Everything You Need To Know About Sender Reputation | Email Marketing
Suppose that you share your email address with a stranger whom you believe shares the same interests as yours. If the stranger sends you relevant emails based on the shared interest, you would engage with the email. The stranger’s reputation would be high in your experience.
Suppose that the stranger sends you irrelevant emails, you would avoid opening the emails, later report and unsubscribe. The stranger’s reputation would be low in your experience.
The experience you are having with the stranger is clearly seen in the kind of engagement you make with the stranger and his/her messages.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the mailbox provider could segment an email sender as a good guy or bad guy based on the experience of many who received an email from the sender and prevent emails of bad guys reaching you?
Sender reputation is important to maintain high email deliverability. If the domain’s reputation is low, mailbox spam filters will prevent the mail from reaching the user. Even if it manages to reach the user, it will still be moved to the spam folder.
Before we dive into the concept of Sender reputation, it is important that we have a basic understanding of a few key terms.
IP address
An IP address is an address in numerical form that computers use to identify things on the internet.
Domain
The domain is the human-friendly wordy version of the IP address. Since it’s inefficient for humans to identify things on the internet using lengthy IP addresses, domain names came to the rescue.
Domain Name System
The Domain Name System contains servers that convert the domain names into the corresponding IP addresses so as to enable the computers to identify things on the internet.
Sender reputation
Now that we have a basic level understanding of the key terms, let’s dive into sender reputation.
Before you send mass emails, you must make sure that you have a good sender reputation. In the online world, it’s not you who sends the email but the domain and the associated IP address.
Since your domain’s IP address can be changed easily, sender reputation implies domain reputation. It is the domain reputation that you must focus on.
For example, nike.com can change its associated IP address easily but it cannot change the domain name ‘nike’ since customers have identified the brand with the domain name.
Domain reputation
Domain reputation is a score calculated out of 100 by mailbox providers such as Gmail. Domain reputation score varies from one mailbox provider to another.
To obtain an average value of your domain reputation score, you can use the popular tools available online. To obtain the domain’s reputation score calculated by a specific mailbox provider, you can use the tools provided by the mailbox provider. For example, you can use Google Postmaster tools to check the domain reputation score of your domain as calculated by Gmail.
Positive engagement with your emails by the users will boost your domain’s reputation score.
Positive engagement by a user could be
- opening your email
- clicking on the link
- replying
Negative engagement with your emails by the users will kill your domain’s reputation score.
Negative engagement by a user could be
- Not opening the email
- Spam complaint
- Hard bounce
How to maintain high domain reputation?
The fundamental way to maintain high domain reputation is understanding the fact that the email is written to humans.
Some important actions to be performed while writing to humans are:
Segmentation
Positive engagement can be expected only if the emails are relevant to the user. To improve relevance, email list segmentation is very important.
Optimal frequency
How often do your customers want to hear from you? Ask them this question while collecting their email addresses. Focus on the product and the customer to come up with a frequency plan.
Maintain list hygiene
Your email list could contain invalid emails and spam traps. Hence it’s important to identify and remove them.
Set up email authentication
It is important to set up a mechanism for the mailbox providers to verify your email for authenticity.
Option to unsubscribe
Make sure that you provide a link for subscription. If your users find it difficult to get to the unsubscribe button, they would report your email as spam which in turn affects your domain reputation.
Domain reputation is important to make sure that good players remain and bad players kicked off so as to make email services safe for everyone using it.
