What are Child Domains for Email?

It’s 2023 and would you believe that email is still one of the most effective and widely used mediums for communicating with your clients, potential customers, and partners? However, email also comes with many challenges and risks that can affect whether your emails get to their intended recipients, and this is measured by “Email Deliverability”. Email deliverability is the gauge of how successful you are at getting your emails to your recipients’ inboxes and avoiding spam filters, blocks, or bounces.

One of the many factors that can impact your email deliverability is the domain or subdomain that you use to send your emails. A domain is the unique identifier of a website, such as google.com or yahoo.com. A subdomain is a subset of a domain, identified by a prefix that indicates that it’s a separate section of the larger domain. For example, mail.google.com or marketing.yahoo.com are subdomains of google.com and yahoo.com, respectively.

By using subdomains for email, you can separate your company’s different types of emails. For instance, you might use marketing.domain.com for promotional emails, support.domain.com for customer service emails, and transactional.domain.com for order confirmations and receipts.

Using subdomains for email also helps you segment your email list and tailor your content and frequency to different audiences. Segmentation means dividing your email list into smaller groups based on their characteristics, preferences, or behavior. Tailoring means adjusting your content and frequency to match each group’s needs and expectations. For example, you might send a weekly newsletter to your subscribers using @newsletter.domain.com, but send a monthly offer to your customers using @offer.domain.com. You might also send different newsletters to different segments based on their interests or industry for example @sportsnews.domain.com @politicalnews.domain.com, etc.

Using subdomains for mass email is not a new concept. It has been around for decades, but it became more popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as mass email marketing techniques became more sophisticated and competitive. One example of an early use of subdomains for email is from The University of North Texas Internet Use Policy Document created in August 1997. In this document, they defined a child email domain as a secondary name associated with the organization that owns or uses the email address, such as meangreensports in @meangreensports.unt.edu. They also said that child email domains could be used by authorized third-party mail senders (someone who sends emails on behalf of someone else, i.e. marketing or promotional emails).

Using subdomains for email is a best practice that can help you boost your email deliverability and performance. By using subdomains for email, you can segment your email list, tailor your content and frequency, more importantly protect your main domain’s sender reputation.

I hope you my article useful and informative, if you need help with deliverability, please feel free to get in touch.