Changing your Email Sending Domain or Brand

**Blog updated in September 2024

 

Making changes to your subscriber-facing brand or domain is a great time to rethink your subscriber experience! Avoid the surprise of unsubscribes and complaints by communicating your brand change early and often. Here are some considerations.

 

  • Change the “friendly from,” sending address or domain to a name that resonates with subscribers
  • Make sure the new address is not too long so that it renders as expected in the inbox.
  • Think about using subdomains to denote different mail streams if appropriate.
  • Let your subscribers know in advance that a change is on the horizon.
  • Monitor closely your open, click, unsubscribe and complaint rates throughout the transition. It is common to see a drop in responsiveness or an increase in complaints or unsubscribes during the transition as members may not recognize your new brand immediately. They may complain, but if you let them know in advance, you will mitigate the risk.
    • Tell your subscribers early and often about the change leveraging your friendly from, subject line, website, message headers and pre-header text, footers, email preference center, etc. Provide a link in the content to explain the reasons for the change.
    • Encourage your subscribers to add your new address to their address book.
    • Leverage both brands simultaneously for a period of time to familiarize your subscribers (example subject line: NewDomain.com, formerly OldDomain.com.)
    • If you are presently using a ‘no-reply’ address, reconsider! Invite replies, which drive positive engagement and will improve your sender reputation and inbox placement rates.
    • If you are announcing the change via an email to your entire lead database:
      • Consider a warming strategy and deploy the message over an extended period of time rather than in one batch. This will allow you to put your best foot forward (most engaged/active subscribers first followed by your lesser engaged, higher risk segments.) It will also allow you to manage your complaint rates and react to user feedback.
      • If you’re mailing to unengaged subscribers, actively review your bounces to ensure you are removing the unknown users swiftly. Work with Marketo Engage’s deliverability team to ensure the Soft Bounce logic supports you well through this process.
    • Don’t forget the landing page! Create a compelling call to action encouraging your subscribers to click and leverage the landing page to reinforce the new brand messaging. This is another way to drive engagement and build a positive reputation for your new domain.
  • Finally…the technical specs. Don’t forget to update your authentication records to include the new brand/domain: SPF, DKIM, CNAMEs, DMARC, tracking links, and landing pages. If you are mailing from a Dedicated IP, you may also want to update the return-path domain branding. Please reach out to your CSM for more info!

 

 

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6 Comments
Viki_Sparks
Level 2

Hi Carmi Lopez-Jones,

What happens to the confirmation email that are being sent from the CTA from the existing landing pages?

We have just changed our email domain and we have tons of active landing pages that sends confirmation email with the old email domain.

Is there way to bulk update the email domain of "From" address and "Reply-to" address, instead of manually editing all the emails?

Thanks is advance.

VS

SanfordWhiteman
Level 10 - Community Moderator

Put simply: no. If you haven't already tokenized that info you can't swap it out. (Principal advantage of using tokens is for future-proofing -- assume anything can change, and the more people insist something is permanent, the more likely it is to change .)

Viki_Sparks
Level 2

That is very unfortunate!   -  Thanks anyways.

Say, now I want to tokenize the email domain which is used org-wide (all sorts of Marketo programs that involves email send), where do I tokenize it?

Would you know?

Thanks

VS

SanfordWhiteman
Level 10 - Community Moderator

For org-wide, set {{my.tokens}} at the highest level possible in Marketing Activities (can't be the actual root, unfortunately, but a folder one level below).

Viki_Sparks
Level 2

That will do the trick! Thanks so much!

Carmi_Lopez-Jo1
Level 3

Viki Sparks​, Sanford Whiteman​ is correct.  Thanks for the helpful advice, sir!