Sender Reputation & You
What are the ingredients of a good email campaign? Start with good quality content about your brand, wrap it around a nice design, and then hit the send button. Well sure, but that’s forgetting a lot of work that has to go into making a good email campaign successful.
Before you even think about hitting the send button. Writing, editing, writing more, editing some more, creating the layout, and design, and - perhaps most importantly - cleaning out your subscriber list. You don’t want to be caught sending to spam traps, bots, moles and other hidden email threats. Because if you do, that’s a good way to damage your sender reputation. According to Return Path, email isn’t delivered 83% of the time, and that’s because of poor sender reputation.
What is a sender reputation?
Sender reputation is like your credit score, or your GPA, except for email. Follow along for a minute and it starts to make sense. Your credit score is dictated, among other things, by whether you’re paying off your accounts in a timely manner. For your GPA, you are trying to get good grades in order to keep up a high GPA. So, when you send emails, you are being measured by a sender score. The higher the score the better your reputation.
Sender reputation measures how often you send, how many emails you send, and the bounces that occur, spam traps hit, among other factors. These results are based on your IP or domain. This number tells you how often you are hitting someone’s inbox or getting bounced into a spam folder. If you do not have a dedicated IP, and have a shared IP, your low sender score may not be your fault. Keep that in consideration when analyzing your sender reputation..
How can you damage your sender reputation?
If you’re sending to a list that hasn’t been email hygiene approved, you are asking for your sender reputation to decrease. What do we mean by this? Well if you’re sending to problem accounts, such as spam traps, bots, moles, screamers, zombies and other problem accounts this will ding your IP address or domain, hurt your sender reputation, and possibly lock you into a blacklist. To learn more information about hidden email threats that can damage your reputation, check out our recent blog post, What’s hiding in your email lists?
Who measures your sender reputation?
Senderscore is the most common site to check your sender reputation, but there are other many sites that provide their own methodology for calculating sender reputation such as 250ok, Senderbase, Trusted Source, and ReputationAuthority.
How do you improve your sender reputation?
There are many ways you can improve your sender reputation. Being consistent with sending out your emails is a great place to start. If you’re sending out 3,000 emails one day and 120,000 emails another day, and then decide to not send anything for weeks or months at a time, this inconsistency can damage your sender reputation.
Your IP and / or domain may not be ready either, so instead of sending out a giant blast of emails, start with a shorter amount for a warm up. Think of it as a warmup, it is much better to slowly ramp up and discover what problems you may run into, before dropping thousands of emails. Test the waters first.
If you already have a low sender reputation, find out if you are on any blacklists, and then learn how to get stay away from them by reading our recent intelligence report. Staying off any blacklist is the best way to avoid a decrease in your sender reputation. How should I stay off a blacklist? Avoid sending to hidden email threats. Get your list in shape frequently using a multi-method email verification and hygiene provider like Webbula.
In conclusion
Email threats are a ticking time bomb, just ready to explode on you at any minute. There are hidden email threats in your lists ready to damage your ability to use your data properly, directly affect revenues, and of course damage your sender reputation. Disposable Domains, Spam traps, honeypots, seeded trackers, and many more are just some of the threats that could be hiding in your email lists that simple verification can’t detect. Learn more by reading our recent intelligence report, “What’s Hiding in your Email” Only multi-method email hygiene has the power to defeat these threats.