Tool

Improve your email deliverability with Google Postmaster Tools

Feb 3, 2020

If you send a large volume of emails to Gmail users (who doesn’t?), you can use Postmaster Tools to see:

If users are marking your emails as spam
Whether you’re following Gmail’s best practices
Why your emails might not be delivered
If your emails are being sent securely

Can it really be this easy?

Google Postmaster Tools’ reputation system is surprisingly basic, and yet it works wonders in email deliverability.

This article will explain the benefits of the system and give you a few pointers to get you the most out of it.

When Less is More

Google offers a simple yet powerful four-level classification, boiling everything down to an easily understood question: “How spammy is my reputation?”

Here’s the not-so-secret decoder ring to their four-tier reputation system:

High = Rarely considered spam
Medium = Sends spam intermittently, along with good email
Low = Sends a considerable volume of spam regularly
Bad = High volumes of spam

That’s it. Instead of percentages and decimal points, you know if you’re doing well, average or abysmally.

The Magic of Domain Name Reputation & Segmentation

Google also makes it easy to dip into the sub-IP level of reputation. Most prior ISP reputation systems shared the reputation of an IP address, but was often too broad, especially when multiple clients (i.e., domain names) shared the same IP address. But Google Postmaster Tools can also expose this same simple reputation score on a domain-name level.

Diving into the reputation of your segments can be really powerful too.

Need to look at the reputation of just part of your email stream? Here’s a tip: give that portion of email an additional DKIM signature with a unique domain name, and Google Postmaster Tools can show you the reputation of that domain name (and thus that part of your email stream).

For example, you could create subdomains based on data source:

Type of email	Signature #1	Signature #2
Data source A	example.com	type-a.example.com
Data source B	example.com	type-b.example.com
Data source C	example.com	type-c.example.com

Or based on subscriber activity/engagement:

Type of email	Signature #1	Signature #2
Subscribers less than 30 days old	example.com	type-a.example.com
Subscribers active in the last 90 days	example.com	type-b.example.com
Subscribers not active in the last 90 days	example.com	type-c.example.com

It can even make you stop sending to non-engagers by using this technique if you see that the Google Postmaster domain reputation of the email sent to non-engagers is “bad,” but the reputation of the recent engagers and new subscribers is “high.”

Oh What a Chart Can Do

It even includes a chart showing your reputation over time.

Like magic, Google helps you see and track your email deliverability. Here’s an example of a sender who significantly improved their deliverability in just three months. (Isn’t that encouraging?) It’s easy to see how quickly things improved:

Google-Postmaster-Reputation-Chart

Comparing the dates of Google Postmaster reputation changes to dates of email program changes can yield powerful insights into what caused what.

For example, if you add a bunch of new subscribers and your reputation decreases from “medium” to “low,” there’s something wrong with that new subscriber list. On the other hand, if you segment out a bunch of chronically inactive subscribers and your reputation increases from “low” to “medium,” you know you’ve done something right.

Common-sense correlations like these can often drive changes that will fix a declining reputation or keep things on the up and up.

Conclusion

If you’re one of the many senders out there whose reputation needs improvement, then this article is for you. Or maybe you already get it, but you’re having a hard time telling your team, “Hey guys, we need to stop sending to this worthless, dead-end list.” In that case, show them this article. They just might come around.