Designing a beautiful email is only half the job for email marketers. You need the right strategies to consistently land in your customers' inboxes and be seen by your customers. Without them you're missing out on potential sales which means less money in your pocket.
Your sender reputation (read: deliverability) and using a subdomain are the keys to getting your emails in front of your customers and converting.
Let’s get into it!
What is deliverability important for an email marketer?
Deliverability is 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 customers want to keep seeing your emails. A strong sender reputation gets you a seat at the cool table - your customers’ primary inbox, otherwise your email gets sent to the other inbox or the dreaded spam folder. Your deliverability determines whether your customers actually see your emails and poor deliverability means wasted revenue potential.
What are 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 customers' 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?
Because your subdomain is directly tied to your subdomain, without one your emails are more likely to end up in spam. But that’s not all! If you only use a parent domain to send all of your emails that get low engagement, 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 customers won’t be receiving your sale promotions, new product release emails, or account support emails. Stay out of your ISPs bad side by using smart deliverability strategies like subdomains to remain a trustworthy sender.
Why your subdomains protect your sender reputation
Look, everyone makes mistakes. We've all sent the wrong email or hit reply all at least once. But when you seperate your different types of emails on intentionally dedicated subdomains, 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 special VIP promo to your whole list – it doesn’t have the correct subject, and the template is half complete. Often subscribers don't check to see where the campaign comes from before immediately 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 separate out engagement levels
There are naturally some emails that will see a lot more engagement because they need to be seen by your customer. 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
There are a lot of moving parts that make up an effective email marketing strategy that consistently drives engagement and maximizes conversions. Taking the time now to set up your email subdomains is the best way to ensure your emails land in your subscribers’ inboxes. A few quick changes and you’ll already see your deliverability and email revenue going up, up, up!