Your email sender score plays a critical part in ensuring the success of your email campaigns. A high sender score often means being able to reach your intended inboxes, but a low sender score results in the opposite.
These scores are assigned mostly by mailbox providers and internet service providers (ISPs) to senders to gauge how trustworthy they are in sending emails. If you forego proper maintenance of your email list and start practicing bad email marketing habits, you’ll find yourself with a bad score that can be hard to fix.
But how can you tell if you have a bad sender score in the first place?
Checking Your Sender Score
The sender score algorithm is a free service provided by the Return Path Provider Network. This entity gathers reputation metrics to come up with a sender score for a specific IP address.
Based on a scale of 0 to 100, sender scores show people how good or bad they are at sending emails. A sender’s score will continue to fluctuate depending on how they perform based on the various email marketing metrics.
To check your sender score, you need to do the following:
- Visit the Sender Score website.
- Create and register an account by using your professional email address.
- After signing up, an email will be sent to your address which you need to confirm to activate your account.
- After logging in, you will be redirected to a page where you can enter an IP address or domain.
- A report will be generated for the IP address or domain you input here, showing the various sender scores.
The scores found on this page indicate whether an IP or domain address has been sending ideal messages or spam-like content in the last 30 days.
Besides the actual score, you can also find the following items on each report of the sender score test:
- Complaints: This score directly ties to the number of complaints your IP address gets compared to all other IP addresses. It is calculated by the total complaints you received divided by all accepted mail.
- Volume: The volume in your report shows how many emails you sent and how many of them received complaints. The scoring on your volume isn’t a direct indication of whether you have a positive or negative sender reputation. It depends on the specific ratio of emails with complaints compared to the total number of emails.
- External reputation: This is the score that shows how your IP address compares to others in terms of its reputation. It is assessed based on whether or not your IP address shows up in whitelists and blacklists.
- Unknown users: This metric keeps track of how often a given IP address attempts to send email to addresses that aren’t valid.
- Unknown user rate: This is the ratio of non-existent email addresses compared to the number of emails that were opened by your recipients.
- Accepted: This represents the number of emails that have been allowed to be delivered to their respective inboxes.
- Rejected: This metric shows how often emails receive a soft bounce or hard bounce compared to other senders.
- Accepted Rate: This is the ratio of messages that were accepted for delivery compared to the number of times attempted.
Having a sender score higher than 80 is a good sign that you’re practicing proper email etiquette. However, getting a score lower than that means the opposite.
Why Is My Sender Score Low?
Have you wondered to yourself, “Why my sender score is low?” It’s because there are several aspects that you might have missed when sending your email campaigns.
Knowing these aspects is important because it can take several weeks to resolve a problem with your sender score. These metrics are:
- Sending an inconsistent volume of emails
- Your sending frequency is erratic
- Sending from a new IP address
- Being added to a blacklist
- Triggering a spam trap
- Getting reported by contacts as a spammer
As expected, email campaigns that are generating poor results with high spam complaint rates, high bounces, and low open rates all affect your sender’s reputation. Being compliant with your data is important because it not only influences the specific email marketing campaign you’re using right now but also all of your future messages.
Knowing that everything you do with your campaign has an effect on the various metrics to come up with your sender score is the first step in taking control of your reputation.
Improving and Maintaining Your Sender Score
The simple truth behind your email sender scores is that you can develop a good reputation once you start producing positive results from your email campaigns. That’s why it becomes especially crucial that you follow the best practices when sending emails.
Below are the most important aspects that you need to ensure for your email campaigns if you want to experience inbox success:
Apply Email Authentication Protocols
When you authenticate your sender account, you help make sure that only a given list of IP addresses are allowed to send messages using the same domain you’re on. This prevents spam-like activity from getting across since spammers won’t be able to use your domain.
DomainKeys Identified Mail, or simply called DKIM, is a popular method for authentication since it acts as a digital signature that receiving servers can analyze. It works as powerful proof that the messages you send have been domain-authenticated and valid, which allows them to tell if the emails come from a fake sender.
If the signature matches that from their database, then they can direct the incoming message directly to the inbox of their user. In case it’s a mismatch, then they’ll have it sent straight to the spam folder or cause a hard bounce.
Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is another email authentication protocol used to stop spammers from using your domain to send emails. SPF allows the sender to publish and specify all of its authorized mail servers so that the receiving servers will know which of them are allowed to be used on their behalf.
Set Up Separate Email Sub-Accounts
Smart marketers separate their marketing and transactional messages by setting up sub-accounts. These accounts will be used based on the different types of emails that they’ll send.
When both marketing and transactional messages have their own sub-accounts, marketers will be able to better track the various metrics in email marketing. These metrics include:
- How often the user sends transactional emails
- How often the user sends marketing emails
- Types of marketing emails sent
- Types of transactional emails sent
Besides separating the metrics, you also get to ensure that any deliverability problems that your marketing emails have don’t affect your transactional messages. This means that if you somehow end up with a low sender score for your marketing emails, you can still send transactional messages such as order notifications and purchase confirmations to your customers.
Keep Track of Your Email Engagement
Your email engagement data is a compilation of statistics showing how engaged your recipients are with regard to your campaigns. Important metrics that are calculated here include:
- Open rate: The rate at which your contacts open your campaign messages.
- Click rate: The rate at which your contacts click on the links in your emails.
- Complaint rate: This is the rate at which users complain about your email campaigns.
- Engagement time: This is the amount of time that people spend interacting with your emails.
- Unsubscribe rate: This is the rate at which contacts unsubscribe from your campaigns.
Making sure that the statistics listed above turn out positive can take a long time and a lot of effort to accomplish. It’s important to note that you simply can’t achieve excellent engagement metrics overnight, as brand loyalty takes time to nurture.
However, email marketers can change the way they create and design their emails. For instance, they can make their messages more responsive for various devices and screens or design emails to easily load upon being opened.
Besides the time, senders should also consider the time and frequency of sending their email campaigns, as these also contribute to engagement. Internet service providers, in particular, are quite strict with regard to the engagement rate of senders when filtering their content.
Perform Segmentation, Testing, and Personalization
Segmenting your email lists is a great way of segregating specific contacts according to specific criteria. For instance, it’s possible to segment people based on their interests, location, age, and gender. This allows senders to send messages to certain users, providing more relevant content for their needs.
A/B testing is the act of sending different versions of a single email campaign and finding out which variant works best. This kind of testing approach lets marketers learn which of their techniques are working well and which of those aren’t. This gives you a basis for adjusting your marketing efforts in the future.
Have a Checklist for Your Email Marketing Campaigns
Creating a checklist containing the best practices for your email campaigns is one of the best things you can do to improve sender score. This is because it can act as a form of accountability log that you can use to double-check your messages before sending them out.
This checklist should ensure that you have the following:
- A compelling subject line
- An eye-catching pre-header
- All links are working and accurate
- All content has been proofread
- Quality calls-to-action (CTAs)
Ensure Your Emails Are Targeted and Relevant
When you can segment and personalize your email lists, sending targeted and relevant content becomes so much easier to do. Sending the same messages to everyone in your subscribers’ list isn’t going to interest all of them simply because people have different preferences.
But when you can send highly targeted messages, it ensures that you provide compelling content to specific subscriber groups that should increase your engagement rate. And when you have good engagement metrics, a better sender score usually follows.
Send Emails to Permission-Based Contacts
We can’t stress this enough: You should only send to permission-based email lists. This means contacts who have specifically opted to join your newsletter.
When you send messages to contacts that you’ve obtained through third-party providers, you increase the risk of lowering your engagement rate. This is because your recipients aren’t engaged with your brand in the first place. Your mailing list could also contain invalid email addresses, or worse, spam traps intended to bait senders who use purchased email lists.
What you should do instead is to include opt-in checkboxes with any form you place on your website. This will allow users to give permission so you can send relevant emails to their addresses.
Practice Good Email List Hygiene
With the above tips in mind, the next step is to make sure that you practice good mailing list hygiene. What we mean by this is that you remove any email addresses that are still subscribed yet have not engaged with your emails for quite some time.
People change email addresses frequently, and previously active contacts may no longer be after several months. They may have lost access to their accounts or could have simply been deactivated. No one would think about unsubscribing from all of their newsletters before they abandon their accounts.
Once you send emails to these inactive addresses, your bounce rate will go up, thereby affecting your sender score and email deliverability. Continue sending to these accounts, and you can easily find your emails heading directly to the spam or junk folder.
To keep your lists healthy, you want to separate all inactive contacts from your primary subscriber group and stop sending emails to them for a while. When you have time, you can start a re-engagement campaign that will try to win back users who have simply lost interest.
If certain contacts still don’t respond after a prompt or two, then you’d be better off having them removed from your email campaigns. It’s always a good idea to eliminate inactive subscribers than to continue sending to them and experience a low sender score.
Send Messages Using Your Own Domain
Finally, you want to send emails to recipients using your own domain reputation. This is because the success of your email reputation depends on which domain you’re on.
Using an account from one of the free mailbox providers like Hotmail, Yahoo!, or Gmail can limit your ability to apply email authentication protocols. It can also be hard to grow a good sender reputation with these providers.
Instead, you should set up your own domain so you can send emails directly from it.
The Takeaway
Your sender score has a direct impact on whether or not your messages will reach the inboxes of your contacts. Having a low sender score often means reduced email deliverability, while a high score provides better results.
As a sender, it’s important that you constantly check your IP reputation by using the Sender Score website link provided above. Knowing where you stand in terms of ISPs and mailbox providers can help you determine the success of your email campaigns.
Email engagement also plays a crucial part in your email delivery rate. Many email entities monitor your engagement metrics to gauge how trustworthy and reliable you are as a sender.
With the tips provided in this post, you should have the proper guidance you need to improve your reputation and get a better sender score for future messages that you send.
