Sending Domain / Domain Alignment Strategy
- Ian Graham
- David Haskell (Unlicensed)
Summary / TL:DR: This is an article outlining the 14West email sending domain strategy. It also explains the reasoning behind the strategy, and explains the importance of good domain management and reputation to deliverability and successful email marketing.
Table of contents
Domain Reputation and Deliverability
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 sound 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 Three Mail Streams
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.BrandA.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.BrandA.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.BrandA.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.
Domain Alignment and Deliverability
The primary control to observe and restrict email domain usage is DMARC. Alignment is at the heart of DMARC; without a firm understanding of it, you may fall victim to a stalled-out project or inadvertently and unknowingly block legitimate email.
In its simplest explanation, alignment refers to the relationship between what humans see in the “from” address and what the inbound machinery reads from the header portion of the email when checking domains in the DKIM and SPF record.
Alignment requires that the “from” domain match either of the domains used in DKIM or SPF. Only emails that are aligned can pass DMARC. The 14 West Deliverability and IT teams work collaboratively to ensure correct alignment.
An illustrated example, via dmarcian:
The process of aligning your email proves to the outside world that a particular vendor or server has been explicitly authorized to send on your organization’s behalf. The big picture is that once you’ve aligned all of the mail you do want delivered, you can instruct email receivers to discard anything that you haven’t approved. Without alignment, degrees of uncertainty are introduced when an email receiver is attempting to confirm the origin and trustworthiness of a message.
Your ultimate goal is to reach as close to 100% alignment as possible with each of your email vendors and then publish an increasingly restrictive DMARC policy of p=quarantine and p=reject.
Further Reading
Everything Marketing Managers Need To Know About Email Subdomains
https://help.activecampaign.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017633519-Subdomains-and-deliverability
https://www.mailgun.com/blog/the-basics-of-email-subdomains/
Wrap up
You should now have a better understanding of the 14West email sending domain strategy.
Have questions about the domain strategy, domain reputation, or anything else?
Please open a Support ticket, and the Deliverability team will be happy to help.