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Subdomains and deliverability

Using subdomains for email sends is a great way to boost your deliverability and reputation as an email sender. 

 

In this article, you'll learn what subdomains are and how to use them to achieve high deliverability rates.

What is a domain and subdomain?

A domain (sometimes called a base domain) is a unique identifier that categorizes an entity, such as a company website. For example, "ansleycollege.edu" is a base domain. Domain reputation helps mailbox providers decide whether to accept your mail, deliver it, mark it as spam, or block it outright. 

 

A subdomain is an extension of the base domain. For example, in the web address, "news.ansleycollege.edu," the subdomain is "news." Subdomains are vital in building a robust sending reputation across your different email types (sometimes called "mail streams").

 

Using subdomains can help you minimize potential domain reputation issues and make sure your mail goes where you want it to go.

 

Why use a subdomain?

One way to help keep your domain reputation high is to segment your email types and use subdomains for sending different campaigns. 

 

For example, you can use the subdomain "blog.yourwebsite.edu" to send blog updates to your audience or use "events.yourwebsite.edu" to alert your audience about upcoming events in their area. 

 

Subdomains are used by email marketers that want to assign a unique name or subset to a specific email type. The domain owner can set a subdomain to a specific email type and manage this as a separate domain from their base domain (with its own reputation).

 

How do subdomains influence your sender reputation?

Your subdomain reputation(s) can impact base domain reputation, but the impact between subdomains will be small. Subdomains are not a way to avoid a lousy domain reputation. 

 

The best way to see good performance is to follow best sending practices in addition to using a subdomain.

 

Subdomains should be treated as an extension of the base domain and managed with best sending practices to ensure high deliverability across your different types of emails. Using deliverability monitoring tools such as Google Postmaster Tools, you can manage your domain reputation to track subdomains separately. 

 

For example, it can help you identify pain points, reputation shifts, and other activities that could potentially harm your deliverability.

What are some use cases and strategies for subdomains?

Sending different types of emails through specific subdomains is important because this can help lower the risk of an underperforming marketing email overpowering and negatively impacting other emails that have actions to be completed, such as password resets.

You can use subdomains for different email use cases, like:

 

Transactional

  • Examples include order confirmations, password resets, and delivery notifications.
  • Typically have the highest engagement rates and lowest spam complaint rates.

eduConverse is a marketing automation platform. We don't have a dedicated transactional email server. Your transactional emails (like order confirmations and receipts) should come from a transactional email service such as With a transactional email service, such as SendGrid, Mailgun, or Amazon SES, to name a few.

 

While you cannot use eduConverse to send transactional emails, it's still good practice to also use our platform to send automated follow-up emails to your customers. 

 

Various admission in-take points

  • You could create a sub-domain for undergraduate, graduate, and professional education admissions. 
  • These see varying engagement rates based on segments, content, and other deliverability factors

Institution-wide emails

  • Examples include class registration notifications
  • These emails see high engagement rates because they contain high-value information.

Since you don't want bulk sending (like a mass audience update) to influence your institution-wide emails negatively, you can try sending them using a base domain, and then create multiple subdomains (news.ansleycollege.edu, events.ansleycollege.edu) to use for your other types of emails.

 

Keep in mind that you need to have substantial and consistent volume to make this strategy effective. Frequent reputation shifts between the subdomains can influence the base domain reputation negatively.

 

Note: If issues arise when sending your campaigns, like emailing an older list and seeing low open rates and a higher than average bounce rate, don't worry – the subdomain is unlikely to be negatively influenced by potential reputation changes because an email may have underperformed.

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