How email infrastructure impacts your deliverability
Email infrastructure refers to the set of software and hardware components that are needed in order to successfully deliver your email messages to the intended recipients. In this lesson, we'll focus on a few key components that are directly related to Klaviyo:
- Sending domain
- IP address
- Click tracking domain
Each of these components has their own separate reputation, and inbox providers will assess these individually to determine whether or not they feel your messages are legitimate.
What is a branded sending domain, and do I need one?
A sending domain is the domain used to send emails on behalf of your business. This information is shown to recipients to give them context on where a message is coming from. A branded sending domain is a sending domain that is solely used by your business, and your business alone. That means no other sender’s activity or sending habits can influence the reputation of that sending domain.
How do you know if you need a branded sending domain? Well, if you have more than 5,000 active profiles in your Klaviyo account, or plan to send messages to 5,000 individuals in any single day, then you will need to set up a branded sending domain in Klaviyo. In other words, every Klaviyo account that is not on a free plan should set up a branded sending domain. We will walk through how to do this in the next lesson.
Differentiate between branded sending domains and dedicated IPs
Sending domain reputation and IP reputation are both important to your overall deliverability. The main difference is that most Klaviyo users will need a branded sending domain but will not need their own dedicated IP because IP reputation is heavily dependent on sending volume. Select each tab below to compare and contrast the specifics of the two components.
Branded sending domain
- Can be configured within your Klaviyo account in a few minutes
- Domain reputation is based on your sending habits and email engagement trends from your audience
- Specific to the web domain (root domain) that is associated with your business
- Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft require bulk senders to use a branded sending domain that aligns with the root domain of their site domain
Dedicated IP
- Only certain Klaviyo accounts are eligible for this due to minimum sending volume requirements being quite high
- Must be configured by Klaviyo upon approval
- Not necessary for most small to medium-sized businesses
- Allows for full control over reputation of the sending server
- Not required by inbox providers, with the exception of t-online.de (Germany)
t-online.de in Germany is the one inbox provider that requires a dedicated IP. If you need to reach customers in Germany who use t-online.de, reach out to your CSM to discuss setting one up.
Achieve domain alignment with dedicated click tracking
In order to track link click activity, every link in your emails has a click tracking domain. By default, all links included in emails sent through Klaviyo are encoded using a Klaviyo-owned click tracking domain. This is why when you hover over a link in a Klaviyo-generated email, you may see a URL that begins with trk.klclick.com instead of the domain of the sender.
If your recipients hover over a link to preview it before clicking, this may cause some confusion around where the link is going to take them. If you want to build more trust with your recipients and achieve domain alignment across all of the domains used in your email, consider setting up dedicated click tracking.
Dedicated click tracking is available to all Klaviyo users. For step-by-step instructions on how to set this up, follow our guide on setting up dedicated click tracking.