Firms that send emails from more than one system are reducing their deliverability, according to practitioners of Google Postmaster.
TL;DR: inventory your shared-domain systems.
Google Postmaster checks sender reputation per sending domain. What this means is that any newsletters or sales sequences are assessed together if they share the domain.
So, whenever Postmaster reports “Needs work” for a firm to honour unsubscribes, it is the second system on that domain that is likely still emailing someone that has opted out elsewhere. Continued engagement to unsubscribes can hurt inbox placement for that whole umbrella domain.
According to a post on the Audience Bridge blog, Google will expect an unsubscribe to take effect within around two days, and count the request even if the sender’s servers never received it. A failing CRM or sales tool is one that does not know about an unsubscribe processed by another tool.
A subdomain, too, does not isolate the risk; activity there still counts toward the main domain. Therefore, recommended actions to take right now involve:
- Finding every system that sends from a single domain, often helped using DMARC reports.
- Syncing unsubscribe lists.
- Giving each mailing list its own List-ID or Form address.
- Including a one-click unsubscribe CTA in every marketing email.
Status updates can take one to two weeks. Be aware that this is a practitioner’s account rather than Google policy documentation.
So, what does this mean for fund marketers?
List your shared-domain systems
Fund firms likely use separate CRMs, investor portals, event platforms, newsletter tools and individual mailboxes across their entire staff brigade. See which of these share your domain after creating an inventory.
Sync opt-outs
As a compliance obligation under marketing consent and data protection rules, prospects should be able to easily unsubscribe from your emails. If they opt-out of monthly commentaries, they should not incur event invitations from a tool that has not ‘got the memo’.
Separate your email stream
Give commentaries, event invites and IR correspondences distinct sender addresses and list tags, keeping transactional investor notices separate from marketing. It is important to protect one-to-one email; Google’s assessment is domain-wide and can affect deliverability between your team and inventors.
Of course, DMARC reports and Postmaster Tools change often. But they are free, and reputational problems within a small high-value list can be a costly mistake that is, in actual fact, easily avoided.
Source
Chris Miquel/Audience Bridge, “Your newsletter isn’t the unsubscribe problem”
