Domain Health & Recovery: How I Doubled the Number of Meetings Booked in One Month

Any company that uses email marketing to drive growth should prioritize their domain health. 

That’s because email service providers (ESPs) like Gmail and Outlook use your domain reputation to decide whether your email lands in the recipient’s inbox or spam folder. And if your nurture emails only land in spam folders, how will you ever engage prospects?

In this post, I dive into the basics of maintaining a healthy domain. I’ll also share how I fixed a client’s struggling domain and doubled the number of meetings booked for the next month.

Domain 101

Here are some basic terms that I’ll use throughout this post:

• Domain: The location of the website. For example, akoperations.com. 
• Email sending domain: A separate branded domain that we recommend all of our clients configure. The benefit is keeping the email sending domain’s reputation separate from the primary domain’s reputation. For example, akoperations.co. We recommend using .com, .co, or .net as often as you can.
• Domain Name System (DNS): The DNS is where you’ll put all of the records needed to tell a domain how to function properly. An example of your DNS provider might be GoDaddy. You’ll need to update your DNS each time your team implements a tool that connects to your domain.
• Domain reputation: The overall health of your domain as interpreted by mailbox providers.

The Importance of Domain Reputation & Health

A healthy domain is crucial to maximizing your email campaign results. With an unhealthy domain, your results will diminish over time because of poor deliverability, the success rate of marketing emails hitting recipient inboxes. 

• Your emails will not hit inboxes. Instead they'll be undeliverable or end up in spam.
• Email providers will flag or blacklist your domain.
• The integrity of other apps or sites connected to your domain are at risk of depleting performance.

This year, I took on a client that had poor domain health, which impacted their email deliverability. After seeing their open rates start to dip, I immediately dove in to see how we could fix their domain.

How to Maintain a Healthy Domain

Sometimes a domain tanks within a day, sometimes over a few weeks. A domain gone wrong can be rebuilt and restored, but it will take time and effort, putting your pipeline generating campaigns on hold.

So how do you maintain a healthy domain? Stay on top of these key areas:

• Email content: The content of your emails should be valuable to your prospects. Emails with irrelevant content, misleading subject lines, or spammy words can all affect your domain health.
• Email engagement: The more positive interactions between your email and their recipients, the better for your domain health. Positive interactions include opening the email and clicking on links, whereas negative interactions include deleting the email without opening, marking it as spam, or unsubscribing.
• Sending volume: This refers to the amount and consistency of the emails you send. If you regularly send an email to 500 prospects every week, your sending volume is consistent. But if you send 50 emails one week, 500 the next, and 1000 the week after that, your ESP may view your activity as suspicious.
• Bounces: An email bounce is when an email does not deliver as intended. Although there are a variety of reasons why an email could bounce, what you need to know is that they have a negative impact on your deliverability. Be sure to track bounces and unsubscribe them from your email lists so you don’t keep sending to them.
• Spam complaints: Even legitimate senders get spam complaints, which are reports from recipients against emails they don’t want to receive in their inbox. You can avoid them by ensuring your recipients have opted into your emails and that your content stays relevant and valuable.

Recovering My Client's Domain

For my client with a poor domain reputation, I started with the basics. After testing our client’s domain and finding that the emails were hitting Outlook spam folders (our primary receiver inbox), we revised our subject lines and updated our targeting to exclude large companies in the hopes for better engagement. However, neither of those changes were impactful.

We then decided to stop enrolling cold leads into our sales sequences and doubled down on reaching out to known engagers. This had a huge impact on our email engagement—our open and click-thru-rates went up—and our domain reputation started to recover. I confirmed this by using GlockApps to test their domain two to three times a week. After that, with a healthy domain, we more than doubled the number of meetings for my client the next month!

Book More Meetings with Automation and our Strategic Approach

Our mission is to make sales more collaborative, data-driven, and scalable. When sales organizations are built around healthy processes, rep-enabled campaigns, and monitored KPIs, our top funnel program produces consistent sales opportunities—ultimately building more pipeline with better conversion rates. After weeks of pivots and continuous improvement, the AK Program performs almost completely on autopilot, requiring only ongoing management and fresh campaigns that sustain companies forever.