Following the best practices in email marketing can help businesses drive leads, engagement, and sales. One of the most important practices is to improve sender reputation and ensure it stays high as much as possible.
After all, having a bad sender reputation can significantly affect the future of your business. But how bad exactly.
Let’s find out.
How a Bad Sender Reputation Can Affect Your Business’ Future
Sender reputation plays a crucial role in your email marketing campaigns. A good sender reputation means that your emails can reach the inboxes of your recipients. This increases the effectiveness of your email campaigns and thus all of the positive metrics associated with them.
A bad sender reputation, on the other hand, will have a huge effect on your email marketing efforts. Not only will your emails have a lower probability of reaching subscribers but they may be blocked outright.
From a business standpoint, this means fewer conversions, and thus, lower revenue. A bad sender reputation will also be associated with your company and not go away easily.
You will need to protect and improve your sender reputation if you wish your business to thrive in the digital realm.
So what if you already have a low sender reputation upon reading this post? Is there anything you can do to fix it or is it already too late?
My Sender Reputation Is Low, How Can I Fix It?
If you’re sharing your IP address with another and have had your sender reputation go down because of their faulty practices, it’s best to leave and obtain a private address to do email marketing. Having your own IP address assigned to your business only can give you full control of what you send to contacts while allowing you to manage your reputation.
If you’re already on a private server yet still have a bad reputation, then you need to stop sending any emails right away until the problem has been resolved. Although it may seem ridiculous to put a halt to your email marketing efforts, it’s always better to do so rather than to continue sending flawed messages.
Keep in mind that fixing sender reputation (IP reputation and domain reputation) will take some time and effort to accomplish. Besides ensuring that the emails are sent, you also have to slowly rebuild your track record.
Overall, this means:
Reviewing Your Messages Before You Send Them Out
Make sure your email content doesn’t incorporate words or phrases that sound like spam since spam filters can detect spam-like emails.
Furthermore, you should also send emails only when they are relevant to your subscribers. This should increase your engagement and other positive metrics to slowly build back trustworthiness.
Ensuring That All Emails Sent Are Compliant with the CAN-SPAM Law
One of the rules of the CAN-SPAM Act is for messages to have a clear identity and purpose for being sent. They should also provide an easy way for people to unsubscribe.
Sending Messages at an Appropriate Rate
Pushing out one email after another in a short amount of time can alert spam filters and email service providers of potential spam.
You want to make sure that you don’t send too many messages in a short time especially to providers like Yahoo, AOL, and Google.
Making Sure That All Addresses in Your Mailing Lists Are Real
When you send to invalid or inactive email addresses, email service providers will take notice and will start scrutinizing your messages – causing harm to your sender reputation.
You can avoid this by removing these email addresses and keeping your mailing lists clean.
Maintaining Good Email List Hygiene
You want to make sure that the messages you send to recipients are those that they actually want to receive. This means that you should:
- Avoid purchasing or renting email lists from third-party providers.
- Take out email addresses that were not obtained organically, such as from directories or web pages.
- Remove any honey pot or spam trap email addresses that might be present in your lists.
- Take out email addresses from people who have specifically requested to unsubscribe from your email series.
- Remove anyone who has marked your emails as spam or filed a spam complaint against you.
Incorporating Email Authentication Protocols
Email authentication protocols such as Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKey Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) are some of the most common policies to employ.
Having these authentication protocols present will make you a more trustworthy sender in the eyes of email service providers and anti-spam organizations.
Segmenting Your Lists According to User Behavior
List segmentation continues to play a vital part in any email marketing campaign. More than this, though, it can positively affect your sender reputation. One way it can improve sender reputation is by separating users who have not engaged with their email content for some time.
These contacts should then be included in a retargeting campaign to try and win them back. If you’re unable to carry out such a campaign as soon as possible, it’s best to remove them from your mailing list to avoid being penalized.
Using a Server Sending Provider for Your Campaigns
Taking advantage of a reputable email marketing platform can help you fix your negative standing. MailMonitor is one such solutions provider that offers a range of features that can help marketers improve sender reputation.
With MailMonitor, you can keep track of your email reputation, identify potential issues, and fix problems with your messages before they become worse.
What Are the Factors That Affect Sender Reputation?
There are many factors that affect your sender reputation. Your reputation score will be different for each IP address and email address you use and this changes constantly as well.
Your email marketing campaigns are influenced by certain, complex factors such as:
- The previous emails you’ve sent. A good sending history with a specific IP address can make you look like a legitimate sender to email service providers and anti-spam organizations. This means that the messages you’ve sent, based on your past behavior, have not been flagged as spam. Spam filters know that most spammers would switch IP addresses regularly and are thus unable to maintain a good reputation for a long time.
- The quality of your mailing list. Anti-spam organizations and spam filters will know that you’re sending to inactive email addresses as soon as they reach their inboxes. When this happens, your sender reputation will plummet and your email campaigns will not be as effective as intended. That’s why maintaining a quality list by practicing proper email hygiene is important, as this ensures that you’re only sending to people who actually subscribed to your campaigns.
- The volume and consistency of your emails. Another factor that email entities keep an eye out for in terms of sender reputation is the number of emails you send including their consistency. Providing ample space before sending the next email and doing it on a regular basis shows that you are a stable and predictable sender. Internet service providers (ISPs) and mailbox providers consider such sending patterns to assess if your messages are spam-like or not.
- The open rates and engagement of your campaign. One of the newer deliverability metrics that keeps track of subscriber activity is the open rates of your campaign. This is a crucial statistic since email service providers prefer senders that their users are interested in receiving email from. Likewise, the engagement rate of your campaign is also important since it shows them that people enjoy your content.
- The spam complaint rates of your emails. As you may already know, mailbox providers are constantly surveying how their users are interacting with emails that reach their inboxes. Each time they mark your messages as spam, this feedback will go directly to their databases. When enough reports have been made, your emails may be screened and sent directly to the spam folder, significantly affecting your sender reputation.
How Can I Protect My Sender Reputation?
Now that you know the importance of restoring your sending reputation, here are the best practices that will help you protect it in the first place:
- Monitor your emails. Make sure that you check the response rates of your messages regularly for any bounces and spam complaints. Constantly keeping track of email deliverability metrics will let you know when there are issues with your email marketing campaign.
- Maintain a quality mailing list. You want to screen and confirm every email that signs up to your mailing list by using an email validation service. MailMonitor has amazing features that let you maintain proper list hygiene so that you can avoid being penalized by mailbox providers and anti-spam entities.
- Incorporate opt-in emails. Apply opt-ins or even double opt-ins to your email campaigns to confirm that people actually want to subscribe to your newsletters. Not only does this help validate active email addresses from inactive ones but it also ensures that your contacts will engage with your content.
- Warm up your IP address. If you are using an IP address to send emails for the first time, then you should warm it up first by sending a few emails each week. Once a few weeks have passed, you can then slowly increase the daily amount of messages you send. Make sure you don’t send too many in a short period to avoid being labeled as a spammer.
- Check to see if you’ve been blacklisted. An email blacklist is one of the lists you want to avoid as an email marketer. Being added to a blacklist is equivalent to being banished. Fortunately, there are ways you can have your address de-listed in case you get added to a blacklist. For Gmail, for example, you can submit a Blacklist Removal Form.
- Improve your email content. Sending emails at a consistent rate is important but content that people are going to value takes higher priority. A few examples of valuable content include guides, e-books, and webinars. You should also remove any spam-like terms from your messages to avoid being flagged by spam filters.
- Redo your overall email marketing strategy. Intentional or not, you should change how you approach your email strategy if you’ve been practicing illegitimate techniques. Anti-spam organizations will one day catch up to your tactics and will penalize you severely if you continue.
The Takeaway
Email sender reputation plays a critical role in how an email marketing campaign fares once it’s active. Having a good sender reputation means that your messages have a high chance of reaching their target inboxes while a bad standing results in the opposite.
As an email marketer, your job is to check and improve your sender reputation to maximize the effectiveness of your emails.
