If you read my last blog, you’ll hopefully know that I was going to conduct a split test to find out whether sending from my old domain was still getting better results than sending from the Deliverability Dashboard domain.

So…

The Results Are In… But Do They Mean Anything?

Well… maybe, maybe not. I’ll let you be the judge. 

My audience wasn’t big enough to gain too many insights from the result. But there was a clear overall result.

The Good News

First things first. I saw a much better performance from the new domain compared to the old domain.

This was a pleasant surprise.

Because, until recently, I’ve consistently seen poorer open rates and higher anecdotal reports of emails going to spam with the new domain.

I’ll never know for sure, but it’s possible that sending a couple of broadcasts from the new domain might have been enough to “warm it up” so that I’d see good performance anyway.

Anything Else to Report?

I’m going to report the results in more detail below, and would love to hear what other conclusions you come to after looking at the numbers.

Here are my thoughts:

• The overall open rate was a little higher than usual… 
• Google still generally gets much better open rates than Microsoft
• The old domain only performed better on the segment of engaged non-Google, non-Microsoft contacts (16.7% of the overall audience), but the new domain performed better in every other case
• Microsoft open rates are significantly lower for less-engaged contacts (which corroborates the theory that Microsoft is more likely to route emails to the junk folder sooner than Google as contacts become more and more unengaged)

Here’s the Detail

Firstly, here are the detailed results:

And here’s a summary:

How Did I Warm Up the Domain? 

Firstly, I started by sending transactional emails from this domain. In this case, it was the email containing login details, sent every time someone registers for the Email Health Check. Unsurprisingly, people look out for this email and open it. Which was a good start because I immediately got high open rates, albeit for a low number of contacts.

Secondly, I started sending emails from the new domain to my most engaged contacts. I changed the email address, but not the “Adrian Savage” name that’s shown next to the email address. Again, because they had engaged with me recently, and saw a name they recognised, they were more likely to open these emails and again, I got high open rates.

Then, I switched everything over for one email broadcast and sent to all of my contacts who’d opened something in the last 90 days. That was when I saw a lower open rate, but last week’s split test seems to have confirmed that things are good enough after all. 

So, to sum up, as long you manage your engagement carefully, you can migrate from one domain to another and still get good engagement fairly quickly… as long as your previous domain has a good enough reputation.

And if you use Deliverability Defender to manage your engagement and use the Email Health Check regularly to monitor your health score, you should already have that good sending reputation.