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Sending Domain / Domain Alignment Strategy

When it comes to getting your email to your customers as quickly as possible, it’s crucial to maintain a good domain reputation. Here at 14West, we’ve developed a strategy based on industry best practices and client input so that our clients can successfully deliver mail to both existing and potential customers.

A solid domain strategy is a cornerstone to deliverability, because domain reputation and alignment is crucial: it’s how your recipient recognizes your brand, it’s how email authentication protocols verify your mail, it’s how ISPs and mailbox providers choose where they want to put your mail.

Spinning up a new domain, warming it up, and establishing good reputation take a lot of effort. We want these domains (and their reputations) to be durable, as well as follow modern email marketing best practices. Reducing the number of new domains also helps bolster reputation: creating and abandoning domains rapidly will appear suspicious to ISPs and mailbox providers, whereas they take good-faith efforts at communication and mitigation as a positive (or at least anti-negative) indicator.

Your mail falls into three streams: Bulk Mail, Paid Mail, and Transactional Mail. We used these three mailstreams to structure our domain strategy, which uses subdomains to distinguish your different types mail.

• Bulk Mail will be designated with an “mb.” prefix – mb.publicationA.com

  • Bulk mail is your marketing mail, sent to prospects and in some cases paid subscribers. Bulk mail makes up the bulk of your mail volume.

• Transactional mail will be designated with an “mt.” prefix – mt.publicationA.com

  • Transactional mail is any mail related directly to a transaction: these are confirmations, receipts, renewal notices, and similar. There should be no marketing content in transactional email.

• Paid Mail will be designated with an “mp.” prefix – mp.publicationA.com

  • Paid mail includes any publication that requires a purchase or subscription to receive. These are the exclusive members-only type emails and alerts.

By using subdomains to distinguish between bulk, paid and transactional mail, we protect each mail stream from the others – for example, hitting a blocklist or running into an issue with bulk mail won’t stop people from receiving order confirmations, and if there’s an issue with paid mail, we can tell ISPs with confidence that these people have paid and expect to receive that mail. We further secure/delineate between mailstreams by providing separate IP pools for each mailstream.

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