Getting your emails in front of your audience is half the battle in keeping your fans engaged with your content, driving ticket sales, and getting fans in the seats of your next shows. So what’s the secret to making sure your email campaigns are consistently getting in front of your fans, and converting? The answer’s simple: your sender reputation (read: deliverability) and using a subdomain to send emails. Not sure what that means? We’ve got you covered - let’s get into it!
What does deliverability mean for an events email marketer?
Deliverability is everything! It’s essentially your sender reputation - think of it like a grade you get from your Internet Service Provider (think: Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook) based on how your subscribers are engaging with your emails. ISPs use that information to determine whether or not your fans want to keep seeing your emails and if they should place your email in their primary inbox, other inbox or the dreaded spam folder. Your deliverability determines whether your fans actually see your emails and poor deliverability means wasted revenue potential.
Related: Why You Need To Focus on Email Deliverability To Drive Higher Revenue For Your Next Event
Subdomains
Now that you know a little bit about deliverability, you're probably wondering where subdomains fit in all of this. A subdomain is the unique identifier of a specific website, and can determine whether an ISP trusts you enough to place you in your fans' primary inbox! In the below example, ‘hive.co’ is referred to as the parent domain, and ‘mail’ as the child domain.
It’s the prefix to the domain that indicates it’s a subsection of the larger domain, and comes immediately after the @ symbol. The great thing about subdomains is that you can put anything before the @ symbol from anima@mail.hive.co to spaghetti@mail.hive.co.
Quick plug: Setting up a subdomain on Hive is a breeze. For a step by step guide, check out this FAQ!
How do subdomains affect your deliverability?
Without a subdomain, your emails are more likely to end up in spam. But that’s not all! If you keep using a parent domain to send all of your emails that fans haven’t engaged with, or don’t want to see, ISPs are more likely to determine that you’re not a trusted sender and not worth inbox placement. By not using a subdomain, you’re jeopardizing your parent domain’s sender reputation and possibly hurting the effectiveness of all your future email campaigns. That means fans won’t be receiving your tour news, ticket releases, or any of the promotional campaigns you have for your next show. It’s way easier to stay out of your ISPs bad side by using smart deliverability strategies like subdomains, then getting back on their good side once they’ve already decided you’re untrustworthy.
Protecting your sender reputation with subdomains
By separating out all of your different types of emails on intentionally dedicated subdomains, from transactional to marketing and support, you protect mistakes on one email subdomain from affecting the sender reputation of the others.
Imagine you accidentally send a draft of a new marketing campaign for a concert that’s being held in Toronto to your whole list – it doesn’t have the correct subject, and the template is half complete. Often subscribers won’t even check to see where the campaign came from before marking it as spam. If you send this oops campaign on your marketing email subdomain, the reputation of that email subdomain will get worse, but the reputation of your other email subdomains will be protected!
Subdomains seperate out engagement levels
There are naturally some emails that will see a lot more engagement because they need to be seen by your fan. Think transactional emails like ticket confirmations, merch shipping notices, or account password resets that need to have the best deliverability. Putting your marketing emails on the same subdomain as your transactional emails essentially ensures that the deliverability of your transactional emails will decrease, as marketing emails receive an average of 20-30% opens, while password resets and order confirmations receive an average of 80-90% opens.
Wrap up
Designing beautiful email campaigns, writing great marketing copy, and putting in the work to make sure your email content is engaging goes hand in hand with a strong deliverability strategy. Your email marketing campaigns won’t maximize engagement, or drive ticket sales with just one or the other. Email subdomains are the best way to ensure your emails land in your subscribers’ inboxes. A few quick changes and you’ll already see your deliverability going up, up, up!
Interested in more email deliverability tips? Check out our Ultimate Guide to Email Deliverability for deeper insights!
