If you are an experienced outbound email sender or even if you’re not, you need to take care of your deliverability if you want your emails to end up in your recipients’ inbox folder. And you want that, right?
Among many factors that affect the deliverability rate, the reputation of your domain and your email server IP plays the most important role.
Difference between a domain reputation and an email server IP reputation
Domain reputation
Your email domain used for sending emails has its reputation which depends on many factors:
- Domain’s “age”- One week after the new domain is registered, it is considered suspicious. A good domain reputation is a crucial factor for deliverability and you will gain a good reputation over time, but you will have to invest some time in warming up your newly registered domain. Read more about it here.
- Email address used for sending - Similarly to warming up the email domain, you should warm up all email addresses related to that domain. The procedure is pretty simple, send just a few emails daily and make sure to do it manually without any automation - automated campaigns will come later in the process. You should also receive some emails, so it would be good to receive responses to some of the messages you send. If you are unsure what the process of warming up an email address should look like, read more about it in this article.
- Domain classification on the web - another important factor is how your domain is classified on the web (e.g. business, industry, education, etc.)
Server IP reputation
The email Server IP reputation depends a lot on your email provider.
If you send your messages using an email address provided by Google, you will be assigned an IP from Google. If you host your own email server (you have an SMTP and IMAP configured on your server), you will get some IPs from the server host. What this basically means is that sometimes, the IPs you get from your email provider or from your service provider already have a reputation – good or poor. That’s why it’s crucial to check your email server IP.
How to check your web reputation & email reputation?
You can find a lot of tools on the web that will let you do just that.
Our team uses an awesome tool called MXtoolbox.
If you do not know your IP address, just paste the domain name in the search box and the MXtoolbox will find your dedicated IP address for you.
This tool will show you if you are blacklisted.
In case you’re listed somewhere, you should go there and check the unlisting process (what to do to get off the list). Sometimes you just need to prove you’re not a bot. And sometimes, they require to send them a message with an unlisting request.
One more very important step is to check your DNS records and in case you do haven’t already set up SPF and DKIM, it’s the perfect time to do it now if you want to have better control over your email deliverability.
Domain health will show you if there’s any problem with your DNS record or Mail Server.
Also, there’s one more important step for you to do and that is to check if your email may look spammy to other email servers.
You can use Mail-tester for that (up to three emails per day for free).
First, start a campaign from Autoklose with the email address that Mail-tester generated for you.
Make sure to send the actual email copy - the one that you wish to send to your prospects.
Once you see that the campaign is sent to that email address, go back to Mail-tester and check your score.
Obviously 10 is a goal here, the closer you get to 10, the better for you and your emails.
8-9 is also a great score but try and fix all the mistakes shown by Mail-tester.
6-7 is also acceptable but some strict email providers may still block some of your emails.
5 and below is not a good score and you should really work on your email server settings and email content.
Read more about how Mail-tester works here.
Why is this important?
If you’re taking your outreach seriously, you will take all that we’ve discussed here seriously too. In a nutshell, if you neglect this, your email account might get blocked and your domain may get blacklisted. If that happens, even emails with the best content won’t get to your prospects’ inboxes.
Keep in mind that you have the ability to control your domain reputation.
It’s especially important if you’re automating your email campaigns with Autoklose.
Since you directly integrate your SMTP (sending email server) with Autoklose, it’s only logical that the reputation of your domain and IP(s) affect the deliverability of your cold email campaigns.
If your IP was used to send a huge number of emails in a short period of time, that will negatively affect the reputation of your email server IP.
If you’re trying to send too many emails too quickly- that will look suspicious and unnatural, and it may negatively affect your reputation after your email provider notes such behavior.
That is also why we recommend to start slowly and send emails to no more than 50 new recipients per day in the first couple of days. Read more about sending limits here.
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If you have any questions do not hesitate to initiate a live chat.
Happy klosing! :)
Your autoklose.com team!
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