARC Help?

TDMARC is an email security tool by Threatcop that helps organizations in securing their outbound emails and improve their domain reputation and email deliverability. TDMARC helps organizations in implementing essential email authentication protocols like DMARC and SPF on their email domain easily. The DMARC and SPF help in securing the domain and, in turn, improve email deliverability for the organization. When the communication and marketing activities run fruitfully and positively, it improves the email domain reputation of the organization.

Additionally, TDMARC provides the organization with periodic analysis of the email domain showcasing the number of emails that have been sent successfully. The report also shows the amount of email phishing and spoofing attempts made by any threat actor. Thus, it helps organizations prevent email spoofing. TDMARC also informs if any genuine email from the organization has failed to land in the inbox of the receiver. This gives them an option to review their email domain and eradicate the issues.

--

--

threatcop

Threatcop is a cybersecurity company that provides security solutions to businesses to protect them against email-based attacks and social engineering attacks.