One real estate agent recently asked an interesting question in the Follow Up Boss community after seeing a dramatic drop in email open rates.

After verifying his sending domain to improve deliverability, his weekly emails went from 45-50% open rates down to around 8% almost immediately. Naturally, he wanted to know what went wrong.

Here was my response:
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For non-verified domains, emails are routed through the SMTP server. They may still hit the primary inbox, but there’s a risk of account suspension and domain reputation issues.

Once you authenticate/verify the domain, you should warm it up over a month or two so spam filters get used to traffic coming from your domain through that infrastructure.

If the open rate is that low, it suggests receiving servers may think the account has been compromised due to unusual sending volume / sudden spike from a new infrastructure.

Recovery is required now.. 😕 It will still take around two to three months, but the process is very different from the regular warm-up strategy.

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