Email domain reputation refers to the overall trustworthiness of your domain name as an email sender. Maintaining a strong email domain reputation is critical for inbox placement and consistent delivery rates, and several factors influence it.

Email engagement is one of the most influential factors in email domain reputation, as it indicates recipients value your content and are receptive to your emails. Conversely, poor email engagement (such as spam complaints or high unsubscribe rates) can negatively impact your domain reputation. Spam traps are another factor, as they can trigger your messages to be quarantined into SPAM folders and negatively affect email deliverability.

Understanding Email Domain Reputation and Its Importance

However, your email domain’s reputation is multifaceted, and each receiver uses its own proprietary scoring process to determine whether you’re a trustworthy sender or not. Therefore, it’s difficult to know exactly what your domain reputation is at each receiver because most email receivers don’t share their judgments publicly.

Fortunately, there are a few free online reputation tools and lookup services (such as Senderbase or Talos Intelligence) that aggregate the judgements of multiple receivers to provide you with a general overview of your email domain reputation.

Ensure your email content is highly relevant to the recipients you’re targeting, and avoid using words associated with spamming in your subject lines. Additionally, consider embracing authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM and DMARC that help confirm the authenticity of your emails, curbing spoofing and phishing attempts. Finally, regularly review your metrics and look for sudden changes in inbox placement and engagement, as these may indicate a decline in email domain reputation.