If most contacts on your list(s) use Gmail for their email address, you can use Google Postmaster Tools to learn the overall health of your domain. In addition, Google Postmaster Tools can help monitor and debug all deliverability issues.
What is Google Postmaster?
Google Postmaster is a free tool provided by Google that will tell you exactly what Gmail thinks of your domain reputation (Good, Medium, Low, or Bad). It will definitively answer the question, "Do I have a good domain reputation at Gmail?". For most senders, at least in the US, Gmail composes a large majority of your list, so this will give you a very important pulse of your overall domain reputation.
In addition, Google Postmaster will also show data about SPF/DKIM/DMARC failures, spam complaints, IP reputation, encryption success rate, and more.
In short, we recommend that everyone setup Gmail postmaster tools if possible. It is extremely useful information to have when monitoring and debugging deliverability issues of all types.
How to set up Google Postmaster
In order to use Google Postmaster, you'll need to add and verify your authentication domains to Google Postmaster. The authentication domain is the DKIM (d=) that is used to authenticate your email. Google Postmaster uses your DKIM to identify your email traffic and provide access to traffic analytics.
To add and verify your domain in Google Postmaster:
- Set up DKIM for your domain. If you are using multiple domains, you can set up DKIM for all of them.
- Go to postmaster.google.com and click the + button on the bottom-right.
- A modal pop-up will appear. Enter your DKIM.
- Google Postmaster will instruct you to create a TXT record in the DNS for your domain:
Note that you will need to create a TXT record with your web host (eg, GoDaddy). - After adding the TXT record, go back to Google Postmaster and click "Verify" to complete the setup.
After completing the setup you will begin to see data populate in Google Postmaster. Note that retroactive data will not be available. If you don't see data after your next few campaigns send, use the SPF/DKIM/DMARC check tool check tool to make sure your DKIM is set up.
What to do if your domain reputation isn't good
This issue can happen if your Google contacts mark your emails as spam or if they don't engage positively with your communications. Repeatedly sending emails to contacts who are not engaging with your messages is the primary reason for declining your domain reputation. Even a legitimate opt-in list can result in a poor reputation if it's old and needs to be cleaned. As a best practice, we recommend implementing a method to remove unengaged contacts from your list regularly.
You can use our Engagement Management tool to quickly remove unengaged contacts from your list(s) right away.