Domain reputation issues
Overview
In the day-to-day process of sending emails, reputation issues may arise and lead to problems with subscribers receiving and engaging with messages. This article provides guidance on identifying potential reputation issues and offers solutions to address them.
Learn more about common deliverability issues and how to resolve them.
Email metrics that can indicate reputation issues
- Delivery rate: <95%
- Bounce rate: >5%
- Defferal rate: >20%
- Open rate: <20%
- Unsubscribe rate: >1%
- Complaint rate: >0.1%
TIP: Reputation issues can be repaired. The key to fixing reputation issues is identifying any poor list-health and/or sending practices.
How to fix reputation issues
Follow these steps to fix domain reputation issues:
- For high bounce rates, review bounce rate themes using this report template.
- Reach out to our support team for more assistance if a common reason isn't easily identified.
- Prioritize the next few sends for subscribers who have signed up or engaged within the past 90 days.
- Ensure all signup sources are secured with CAPTCHA and have clear opt-in consent.
- Learn more about how to enable Google reCAPTCHA.
- Review recent campaigns with high negative engagement rates (such as unsubscribes or complaints) and pinpoint potential sources that may require updates.
- Remove all recipients who have not directly opted into receiving marketing content.
- Ensure email content follow these best practices:
- Ensure that promotional content is not being repeated in a way that could lead to subscriber fatigue.
- Helpful/informative content is being sent with personalized information.
- Regularly review campaign metrics and only ramp back up to less engaged subscribes once stronger rates return.
- Consider pausing sends to subscribers who have been unengaged for over 12 months and plan to target them later with a highly engaging re-engagement campaign once overall performance stabilizes.
Key methods to protecting domain reputation
- Schedule regular reviews of overall engagement trends and per-campaign performances. Leverage the email deliverability dashboard template to quickly build a dashboard with insightful reports.
- Set up Google's Postmaster Tool to monitor domain reputation specific to Gmail.
- Ensure all signup sources are secured with CAPTCHA and have clear opt-in consent.
- Opt-in should be voluntary and not mandatory.
- Learn more about how to enable Google reCAPTCHA.
- Set up strong subscriber lifecycle automations.
- Refer to our Templates library here for helpful templates to get started including: Welcome journeys, new customer nurture/onboarding series, and re-engagement check-in's.
- Enable the Sunset policy for the account to automatically remove long-term unengaged subscribers.
- Build campaigns and automations with personalized content wherever possible.
- Review Ortto's deliverability knowledge base and monthly blog posts for ongoing deliverability learning opportunities.