Growing your business can be challenging. For it to thrive, you need to build and monitor your online reputation, whether online or offline.

Such that when people search for your company or brand online, the results (like reviews from social media channels or your website itself) would show that you are maintaining a positive reputation score.

But keeping your brand’s reputation spotless, in itself, is not easy. In email marketing, it can be impacted by many factors, including the quality of your email list, the number of emails plus the sending consistency, open rates, and your sending history.

What email marketing best practices can you then adopt to improve your sender score and get into your subscribers’ inboxes?

In this guide, we’re going to share with you what email sending reputation is and how you can repair it if you have a bad sending reputation.

What is email sending reputation?

Email sending reputation is a score (100 usually being the highest) that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) assign to a business or organization that sends email. It’s basically how mailbox providers are judging emails.

If the sender has multiple domains or is sending emails from different IP addresses, each of these will have its own sending reputation. The higher the score is, the higher the chance of getting the emails land in the recipients’ inboxes and not in the spam folder.

Factors that impact your email sending reputation

Email providers use various programs to monitor to assess your sending reputation as well as the risk of your IP address delivering emails to their network.

The factors that impact your email sending reputation include:

  • Quality of your contacts to whom your sending messages
  • Sending volume trends
  • Level of engagement of the recipients
  • Quality of content
  • Number of spam complaints
  • Emails sent to spam traps
  • Unsubscribe rate

As to which of these factors is important remains unclear because each ISP chooses which factors impact the reputation score more heavily.

Still, it is clear that having a good email sender reputation matters if you truly want to achieve a healthy email campaign.

How do I check my email sender reputation?

If you’re having email deliverability issues, one of the most important aspects you have to check is your email sender reputation.

Luckily, there are a number of tools online that can provide you with a decent indication of your reputation. These include Sender Score Reputation Network, ReputationAuthority, TalosIntelligence, and Google Postmaster Tools.

Some of these tools provide you a number, others just show whether you have a good, neutral, or poor score.

What is a good sender reputation?

On a range of 0 to 100, the better you are to 100, the better your IP reputation is. And typically, a reputation score that is within the range of 50 is either Neutral or Good.

All sender’s reputation change

As you improve your IP reputation score, know that all sender’s reputation changes at some point. This is because each mailbox provider is operating a little bit differently.

If you already have a good sender reputation and want to protect it, keep an eye on the changes, especially on a domain-by-domain basis. Doing so can help you spot specific reputation issues at certain mailbox providers.

How to Protect and Boost Your Sender Reputation

Proper Authentication

If you’re not happy with your ratings and want to boost your domain reputation, you need to do proper authentication to your accounts.  The standard set of authentication is the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.

List Management

Another important step to incorporate in your email marketing strategy is list management. Clean your list and remove the non-responders or invalid email addresses.

Almost majority of the factors (spam reports, traps, unsubscribes, etc.) we mentioned earlier can detail your reputation but they can also be avoided if you are growing your list in a healthy way.

Respect Your Subscribers

Since your subscribers have shared their email addresses with you, it is, therefore, your job to make your content attractive, relevant, and clickable. That way, you’ll have high open rates because your subscribers are keen to open your emails.

Usually, domains with sender scores of 90 and above only have a 1% complaint rate and an average rate of 0.36% for spam trap hits. This means that you also have to consider adding an unsubscribe link in your email campaign to have a low complaint rate.

But of course, the goal is to stop them from unsubscribing nor reporting your email as spam. That’s why having a clear interaction with your emails is crucial to secure email deliverability.

Warm-up your IP

If you are using a new IP address, it is best to warm up your IP first through what we call email throttling. In this practice, you control the number of emails you send to one IP at a time.

Begin by sending a small number of your campaigns and then gradually increase it on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on your target email sending frequency. It is also a good strategy to send to the most engaged recipients first so that early despatches of your emails will see good results.

Rates, Rates, Rates

The sender score algorithm reviews over 100 variables before they will configure your sender score. To avoid having a poor sender reputation score, we encourage you to always monitor your engagement and delivery rates.

These rates will help you determine any abnormalities so you can quickly take repairing actions before it will end up as a full-on email disaster.

Be in Control of Your Email Reputation

By now, you may be already fully aware of the importance of email sender reputation and senderscore. Follow these tactics and tools and you’ll be in control of your email reputation.

But since having a good sender score is not the end-all, be-all to good email sending, you should not miss out on other important factors that influence overall email sending. In the same way, having a poor sender score does not mean that your campaigns are always meant to be undelivered.

Best of luck in boosting your email sender reputation!

Interested in having a partner to ensure your email sending reputation is set up for success? Get in touch. We, at InboxAlly, are committed to helping businesses like yours get a reputation boost!