Nowadays, emails have become essential communication and marketing tools for businesses.
But what do you know about email sender reputation and email deliverability?
For marketers, there is more to email marketing nowadays. It is not just about sending your “email campaigns” out to the recipients, it’s also about reputation and deliverability.
The question you should be asking is whether people are actually receiving your emails. It’s important to ensure that your emails actually make it into your customers’ inboxes.
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This is why email sender reputation is important. You will need to have a positive email sender reputation to ensure that your emails make it into your recipient’s inbox.
#1]. What is Email Sender Reputation?
Email Sender reputation is an assessment of email campaigns’ quality, which depends on their frequency, scale, and subscribers’ interaction. Based on it, email providers decide whether to deliver emails to users or not.
Unfortunately, there is no single metric to measure this indicator. However, choosing a reliable email service will save you the trouble of the email sender’s reputation. There are many good email address search services like Snovio and Hunter.
An email sender reputation is a score that an Internet Service Provider (ISP) assigns to an organization that sends the email. It’s a crucial component of your email deliverability. The higher the score, the more likely an ISP will deliver emails to the inboxes of recipients on their network.
#2]. How to check sender’s reputation
- Mail Tester – Mail tester is used to check the spam score and quality of the emails and email search.
- SenderScore.org – Sender Score is a free email reputation evaluation service from Return Path by Validity. Sender Score indicates the trustworthiness of an email sender’s IP address. Mailbox providers evaluate the reputation of senders to determine whether to deliver messages into the inbox.
- BarracudaCentral – Barracuda Central maintains a history of IP addresses for both known spammers and senders with acceptable email practices. This information contributes to the Barracuda Reputation System, which gives the Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall the ability to block or allow a message based on the sender’s IP address.
- Trustedsource – TrustedSource is an Internet reputation system initially developed by CipherTrust and now owned by Intel Security. It provides reputation scores for Internet identities, such as IP addresses, URLs, domains, and email/web content
- Google Postmaster Tools – Use Postmaster Tools to analyze your email performance and help Gmail route your messages to the right place.
- Microsoft SNDS – Microsoft Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) is a free service Microsoft offers to senders that provides high-level insight into how subscribers rate the email they receive and the health of an IP address as viewed by the Outlook system. SNDS provides data based on an actual email sent to Outlook subscribers.
#3]. How to improve sender reputation
To improve email sender reputation, you have to perform these tasks:
- Validate your mailing list – If you have collected a mailing list a long time ago but have not sent a mailing list to it, check the addresses. Thus, you will clear it of invalid addresses, spam traps, and addresses with errors. Validation will help you maintain a good sender reputation.
- Clean your mailing list regularly – Monitor how subscribers interact with emails. If your potential customers do not open brand mailings for a certain period, send them a reactivation letter. If that doesn’t work, remove their addresses from the mailing list.
- Use a two-step subscription – A two-step subscription saves you from getting on the mailing list of non-existent addresses and helps you interact only with interested users.
- Warm-up your IP – The new IP address is also called “cold” because it has not yet won the Internet provider’s trust. It takes a long time to get a good sender reputation. To warm up your IP address, increase your mailing volume gradually. Remember the quality and relevance of your email campaigns.
- Increase email open rates – Track your open rate. Remember, the sender’s name, subject line, and pre-header form a first impression on the subscriber. Experiment to find the variations of these elements that will best grab your audience’s attention and increase your open rate.
- Give users a choice – Give your audience the ability to choose the frequency and type of email campaigns. Also, ask subscribers to share personal information to create more personalized emails.
- Create relevant content – Despite all the technical tricks, providing valuable content is key to your email marketing success.
#4]. What does the rating depend on?
The sender rating is calculated by postal services to determine from whom it is worth accepting letters and from whom not. Algorithms for determining reputation are as carefully hidden as algorithms for indexing sites.
Each provider has its way. Dozens of parameters affect the rating, and here are just a few of them:
- The presence of an IP address or domain in blacklists ;
- Spam complaints;
- The number of non-existent addresses and the presence of spam traps in the database;
- Setting up email authentication;
- The proportion of letters that were deleted without being read;
- The regularity of mailings;
- Programs or scripts with the help of which the newsletter was sent;
- Content of the letter and links in the text;
- Percentage of openings and clicks;
- Replies to the letter and forwarding the message.
As a result, the reputation is formed based on the marketer’s actions and subscribers’ reaction to them. Moreover, each parameter has its weight, and for different types of letters, they use their formula for calculating the rating:
Reputation is a fickle thing. For each mailing, the sender is credited or, conversely, deducted from his reputation points. The sender is identified by the IP address and domain from which the letters were sent.
Reputation = Domain Reputation + IP Reputation
It may seem that it is worth changing the domain and IP – and you have a clean reputation again. But not everything is so simple. Providers keep mailing history.
And if letters come from the new IP and domain, you will be identified very quickly because your reputation has suffered.
#5]. IP reputation
Mail providers use several factors to evaluate each IP address. To reduce the likelihood of spam entering customer mailboxes. What exactly are they tracking:
- The number of emails sent from an IP address;
- Content quality, spam characteristics of sent emails;
- Engagement rate of email recipients;
- Number of recipient complaints;
- The number of emails caught in spam traps or sent to non-existent addresses
These factors determine the reputation of an IP address. If the reputation gets bad, email services will start blocking your messages.
And these are just a few examples of what providers react to when determining the sender’s reputation. Each mail service sets its parameters that affect the reputation. Therefore, before submitting your mailing list, check your IP reputation.
#6]. Domain reputation
A domain’s reputation is similar to the reputation we build in personal relationships with people. It depends on what we have done in the past and with whom we kept in touch.
This used to be easy to maintain a reputation at a decent level. It was enough to respond to complaints in time and regularly clean your email list.
But now, email providers are implementing algorithms that analyze domains, IP addresses, content, links, etc. On the one hand, it makes life difficult for spammers.
On the other hand, it adds a headache to “honest” mailings. IP reputation and domain reputation are two interdependent concepts that affect each other.
For example, with a high IP reputation and a low domain reputation, you run the spammed risk. Remember how IP and domain reputation is related:
- The IP reputation is tied to a specific server from which you send mailings.
- Domain reputation is unique to your domain name, regardless of the IP address.
- IP reputation can help or damage the reputation of a domain. You risk reducing your domain’s reputation if you start sending mailings from a server with a low IP reputation.
- ISPs consider IP and domain reputation as separate values.
A better domain reputation increases the deliverability of inbox emails. So, it is essential to check and fix problems regularly.
#7]. Conclusion
Conclusively, you now have a good idea about email sender reputation. Also, we have highlighted how to check and improve email sender reputation.
Additionally, you now have a good idea about why email sender reputation is essential for digital marketing strategy.
Now, you can do email searches using different services like email hunter, email extractor, Snow email finder, etc. You can also take a step to ensure all emails follow best practices and remove spammy emails.
