Sending out email campaigns isn’t as simple as clicking the send button and waiting as customer impressions start rolling in. Your email reputation affects how well, or how terribly your email campaign performs. In this guide we’ll discuss what email sender reputation is, how it can drop, and what you can do to improve it.
What is email sender reputation
Email service providers (or ESPs) assign a score to your mailing address to gauge whether your email content is trustworthy or not. Your sender reputation is determined by a mix of the domain and IP address you’re using. If your domain has been used to send useful emails with high impressions to valid email addresses, your sender reputation will be fine.
The IP address you use also determines whether your email will end up in a spam folder or not. Using a free domain such as a free Gmail, AOL or Yahoo account to send emails will end up performing poorly as spammers are known to use free domains to send their email campaigns.
You will get better results if you use an IP provided by an email marketing platform.
Having a high email sender reputation translates to high deliverability of your email campaigns. In other words, your email campaigns will end up in your recipients’ inboxes. Emails by domains with low sender reputation will often get flagged as spam or not get sent altogether.
What can harm my email sender reputation
Be wary of the following parameters to ensure your email sender reputation score remains satisfactory to ESPs to avoid unnecessary hurdles in your email campaigns.
Email marketing platforms
What email platform or IP you use to send out emails will affect the performance of your campaign regardless of the email content. Email marketing platforms with paid domains perform better than free consumer-based email clients, such as your personal Gmail, AOL or Outlook account.
Sender history
Email campaigns you’ve sent in the past will influence your future email campaigns. Email campaigns with a high number of spam words, absent physical address, inadequate mailing lists (more on that later), and no way for subscribers to opt out will lower your sender reputation.
Email bounces
Sometimes your email may fail to deliver despite your ESP working correctly. Email bounce rates are of two types, soft and hard.
- Soft bounces - The recipient's inbox is full or a server side error. These emails eventually get sent when the problem is fixed.
- Hard bounces - The recipient email is invalid, or your domain is blocked by the recipient. These emails are never sent.
Soft bounces have no effect on sender reputation and can be ignored. On the other hand, hard bounces are detrimental to your sender reputation and need to be addressed immediately.
While you cannot unblock a recipient’s domain, you can remove invalid emails from your mailing list. Regular maintenance of your mailing list helps keep engagement and deliverability rates up of your emails. Remove the emails from your list from which you get little engagement or bounced emails.
Engagement
How often recipients open and interact with your emails refers to your email’s engagement. This includes opening the email and clicking links. Emails with low open rates and engagement will trigger ESPs to start sending more of your emails to the spam folder as recipients don’t find these useful.
Learn more about improving email performance here.
Your mailing list (and buying mailing lists)
The health of your mailing list(s) also determines email deliverability. The easiest way to lower your sender reputation and blacklist your domain is by buying mailing lists and sending emails to these.
Sending emails to bought mailing lists can cause multiple issues:
- Many emails in this list are invalid, which lowers overall engagement of your email.
- Recipients with legitimate email addresses have no reason to open your email, and may even end up reporting your email, which increases your chances of getting blacklisted.
- These lists may also contain emails which act as spam traps. Spam traps are created by internet service providers (ISPs) to catch and blacklist spammy domains. Sending an email to such an email account may place your email on a public blacklist.
It's important to create your mailing lists organically, either by creating a sign up form or asking for the customer’s email in exchange for a product or service (like a free ebook).
Unsubscribes
Customers may unsubscribe from your mailing list for a variety of reasons. Regardless of their reason, high unsubscribe rates may trigger ESPs to flag more of your incoming emails. Here’s some common reasons for customers to unsubscribe from your email blasts.
- You’re sending too many emails.
- Your email content is no longer relevant
- The customer didn’t sign up to your mailing list (only valid if you purchased a mailing list)
- The emails might be too repetitive
- Your emails do not provide them with value.
Additionally, you will also need to include your physical address and meet other anti-spam requirements to gain customer trust and keep customer ESPs on your side.
While there’s no one size fits all solution to stop unsubscribes, you can try these email design tips to improve customer engagement.
Design your own high quality email content via the PosterMyWall email marketing platform.