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Why Reputation Matters for Your Email Marketing

Email marketing has become one of the crucial ways for businesses to communicate and establish a relationship with their customers. Your marketing team can create a well-researched and enticing subject line followed by relevant content, visuals and a call to action, as well as ticking all the checkboxes for an ‘ideal email campaign’. But what if that email doesn't make it to your audience’s inbox?

In order for email marketing to be effective, the emails have to make their way to the inbox and not be sent to the junk or spam folder or, even worse, be simply blocked by the mailbox provider. But the statistics show that this is not always the case. 1 out of every 5 commercial email never reaches the customer’s inbox! Delivering your emails to your customer’s inbox involves first having a good sender reputation.

Your sending reputation plays a critical role as far as the delivery of your emails is concerned. Mailbox providers take many metrics into consideration to determine your sender reputation, including the proper configuration of your email delivery settings, spam complaints, mailing list, content, engagement, industry blacklists, and more.

To begin with, your priority should be to safely reach your customer’s mailbox and for that, you need a solid email sending infrastructure. At first, step you should undertake to implement outbound email authentication, so your ISPs will know that your emails are coming from a legit source and not from spammers or malicious senders.

The 3 Cornerstones of Email Authentication

Sender Policy Framework (SPF)

SPF is a standard implemented to check if a particular email campaign was launched from an authorized server. It increases your credibility in the eyes of the receiving email server by cross-checking the domain name against the associated IP address to make sure it is legitimate. Without an SPF in place, the mailbox providers will generally reject your emails.

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)

DKIM confirms to the receiving email server that your email can be trusted and has not been tampered with. It helps the receiver to ascertain that an email claiming to have come from a specific domain has been approved by the domain’s owner. This is achieved by using a digital signature linked to a domain name, for each outgoing email message. A DKIM signature means that the email has not been tampered with or hijacked upon delivery and that it comes from a valid sender. If the receiving system has a whitelist of known good sending domains, it can skip the filtering on signed mail from those domains.

Domain-Based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC)

DMARC is an added authentication method that uses both SPF and DKIM to verify whether or not the email was actually sent by the owner of the domain. Both SPF & DKIM must pass for the DMARC to be authenticated and to confirm the email is coming from an authorized server. DMARC also lets email senders inform receiving email servers of what action to take in case an email fails authentication under SPF or DKIM. It proves to ISPs that you are legitimate and are willing to take precautionary measures to protect your identity and reputation.

With a tool like you Domain Reputation API, you can check for any discrepancies in your email authentication. In fact, Domain Reputation API conducts a deep analysis of your entire Mail Server and provides detailed reports of any prevailing issues. Besides your mail servers, this valuable tool can also check your infrastructure that can affect your deliverability including factors like:

• IP reputation: When you use shared IP, your reputation can be affected if it is located in a bad neighbourhood or blacklisted because of the presence of malicious domains in the same shared space.
• Blacklist Appearances: The system checks numerous reputed security data sources and reports if your domain is blacklisted for malware or any other spam.

Domain Reputation API, in fact, evaluates 120 components for any given domain name or IP address and reports any warnings for it, including vulnerabilities in your infrastructure which can be adversely used by malicious actors. So you can use this tool not only for your Email Marketing but also for keeping your online brand safe and protected. Now that’s killing two birds with one tool, isn’t it?

Start improving your reputation today!

https://threatintelligenceplatform.com/threat-intelligence-apis/domain-reputation-api