What it is and how to improve your sender's reputation

Category: Email Marketing

Reputation is a way of measuring the trust placed in a sender and deciding whether to let their messages pass through without problems, consider them spam or block them because they do not pass the filter. It is a key factor in deliverability and is made up of several elements that are important to know in order to avoid getting a bad reputation.

 

What is reputation in email marketing?

We could start with the basic one, the one that any brand has and that makes a person decide to sign up and open your newsletters. But when we talk about reputation in email marketing, it is more a mathematical calculation than a user perception.

Sender reputation takes into account three parameters:

• The IP from which the messages are sent is valued by counting bounces and complaints, considering the history and not individually.
• The content itself, whether it includes suspicious words or attachments or whether once opened, the sender is blocked.
• The sender's domain, measuring the quality of authenticated emails. The IP and the domain can be different, which is why they are considered separately.

 

How is reputation calculated in email marketing?

Each ISP has its own calculation for sender reputation, but Return Path's Sender Score tool can give you a reference. It is based on an anonymised dataset of more than 60 million email accounts from different ISPs. After entering our sending IP, the tool returns a number from 0 to 100: the higher the score, the higher the likelihood of high deliverability; a low score would indicate that reputation needs to be improved, although it does not necessarily mean that everything you send will go to the spam folder.

 

Five ways to improve your sender reputation

There are several ways to improve your reputation metrics. Implementing all of them will not guarantee you a sender score of 100, but you can improve it.

• Verify your IP and your domain: authentication (SPF for IP and DKIM for domain) is the most direct option to confirm that you are the one sending each message and that it is not fraudulent, such as spoofing.
• Protect your senders: each type of campaign can be sent by a different account, for example, transactional notifications and loyalty newsletters. In this way, each will have its own reputation because user behaviour will vary.
• Take care of your list: always use double opt-in to avoid falling into ISP traps and do good maintenance to eliminate bounced emails. You can also run re-engagement campaigns for inactive users.
• Offer good content: segment and personalise your messages so that the user does not consider them spam. You can ask them during the sign-up process to make sure you give them what they want in time (frequency) and form (topics).
• Look for quality: check the campaigns using a spam filter to make sure that there are no campaigns that could be considered spam, check that you do not use strange codes in the layout and that the calls to action are clear and generate trust.

Also, as a prevention measure, look at your statistics: open rates, click-through rates, complaints and unsubscribes will help you detect that something is wrong with your campaigns. Reviewing them will help you ensure that future mailings comply with the recommendations we have given you and thus protect and improve your reputation as a sender.
Want to improve your sender's reputation? Contact one of our deliverability experts.

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