Why use a subdomain when sending Zoho Marketing Automation emails?

To increase your deliverability rates and thwart ruining your domain reputation, that’s why!

You’ve stumbled upon sending emails through a subdomain. Congrats! Sending email through a subdomain is an industry best practice for many reasons. Unless you work with a Zoho Marketing Automation solution expert like QuakeCinch, this may not even be on your radar. The main reason being to keep emails from your company flowing to inboxes, not spam folders.

A domain is usually in a format like xxxxx@yourdomain.com . A subdomain is something like xxxxx@email.yourdomain.com. Notice the ’email’ before the yourcompany.com ? But why use this approach? Think about all the technology services you pay for. Many of them probably send emails on your behalf. Yep, on your behalf. If you do any level of marketing, you probably have a newsletter, or send out follow up emails after a lead or web visitor takes an action or fills out a form. What about that digital signature product you have that sends documents to be digitally signed. What about your system sending out notifications, invoices, reminders, approvals or service follow ups? What about your website? Could your website be sending out emails? If you are using something like Zoho Marketing Automation or Zoho Campaigns (the reason why we are here), that is another service sending bulk emails on your behalf. Using Outlook, Gmail or Zoho Mail to send business emails is another service that sends on your domains behalf. The point I am trying to illustrate is many services, send many emails, for many different reasons, all from your domain. Emails you compose manually and individually take time, effort and thought. You want to ensure that they definitely get delivered to the recipients. You do not want them classified as possible spam when recipients get your email. We realize you do not want any of your emails to get forward to recipients spam folders or outright deleted and never delivered, but it happens to the best of us. What if you could come up with an approach that would keep your user generated emails being highly likely to be delivered. You can, and a good start is the subdomain approach.

Ideally, you send high priority emails individually from “yourdomain.com” using Gmail, Outlook or Zoho Mail. You know, “work email”. Think about your newsletters. You want those to be delivered, but they are not as important as your individual work emails. You do not want people that think your email newsletter is spam to impact email deliverability for your work emails, right. For sake of conceptualizing this approach, lets add another layer. What about emails you nurture leads with? Lead nurturing emails are usually generated from your marketing automation system such as Zoho Marketing Automation and sent based on user behaviors on your website, engagement with past emails, a lead score or grade to find the hottest leads, their online profile interests and attributes etc. Of the three types of emails, work, newsletter, and lead nurturing, which do you think is the least important to guarantee delivery? Lead nurturing emails are advanced drip marketing emails created using Zoho’s journeys and of the three, the least important in many cases. For some, this is their bread and butter. Think about how many emails are going to be sent to one person using automated marketing? Probably more than one off emails directly from a coworker.

If you create a subdomain like “email.yourcompany.com” and send your lead nurturing emails or marketing automation emails from that domain rather than “yourcompany.com”, many recipient email servers look at them as entirely different companies, and tarnishing one domains reputation does not affect the other. You can send out coupon codes, surveys, system-generated solicitations (you know, junk email 🙂 ), without it directly impacting email deliverability for your work email. Now, that’s not entirely true, but it’s more true than not and another tactic in your email deliverability tool chest.

How do we configure Zoho Marketing Automation to send emails from a subdomain? Open Zoho Marketing Automation, choose Settings in the bottom left, and select Domain Authentication in the top right.

Go ahead and add your subdomain. Successful results are shown on the next screen. In our screenshots and examples we use the subdomain “email.fburgcrm.com” but all we need to do is create a simple subdomain so we suggest “e”. That would make our email domain “e.fburgcrm.com”. Having one letter subdomain makes it easy for the recipient to realize it’s from you without being an eyeful.

This article is not geared towards explaining how to create the needed DNS records to authorize Zoho to be ale to send as “e.yourcompany.com”. However, below is a helpful link from the Zoho help pages. You’ll need to setup a domain for “e.yourdomain.com” and usually done with who ever you registered your domain with.

How to authenticate your domain in Zoho MarketingHub

It is imperative to do the SPF and DKIM implementation as noted above. Actually, it’s required from Zoho to be able to send from their servers as your domain. You can take these deliverability settings to the next level by creating a DMARC policy.

Easy Peasy, right?

After subdomain setup, you’re ready to start sending email campaigns using Zoho Marketing Automation. If you had your base domain setup and you were sending emails before this reconfiguring, you’re now all set. Simply goes through the motions for sending an email campaign in Zoho Marketing Automation or Zoho Campaigns, but this time select your new subdomain in the ‘Sender’ field as shown below.

You can also have replies sent to your subdomain email address if your email server is configured to accept that email address. As a Zoho One implementation company, we use all Zoho including Zoho Mail. With Zoho Mail, you can configure sub domain stripping for your subdomain.

There are many aspects to email deliverability, but this is a proven tactic to boost your email deliverability rates. Try to ramp up or warm up your new email subdomain. You do not want to get caught blasting emails right out the gate from the new subdomain. With Zoho Marketing Automation, you can choose to send emails in batches instead of a huge bulk send.

QuakeCinch has extensive experience implementing Zoho Marketing Automation and we can get you up and running quickly!