Expertly Manage Your Email Reputation and Keep Your Messages Out of Spam Folders: A Comprehensive Guide

Maximizing Email Deliverability: A Comprehensive Guide
Email remains a powerful channel for businesses to engage with their customers, even in the age of mobile and push notifications. However, setting up your email infrastructure and monitoring reputation can be complicated – especially for startups. Poor reputation can lead to your emails ending up in the spam folder, and this guide will help you avoid that.

Technical Configuration: Setting Up Email DNS Records
To create a reputational firewall and protect your sender reputation, you need to set up various DNS records. There are multiple protocols and records to consider, such as the MX record, PTR record, SPF record, DKIM record, and DMARC record.

Creating an MX record under your domain instructs people on which servers to send emails to. For a shared IP, a PTR record won’t be necessary. However, if you’re using dedicated IPs, it’s essential to set up your PTR record. An SPF record specifies which IPs are allowed to send emails for your domain, and a common mistake is creating separate SPF records for each email service. Instead, use one record for multiple email services.

DKIM is essential for the DomainKeys Identified Mail protocol. This TXT DNS record enables email authentication and prevents unauthorized senders from hijacking your reputation. Finally, setting up a DMARC record provides email service providers with instructions on how to handle invalid emails purporting to be from your domain.

Email Domains and IP Pools
Reputation signals from domains, subdomains, IP addresses, and sender email addresses affect email delivery. To create a reputational firewall between corporate emails and marketing emails, ensure that they use different domains. Facebook uses fb.com for its corporate email and facebookmail.com for marketing emails. Meanwhile, Slack uses slack-corp.com for its corporate email and slack.com for marketing emails.

Moreover, creating email subdomains for various email classes, such as account emails and marketing announcements, are necessary. For IP addresses, choose between shared IPs, private IPs, and BYOIP. The shared IP is the cheapest option but isn’t suitable for high-volume email senders, whereas private IPs are ideal but need to be warmed up slowly over time. BYOIP is a suitable option for businesses who want to avoid vendor lock-in.

Managing Your Sender Reputation
To protect your email deliverability and sender reputation, businesses must be mindful of their engagement rates. Engagement rates reflect a recipient’s interest in your emails. Additionally, reporting spam emails helps to stop an email from delivering to spam folders. Notably, an unsolicited email, such as those from purchased email lists, generates poor recipient engagement rates and higher spam complaints.

Furthermore, sending frequent emails is essential, and a single email every quarter will not help businesses maintain an excellent sender reputation. Finally, removing inactive email subscribers and re-engaging with inactive subscribers are critical measures to keeping the recipient’s engagement rates high.

Conclusion
Setting up an email infrastructure and managing reputation can be complicated, but it is necessary to ensure that emails end up in the recipient’s inbox, not in the spam folder. Maximizing email deliverability requires creating a reputational firewall between different email classes, knowing how to set up DNS records and IP addresses, and managing sender reputation through a variety of engagement measures. Follow this guide, and your emails will have a higher likelihood of landing in the recipient’s inbox.