How to Maintain Your Email Sender Reputation

There is no single action that determines your sender reputation at all; it’s always been various things coming together. Primarily, there are two things that matter the most: your IP reputation and your domain reputation. That, too, happens over time.

In this blog, we are going to explore how your sender reputation gets influenced by various factors. Also, we will talk about how to improve your sender reputation later on in this blog. Let us first begin with how to determine sender reputation.

Yes, the IP address you’re using to send emails also matters when it comes to email sender reputation. If you’re using a shared IP address, your sender reputation is influenced by the user of your IP. It will become a collective version and affect the sender’s reputation. On the other hand, if you’re alone using a dedicated IP, you’re completely responsible for your IP and sender reputation.

The domain you’re using to send emails also determines your email sender reputation. Suppose you’re using gmail.com for sending emails, then you can build a good sender reputation. However, in business communication, dedicated email domains are getting used, so Gmail might not be suited there. Be careful when choosing domains for sending emails, as they matter the most when it comes to building sender reputation.

Besides these two things, there are plenty of matters that can influence email sender reputation. We can explore them here to understand what is at the core of this issue.

Suppose you’re sending good-quality content to your subscribers. Thus, it’s natural for them to get more content from you. The open rate will be good, and every other matter will be in the right position. Hence, when you target a new group of audience, it’s more likely for your emails to hit their inbox too. Because you earned a good sender reputation. The email server is pushing your content to the receiver.

On the contrary, if your email content is pathetic, it’s more likely that your emails will end up in the spam folder of the receiver. As a result, your email sender reputation will be lost forever.

If by any chance your emails trigger spam filters, your sender reputation will get badly affected by it. Verifying every email address before you send it is important to maintain sender reputation. Your emails should not hit the spam folder at all. Some receivers may get irritated by your emails, and they can report them. That could also affect the reputation. So, do not nag when someone is not responding.

Suppose you have an email ID, and you created it recently. As you have your list of emails at your disposal, you started sending emails at scale. It can hurt your sender’s reputation badly. Without any decent sending history, sending emails in bulk is equal to inviting a ban from mail service providers. Hence, be cautious when starting your email campaigns. Send some ‘warm-up” emails from your IP to get everything aligned before starting your email campaigns.

Guess it!

Yes, you’re absolutely right. Your emails will not hit the right inbox at the right time. In most cases, they can end up in the spam folders of your recipients. An average email user receives 1825 spam emails per year, and the number is high for the United States.

If your sender reputation is not good, you’re unlikely to reach your audience via email campaigns. Most of the ISPs will flag your emails and block your ID eventually. There’s no scope unless you improve your sender reputation to build a successful email campaign.

Again, there a plenty of ways you have to improve your sender reputation. But before you follow them, you need to check your score for sender reputation. You can try any tool which are available online. Based on the scores, you need to decide what metrics you should incorporate into your email sending practices. However, to build and maintain a good sender score, you can follow these simple measures in your practices;

Keeping your email list clean and accurate should be your top priority if you want to improve your sender reputation. Maintaining email list hygiene can provide many benefits besides improving sender reputations. It includes increasing deliverability, reducing bounce rates, etc. You can confidently reach your intended recipients’ inbox with the right type of message that you want to deliver.

Validating the email list comes into play in this. Initiate a proper email clean-up process to verify and update your email list. This clean-up process included checking the spelling and format of your email list. Further, the process also checks whether the emails are still valid or not. There’s no point sending emails to a receiver who has stopped checking emails in that account. Hence, verification of email IDs is essential at this stage.

One interesting thing you must check out is that many people use multiple email accounts. Thus, you need to ensure that you’re sending your message to the most active inbox among the email addresses they use. As a result, you can easily improve your sender reputation and successfully perform email marketing campaigns.

Before starting your email marketing campaigns, you need to make sure that all the email authentication protocols (SPF, BIMI, DMARC, DKIM, etc) are in place. These protocols will keep your email deliverability stable while improving sender reputation.

When you choose the double opt-in option for your subscribers, it will make the email verification automatic. Your subscribers need to validate their emails by confirming the code that is sent to the email ID they provided while signing up. This also confirms the interest of the users in receiving your emails. This strategy works only when you offer more than the users ask cases.

Frequency and the context of emails are the two factors that matter here, along with the content. Using promotional language in emails or sending emails at the wrong time always decreases the sender’s reputation. Because the recipients might not open them or mark them as spam. So, always try to provide valuable content in emails in order to drive your prospects to take action, but don’t push them to take bad actions.