The importance of a healthy domain

I originally posted this over at www.dmaemailblog.com

One factor which is often overlooked with regards to email deliverability is the health of a sending domain name. The actual 'from' domain plays a very important job when it comes to getting your emails delivered to your subscriber's inbox.

Apart from the (very important) basics, such as the power of brand recognition, there are many unseen factors to do with your domain name, which may be preventing your emails to be delivered as successfully as they could be.

The main things to be aware of are:

1: Authentication
2: Reverse DNS
3: Active sending 'from' address
4: Active Abuse@ and Postmaster@ addresses
5: Whether the domain is blacklisted

Let's take a quick look at each of these influencing factors:

1: Authentication

Authentication is a key factor to good deliverability and is growing steadily in importance and use.  The main types of authentication which need to be done on a domain are SPF, SenderID, Domain keys or DKIM. You can download a whitepaper by Return Path here which explains more about it.

2: Reverse DNS

Reverse DNS (RDNS) is a very basic, yet important factor in the health of a domain. Many ISP's will not deliver a message from a domain which doesn't have a RDNS and there are some blacklists out there that will put you on their list for this as well. You can check your RDNS at www.dnsstuff.com

3: Active sending 'from' address

Don't be fooled into thinking otherwise -the ISP's do check these, so make sure that your sending address is active and monitored. If it isn't, there's a good chance that not only will the emails not be delivered, but that you may get blacklisted.

4: Active Abuse@ and Postmaster@ addresses

Ensure both these addresses are active and monitored. ISP's, system administrators and blacklists all check to see if these are functioning addresses. It is also advisable to register the domain at www.abuse.net.                                                                                       

5: Whether the domain is blacklisted

This a very obvious thing to do, but you'd be surprised how many companies don't have it scheduled to do on a regular basis. A free service which allows you to do this is www.robtex.com.

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