In this age of information and technology, plenty of threats loom around the Internet. The digital world did not only provide the opportunity for things like social media, streaming, and the Internet of Things. At the same time, it brings new forms of criminal activities including identity theft, hackers, spams, viruses, and more.
With such threats just around the corner, it makes sense to take extra precautions. You need to protect yourself against them before entering the digital world. As an email marketer, protecting your email sender reputation is one of the things you need to keep in mind. Since the 1990s, email spams have dominated the inboxes of users, and they are as prevalent even today.
What is Email Sender Reputation and Why You Need to Protect Yours Now?
Not a lot of people know about email sender reputation and its importance. If you are in online marketing, specifically email marketing, you must know that e-newsletters are an excellent way to communicate with your customers inexpensively. Without much cost, you can send emails to your loyal customers to inform them about changes in your business, special deals, news, and more.
Your email sender reputation is vital in ensuring your emails will get to where you intended them to be – the inbox, not to the spam folder. Your sender reputation score is what helps internet service providers or ISPs to determine this. If you have a poor score, it means your emails and marketing efforts will be wasted since only a few recipients will likely see them.
If you are confused, you can think of your email sender reputation score the same way as your credit score. If you have a higher credit score, the better the opportunities that come your way. How do ISPs determine your reputation score? Three things – spam trap hits, bounce rates, and complaint rates.
If the results of these are unfavorable, ISPs will likely block your business email address. Spam traps look like legitimate email addresses, but they don’t belong to any person. These are tools used by ISPs to identify spammers so they can block them.
How do you check your sender score? There are various online tools for calculating sender scores. Most of them involve entering your IP address or domain and ranking them against the others. Scores range from 0-100 and are calculated over a 30-day period. Having a high sender score suggests that you are maintaining a healthy subscriber’s list.
A good sender reputation is an asset that email marketer must have to ensure your messages are delivered. Besides that, a high sender score means plenty of benefits for you such as increased rates of opens, clicks, and fewer spam complaints. Good thing there are ways you can ensure your reputation is intact and keep it that way.
Tips to Protect Your Email Sender Reputation
When ensuring you have an impeccable sender reputation, there are plenty of things you can do. Regularly checking your score is crucial. By doing that, you can always stay ahead in performing the right actions that will protect your sender reputation. On that note, here are some of the practices you can adopt as an ongoing component of marketing efforts giving you the best chance of success.
- Avoid switching your IP address, or at least be aware that IP addresses that have no volume history are subject to being restricted or controlled by ISPs. It is because spammers often change their IP addresses.
- After signing up for feedback loops from ISP that informs you of spam complaints, remove the complainers from your email list before the next send. Thus, you can avoid further complaints.
- As mentioned before, you need to keep monitoring your reputation data. It will allow you to act immediately on unusually low or high statistics of complaints, hard bounce, spam traps, and more.
- If you have unsubscribers, remove them from your list quickly before sending new emails to minimize your complaint rate. Include testing your opt-in process before sending as part of your audit process to ensure they still work.
- Before doing any changes in your email program, do some test runs first and measure the complaint rate. If the rate boosts, it means your strategy needs some rethinking.
- If you have hard bounces, manage and remove them as well before sending your next emails. You may try to rescue the invalid addresses through some techniques, but if you cannot, best to let them go.
- If you conduct risky test email campaigns or have new opt-ins, isolate the emails that you sent in separate servers to determine the list’s quality. You will have to manage this as well, but it will help you learn the factors negatively affecting your campaign and address them.
One important tip to protect your email sender reputation is verifying your contacts using an email validation service before sending emails. This way, you can ensure your email list is clean and effectively reduce your bounce rates. If you can remember, bounce rates are one of the factors that affect your sender score.
There are plenty of practices and techniques, as well as tools you can use to keep your sender reputation excellent. Using them, you can reduce many of the things negatively affecting your deliverability rate. Keep them part of your email marketing campaign and your business can ensure successful email marketing.
Author: Nelly M.
Leading the digital marketing and communications for EmailOversight, with more than 5 years of experience in email marketing, Nelly M. is dedicated to helping customers make the right decisions. Being a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, her talent for managing digital content is impeccable and her definition of success is measured only when customers are happy.