Email communication is crucial for publishers, as it does much more than reply to readers’ inquiries; it can be a source of income from newsletters, sponsorship advertising deals, affiliate marketing, and business collaboration. Email services are generally considered secondary and overlooked.
A major miscalculation that could lead to losses is overlooking that email addresses, domains, and domain configurations can significantly affect deliverability and clients’ perception of business deals.
Sendable Email Begins With Your Domain
The journey of an email to the recipient’s inbox involves much more than simply pressing the “send” key.
Most mail providers use multiple signals or markers to determine whether a message should be delivered, filtered, or rejected. Having a professionally formatted email address linked with your publishing domain puts you in sole control of that infrastructure. You no longer depend entirely on the address given to you at the generic level; instead, you’re the recognizable sender tied to the publication.
Verifying the sending domain is important here. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC allow receiving systems to verify whether a message is legitimate and originated from the sender’s domain. According to the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG), authentication can provide signals for spam filtering and enable receivers to identify only authorized senders. Authentication is a must for those who send emails from sending domains, according to Google.
As of the time of updating the Gmail guidance, any message sent without the authentication process might cause recipients to see it as spam or have their emails rejected. If the email marketer is using the bulk method, then their emails would be required to have even stricter policies of SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
Pubsellers are affected in two different ways: A newsletter platform might actually be sending the campaign for you but your website domain, the publisher’s, still plays the role of sender identification
It is possible to have the best infrastructure, yet the mail does not go directly into a recipient’s inbox. Quality of content, engagement level, sending style, spam complaints and reputation are all key. But the authentication of the domain, together with consistency in the sender’s identity, could make the technical base of your publication more robust.
Credibility Is Key When Money Is At Stake
It shouldn’t be considered sufficient to ensure a message is delivered to its intended destination simply because it is properly formatted and correctly addressed. The sender should be equally convincing.
Different publishers approach an ad agency with very similar traffic and audience data. The first one sends their email from [email protected], a clearly defined email address belonging to the publication, whereas the second one uses a regular person’s mailbox with no clue as to which publication the sender is affiliated with.
If you think about it, you’ll probably agree that a professional email address which is attached to a sender’s domain is a great way to show the link between the sender and the publication.
If say a potential client wants to start a new campaign or a seller is reviewing inventory options to sell or buy or an agency is looking into partnership opportunities, these tiny signals may help in creating a lasting impression of a very established business.
That is in particular important for those indie publishers without a big budget or a team, an attractive building or even a sales force. The email address is the most straightforward piece of a company’s infrastructure that can give the illusion of an organized, well-prepared business.
It also helps clearly demarcate roles. For instance, readers or the other company’s rep will know who they are corresponding with when they see emails like editor@, partnerships@, advertising@ or hello@.
Make Email Part of Your Monetization Infrastructure
An editorial monetization structure should not be limited to ads and website stats only. Other tools that support commercial activities include your business domain, website, newsletter system, contact forms, analytics setup, and email accounts, to name just a few.
Registering a business domain is your first move. Plus, with the domain, you need to create professional-looking email addresses that align with your publication’s brand identity.
Your second step here is to ensure that your email provider and email marketing platform’s configuration settings, more specifically SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for your domain, are correct. With a mail address service, publishers can create such set-ups via addresses from their registered namespace. The main idea is to have the mailbox as a component of business tools alongside other ones like office websites etc., rather than being yet another email address.
The idea of keeping your operations legally safe should not be disregarded either. The United States Federal Trade Commission has released the CAN-SPAM guidelines, which state that commercial emails must include accurate sender information in the headers, avoid deceptive subject lines, and provide a valid unsubscribe button.
Google has set up Gmail sender best practices guidelines, which include authentication and tips on how to improve mail delivery.
Based on M3AAWG’s email authentication recommendations, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC should be deployed together to verify a sender’s identity.
A Little Adjustment That Changes a Lot for Publishers
Publishers obviously think first about bigger money topics: more traffic, higher RPMs, sponsorships, newsletter subscriptions, or advertising deal negotiations.
Still, a publisher’s infrastructure can greatly impact such strategies even without their knowing.
While a professional email may not miraculously boost revenue or give 100% delivery guarantee for a newsletter, it definitely helps form a clear business identity, allows for appropriate authentication, and eliminates one of the potential reasons for doubt when dealing with new commercial partnerships.
For a publisher wishing to develop a major media operation, these are the sorts of things where professional email service is a small cost that pays off in multiple ways at least in deliverability and trust.