Many people who are new to email marketing believe that this type of marketing strategy is easy to do. Coming up with amazing email content doesn’t seem complicated especially when you already know what your contacts want.
Yet even if you have everything dialed in with regards to your strategy, you can still experience difficulties in reaching your target inboxes. The whole email marketing mechanism has many cogs involved throughout the process that affects your email deliverability.
One of the most important metrics that email marketers should look out for is their sender score.
What Is a Sender Score?
Your sender score is a numerical value that represents your standing in terms of sending reputation. This IP reputation is calculated based on how well you perform across several important metrics that email service providers uphold.
Such metrics are designed to help email senders understand how welcome their messages are to the subscribers of mailbox providers.
Here is an overview of how sender score works. First, the email marketer distributes the messages from their email campaign to their target recipients. Once completed, a sender score is generated for the IP addresses the sender used to send the emails. These sender scores are based on a scale of 0 to 100. 100 is the highest while 0 is the worst.
The sender’s reputation metrics that make up their sender score are captured by different sender score networks. Such networks are powered by spam filtering entities, email service providers, and spam trap companies. They can also contain countless unique IP addresses to use as references.
The marketer’s sender score will change depending on their performance according to the various reputation metrics. These reputation metrics are then shown using the appropriate tool such as the sender score MailMonitor tool to help senders learn and understand their rating.
How Is Your Sender Score Determined?
As mentioned above, the sender score is used by email service providers as a reference to determine whether the emails from an IP address are worth forwarding to their designated inboxes. There are algorithms in place that determine such rating but providers are secretive about how they work.
What we do know is that sender scores are affected by several parameters such as:
How Often Your Emails Have Been Marked as Spam
Unfortunately, spam complaints can still occur to senders even if their recipients are actually subscribed to their email marketing campaigns. Some people may view your content as something no longer relevant to their needs or have simply forgotten that they subscribed to your mailing list. It’s also possible that your unsubscribe link is hard to find, which is a common reason why people file spam complaints.
The more complaints that are filed against a sender, the lower their score is going to be.
In order to minimize complaints, you can use an email service provider that has feedback loops as a service so that they will notify you whenever a user sends a spam complaint.
Furthermore, you should remove any contact who has complained about your recent message. This should prevent them from getting any more messages from your campaigns while minimizing the complaints you could possibly receive from them.
How Often Your Mailing Server Has Sent Emails to Invalid Addresses
Email service providers and ISPs assess how senders acquired the contacts in their lists by checking for invalid email addresses in them. Purchasing these email lists, using old ones, and creating lists without using confirmed opt-in methods can contain many of these non-existent addresses.
Even email lists that are constantly being cleaned can still contain addresses that are no longer valid. This is especially true since people can easily change their email addresses whenever they want.
Mail servers that attempt to send messages to invalid addresses constantly, will appear as spam activity to service providers which could then potentially lower the sender score.
How Many Messages Were Sent From an IP Address
New IP addresses or those that have not yet sent many emails could have little to no existing sender scores assigned to them. Email marketers won’t be in trouble if they decide not to send many emails from them if they want to maintain a low profile.
However, mail servers can appear as if they have been compromised by spammers if they start sending emails by bulk even if they don’t have sender scores yet. One of the worst consequences here is the entire mail server being added to a blacklist.
How Many Emails Were Sent to Spam Traps
Veteran email marketers know what spam traps are and that it’s best to avoid them as much as possible. Spam traps are addresses that serve to trap users who have purchased or acquired their mailing lists through illegitimate means. This is one way blacklist providers and ISPs fight fraud on the web.
The two types of spam traps are called pristine and recycled. The pristine spam traps are those that were made solely to identify spam and had never been owned by a real person. Meanwhile, recycled spam traps are those that used to belong to a person but have become quite old and are no longer in use.
Email marketers that inadvertently send to spam traps, especially when it happens regularly, indicate that they aren’t maintaining proper list hygiene. The consequences of hitting these spam traps vary based on the type they trigger and how often it happens.
At best, your sender score will go down while the worst scenario would be the permanent blocking of an IP address from all ISPs.
Whether or Not the IP Address of a Server Is Blacklisted
Getting blacklisted is perhaps the worst consequence an email marketer can face in their campaigns. This is because it can significantly change your email deliverability while dramatically lowering your sender reputation. Having a bad sender score is a common reason why ISPs block emails from certain senders.
There are many tools available today such as MailMonitor that can help you know if your IP address has been added to a blacklist. If so, you want to get your address removed from the list as quickly as possible so you can continue with your regular mailing activity.
Aside from these public blacklists, IP addresses can also experience being blocked by specific internet service providers and email service providers.
How Often Email Marketers Send Emails
Email service providers like Yahoo Mail put limitations on the number of emails an account can receive from a specific IP address within a certain period. Going past this limit means putting your sender reputation at risk.
It’s important to keep in mind that sending emails faster isn’t always a good idea. Oftentimes it’s best to send messages slowly or by using several servers and IP addresses. This is particularly important if you have to send time-sensitive emails but would like to avoid violating any rate limits.
Whether or Not the Server IP Address is Shared or Dedicated
Sending from a shared IP address means that you also share the same sender score with other accounts within a server. This also means that the mailing activity of your colleagues will affect the deliverability of your messages. For instance, if one user is sending spam from their account, their tactics can affect how your emails will be perceived by mailbox providers.
That’s why serious email marketers use dedicated IP addresses as it allows them to build and maintain their own sending reputation from scratch. It also lets them take control of what messages are sent with no surprises on their end.
Brands, in particular, should leverage dedicated IP addresses, especially for transactional emails. These messages should be separate from marketing emails since transactional ones have inherently ideal scores and you want recipients to receive them. This helps ensure that even if your marketing campaign is bad, it shouldn’t negatively affect how you send your transactional emails to those who deal with you.
You should also make sure that your sending IP address is static and doesn’t change whenever you use it.
Whether or Not the Sender Is Using Proper Authentication
Email authentication is vital as it helps protect messages from forging. It also provides that the sender is exactly who they say they are and not an impostor.
Messages that fail authentication checks could be blocked or may have to go through additional filtering. When this happens, they might end up in the spam or junk folder and not the inboxes of their recipients.
There are various techniques used in authenticating email campaigns with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC being the most common. No one method is the best type for authentication and ISPs use different methods to assess the authenticity of the sender. To get the best results, you should make sure that all of your authentication records are set up properly.
In case you are using your own SMTP server together with an in-house email service, you should implement the right email authentication methods and ensure their records are correct.
How Can a Bad Sender Score Affect Your Email Deliverability?
The primary concept behind labeling senders with their own sender scores is to identify potential spammers and stop them from sending emails to recipients. As a result, ISPs and email service providers are constantly updating their filtering algorithms to stay ahead.
Email senders who aren’t proactive with mailing trends and fail to follow the latest requirements will find themselves with bad sender scores. A bad sender score heavily influences one’s ability to send email since their messages will have a hard time achieving proper inbox placement. The lower the sender score, the harder this process is going to be.
For email marketers to ensure their emails reach their target recipients, it’s important to regularly audit their sender scores and make sure they aren’t being labeled by providers as potential spammers.
How to Improve My Sender Score With MailMonitor?
Comprehensive email marketing platforms such as MailMonitor allow marketers to check, manage, and even potentially improve sender score. MailMonitor offers a range of email marketing solutions such as:
- Inbox monitoring: Email marketers will know where their messages are going to land – whether in recipient inboxes or the dreaded spam folder. Such knowledge can help them learn what needs to be changed to improve email deliverability and sender score.
- Reputation tracking: Building trust and reputation with ISPs and email service providers is crucial for email marketers. Tracking reputation and ensuring it stays strong is vital to maintaining good sender scores.
- Spam filter testing: The MailMonitor tool lets you solve your email deliverability problems by giving you in-depth information on how spam filters rate your email campaigns.
- Blocklist monitoring: Being listed in a blocklist is one of the worst things that can happen to email marketers. By monitoring your domains and IP addresses, you can immediately take action as soon as you find any of them added to these lists.
- DMARC and DKIM analytics: Email authentication can improve sender score by letting mailbox providers know that you’re a reputable sender.
- Email preview: MailMonitor lets you see how your messages are going to appear to your recipients. Find out if there are any issues with formatting, coding, and linking so you can fix them before sending them out.
