In this episode of Do This, Not That, host Jay Schwedelson discusses the importance of domain frequency in marketing databases and provides actionable tips for both B2B and consumer marketers.

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Best Moments:

(00:54) Introduction to domain frequency and its impact on marketing

(01:38) How to run a domain frequency report on your database

(02:53) The importance of domain frequency for B2B marketers

(05:49) Opportunities uncovered by domain frequency analysis

(07:22) Domain frequency considerations for consumer marketers

(08:53) Identifying and removing throwaway email addresses

(09:43) Sponsorship message for Marigold email platform

(10:48) Personal anecdote about social gatherings and remembering names

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MASSIVE thank you to our Sponsor, Marigold!!

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Regardless of your size, check out Marigold today to get the solution you need to grow your business!

Check out this free content from marigold that Jay has loved digesting, 5 Steps For Selecting The Right Email Marketing Platform.

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Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. Also, dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that.

We are back for the do this, not that podcast presented by Maragold.

And today we're going to talk about something that has a massive impact on all of your marketing, whether you're a business marketer or a consumer marketer. And I think a lot of people are just sleeping on it. It's something called domain frequency, right? So you have a database.

Everybody has their database, their prospects, their customers, their newsletters. It's your database, okay? And in your database, what do you have? You have email addresses. Now, my email address, for example, is J A y s@corcwd.com.

now, the domain of that email address is corpwd.com, right? Maybe you have a consumer database and it's jmail.com and Gmail is the domain. Right. Of the email address for that particular context.

We all know what the domain is of the email address. Great. But have you ever sorted your database and done it in a frequency way?

Meaning you take all the contacts in your database and then you make a table. You sort it by how many contacts are at what domain.

So let's say you had 100,000 people in your database, and now you're going to take all of the email addresses that you have and you're going to sort it and say, okay, what is the domain that has the highest number of people from it? You know, the consumer side, it's going to be Gmail, right? That's going to be the domain where you have the most number of people.

So let's say you have 100,000 people. You'll have, you know, 50,000 people with the domain of Gmail. On the business side, your biggest domain may be a particularly large company, right?

Maybe you have a thousand people at some sort of, you know, healthcare company or something like that. But there's gold in your domain frequency report.

And not only is there gold in the domain frequency report that you're going to run, but there's also things that might be holding back your marketing massively. So what you want to do is you want to run this report, all right? I want to see how many contacts I have at every domain.

And you want to do it in a descending Order. So you see the biggest ones float to the top. Now what does this do? First, let's talk about why you do it. If you're a business to business marketer.

And then we'll get into consumer. When you run this report, you're going to see weird things. You're going to see things that you're like, wait a minute, what is going on? Right?

And why I say that is because I've done this a million times with all my clients in my agency. You will. Then let's say you have 100,000 people in your database or even you have 10,000 people in your database. It doesn't matter how big or small.

This is something you want to be doing. But let's just use a hundred thousand because it's easy for math, right? A hundred thousand people in your database.

All of a sudden you see, wow, we have 2,642 people at this, you know, random manufacturing company. Who is that? Why are those people even on our database? They're not even a client of ours.

And the reason it matters is if you are sending too many emails to certain organizations, okay, at and you're sending them in massive quantity, it can hurt your overall deliverability, right? Because it messes up. It makes you look like you are kind of like spamming an organization and then you get flagged.

You know, people say, this is spam, this is this. And it starts to hurt your actual overall sending reputation.

It doesn't just hurt your sending reputation into that one company, but because you're trying to kind of quote unquote spam this entire company. Like, what is this? Okay, so when you see these oddball companies at the top, you want to pull those out.

You want to pull those out and be like, wait a minute, let's sideline those before we do our next send. Now let's say, for example, you see, you know, you have a thousand contacts at a particular company, but you know what?

It's the Ford Motor company and Ford's our client. That makes sense that we're sending a thousand emails into the Ford Motor Company because they have 100,000 employees. But here's the problem.

When you try to send that many emails into one receiving infrastructure, especially on the B2B side, okay, it could hurt your deliverability and into that organization because instantly that organization from a, from a network level is going to see all these emails coming in to so many people in their company at one time. They're just going to block them. Right, right at the start. And you may see it Right. You may be like, wow, we, we never hear from Ford.

Even though we work with them, we never hear from them.

And it's because they're probably not getting your emails because you're trying to deliver so many emails into their receiving infrastructure at one time. So what you want to do is one of a few things.

Either you want to work with your sending platform and throttle means you don't want to send too many emails to one given domain over one period of time, like you do every hour, every two hours, every three hours, whatever it is. Or as a test, pull out those thousand people you have from Ford, right, and put back in there maybe the, the 20 people that really matter.

And then let's see the deliverability there, let's see the interaction there. Let's see if they're engaging, you know, like that.

You will be shocked to find how this is impacting your deliverability into the organizations that you want to be talking to. Now there's benefit though. What's the good stuff? Forget about this deliverability garbage. Let's talk about opportunity.

And this is something that I'm doing in my business now, and it's been a game changer. And then we will get to the consumer side, right?

So in your database, when you do this domain frequency report, and this is what we, we're seeing as well. And all of a sudden you're going down that report.

Now forget about the people, you have a thousand people at now all of a sudden you say, wait a minute, we have 20 people at Nike that are on our database that are getting our stuff, that have signed up for our content, that have signed up for whatever. I didn't even know Nike was in our database. I didn't even know Nike would be interested in what we're doing. I would love to work with Nike.

So what you can do, okay, you can make a threshold.

You can say, okay, I want to report anywhere where we have at least five contacts at one domain, really, which means at one company, I want to pull them off to the side and I want to check them out and work with our sales team and say, wait a minute, do we have an opportunity here?

Because these organizations are literally raising their hand, coming onto our database almost like they're a team and they might be a team signing up for your stuff.

Digging into the domain frequency of your database can tell you a story about things that you don't even know about your business, but other businesses that are interested in you. So let's talk about the consumer side, which is a very different game, right?

On the consumer side, when you do your domain frequency, obviously you're going to see Gmail, you're going to see Yahoo. That's normal. They're going to be the top ones. Gmail is going to be like 45%. Yahoo may be like 15%. But what else are you going to see?

You're going to see things that are hurting you. You will want to look at not just the domain. Okay, but you want to look after the domain.

So if my email address is, you know, J A Y s at corpwd, okay, the dot com part is really important because on a lot of consumer databases you see things that might be hurting your actual deliverability. Things like country code, top level domains. What does that mean?

So let's say you saw an email address in there that was schmo@garbage.r u ru is a big red flag. Ru is the country code for Russia. Now you, you might actually have Russians on your database and that's fine. Russia's fine, whatever.

But a lot of the biggest spam trap accounts are coming from.ruemail addresses. They are being used for malicious reasons.

You want to take any email address, unless you're selling a lot into Russia, any email address that's ending in.ru and you want to get them out of your database because those are things that when you hit send are literally causing you massive, massive problems. The other things that you want to look at when you do your domain frequency are throwaway email addresses.

A lot of people use these throwaway email addresses and when they do, that also hurts your deliverability.

So if you go into your database and you see things and these are the actual domains, it would be like jemp mail IO temp mail T E M P M A I L IO that's a garbage address. Those are throwaway addresses. You're never going to be able to communicate with them. You want to get them off your database.

Or the other domains that are like that are 10 minutemail.com, mailinator.com yop mail.com these are addresses that people use to sign up for stuff that they literally will just hurt your deliverability. They're throwaway addresses and you'll never be able to engage with them.

And so if you're not having the open rates and click through rates, you're like, why is nobody engaging to you might have boat anchor garbage in your database.

All right, before we get into, since you didn't ask, which is the chaos portion of this thing, I want to let you know that this Podcast is presented by Marigold. Marigold is my email sending platform. They are a rope of sail through and Emma and campaign monitor and live clicker.

They're an incredible sending email sending platform for both business and consumer, large, medium, small. And I asked him, I said, listen, I don't want to promote a piece of content. I want to get people to check out your platform.

I want to hook up my listeners with a deal. And they said, okay, we're going to give your listeners 50% off of Emma, which is the most incredible platform that's part of Marigold.

And if you're a massive sender, they're actually going to waive your implementation fee. This is for my listeners.

If you go to jschwetelson.com Save S A V E, you can get the information on, on this incredible 50% off deal from Emma that's part of Marigold. I am telling you, if you don't like your platform, you have got to check this out. That's JSON.com save. All right, let's get into.

Since you didn't ask. Oh, I'm the worst. I don't even know what's going on. I was over my friend's house. You had a bunch of people over, okay.

And I had to go there with my family is one of the things everyone bring over their families. So we all went, right, we all go there, and I don't, I don't know. I knew some of the people there. I didn't know everybody there.

And I realized I am a horrible person, okay?

Because the second we get back in the car and I couldn't leave fast enough, okay, the second we get back in the car, all I do is I instantly talk crap about everybody that was there. That's the first thing that I do. What does that mean? Like, am I a bad person? Like, I'll get in, I'll be like, oh, my God.

I was just talking to X, Y and Z and they told me this, and that is that that person's annoying. That person doesn't know what they're talking about. That person always, you know, spits on me when they talk.

And I mean, I shred every single person that's at the thing. And even one of my kids was like, dude, what's wrong with you? That's not like, come on, let's, let's stay a little positive here. I'm terrible.

It's not even like, okay, Jim, I teach you a trick to remember somebody's name. It's not even. It's not possible for me to remember somebody's name anymore when I'm meeting with people, okay?

So now what I do is when I walk in, tell my kids, I say, listen, when I walk up there, you got to come up right next to me. If. If it's somebody that you know, I don't know, or that I'm supposed to know, but I don't know the name.

And I want you to introduce yourself, say, hi, I'm me. What's your name? I need you to say, what's your name?

And then I'm going to listen, and then it'll be a trigger for me to then remember that person's name. I need this help. I need this support, okay? Because I am. I cannot navigate meeting other people.

And then the second I do meet them, in my head, I'm thinking about how I'm going to shred them the second I get in the car. All of this is very bad.

I don't know what the new year's resolution is going to be at the end of the year, but it's going to be something to solve for this because I'm a. Something's wrong. Something's actually wrong with me. All right? I don't know what we talked about. I do not know, but I appreciate it.

Leave this thing a review. If it's not the worst podcast, it might be. It literally might be the worst one of all time. You are awesome.

Hit me up@jayshawettleson.com we can connect there, we can partner there, we can work together. I don't even know what we're talking about. Have a great day. Later. You did it.

You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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