Best Practices on Email Sending Structure & Domain Consistency

Segregate Your Email Activity per Domain and IP Pool

Using single-purpose subdomains is key to build a reputation quickly and secure your email delivery, especially if you send both transactional messages (e.g., account creation confirmation emails) and optional marketing communications targeting thousands of subscribers at once (e.g., a weekly newsletter).

Here is how a typical email setup looks like:

Dedicating a pair of IP/subdomain to your transactional messages and a different pair of IP/subdomain to your marketing communications is highly recommended for two reasons:

1. Enhanced Reputation Management

By segregating email types, you can better manage the reputation of each domain and IP address.

This prevents issues with one type of email affecting the deliverability of others, giving you time to fix your issues and improve your email practices (e.g., in case your newsletters are blocked, your other emails won't necessarily be blocked):

2. Improved Deliverability

Dedicated domains and IPs allow you to adapt your email infrastructure to your needs. This can result in better deliverability rates, as inbox providers and spam filters may treat transactional and marketing emails differently.

Also, you will be able to track separately the performance of your emails (e.g., identify the causes of abnormal spam rates, etc.) and address issues in a more flexible way (e.g., having your marketing subdomain blocked will not necessarily mean that your transactional subdomain will be blocked).

Choosing a Sending Domain

When creating your sending subdomains, please consider the following points:

→ Send Emails Exclusively from Subdomains

It is essential to send emails using subdomains to properly segregate email sending by activity (for example, marketing vs. transactional emails).

→ Choose Your Subdomain Name Carefully

Select your subdomain names thoughtfully. The names you choose will be visible to recipients and help them identify your different communications (e.g. news.domain.com for newsletters, service.domain.com for transactional emails, etc).

→ Send Emails from the Right Domain

The main objective here, in addition to making your emails easier to identify by recipients, is to avoid being mistaken for a bad sender that commonly uses "cousin domains" or "lookalike domains".

Domain

Select a subdomain under your primary domain to gain credibility with inbox providers and email recipients (e.g., news.domain.com).

Don't choose another domain that has no history (e.g., news.randominternaldomain.com). This is especially important for known brands that can be victims of phishing/spoofing campaigns.

Top-level Domain (TLD)

Be sure to use a top-level domain that matches the one of the links you put in your emails.

For example, if you have a localized website (e.g., domain.fr) and a global domain (domain.com), you will need to set up two different sending subdomains to send your newsletters so that the TLD of your links and the TLD of your sending domains are aligned:

• For your localized newsletters: news.domain.fr

• For your global newsletters: news.domain.com

Aligning Your Sending and Your Tracking Domain

Domain consistency is a best practice when sending emails.

While this is optional, we recommend using a dedicated click tracking subdomain for all the emails sent from Batch (e.g., click.domain.com) that will be aligned with your root domain (e.g., domain.com). If you send emails from news.domain.fr and news.domain.com, make sure you have two different tracking domains (e.g., click.domain.fr and click.domain.com).

Using a custom tracking domain has several advantages:

• Increased trust: Links in your emails point to a domain your customers recognize. This reduces the risk of the emails being marked as suspicious or fraudulent. Also, this helps your customers verify the message they just received is not a phishing email.

• Increased security: HTTPS tracking links are a big improvement over HTTP tracking links, especially if you are providing a service in a sensitive sector (e.g., banking, insurance, etc.) or sending sensitive messages (e.g., verification codes, password reset links, etc.).

• Better deliverability: Email providers are more likely to trust emails with a tracking domain aligned with the root domain and no mixed content (e.g., mixed HTTP and HTTPS links), leading to improved email deliverability rates.