Emailmarketing: Sender Reputation

The sender reputation is one of the most important factors to deliver your email. One the one hand, it is the reputation with the ISP, who decide which mails to deliver to their user´s inboxes. And on the other hand, it is the reputation with the recipients of your emails, which decide to open and click your emails or just mark it as spam.

But what does make your sender reputation? There are some indicators, which are used by the major ISPs to select the good from the bad mails:

1. Spam complaint rate: The most critical part of the process is the user himself. The more people complain about your emails, the more likely your emails will get blocked by the ISPs. The limit of complaints seems to be 1% - if you exceed this limit - you will have to face the ISP blocking all your emails.
2. Unknown user / Hard Bounce rate: Sending repeadidly to e-mail addresses that don´t exist, will cause the ISPs to have a closer look on your emailmarketing doings.
3. Spam traps: An old Emailadress that is inactive can be used by the providers to build a spam trap, because these email adresses won´t have signed into any subscriber list, and will show the providers that you have a bad customer acquisition tactic.

As we have seen the three elements to avoid (Don´ts), we can conclude the elements to build up a good reputation (Dos). Let´s have a closer look on them:

1. Permission practices: Always make sure that you collect the direct consent of the subscribers of your mailing listst. Best practise ist still the Double Optin for this.
2. Technical infrastructure: Use authentication like SIDF and DKIM, to build up a good technical reputation of your email marketing program.
3. Relevancy: Make sure that the email communication to the users always holds a specific benefit for them. And make sure you you send the users what you promised them, that they would sign up to.
4. Recognition: Always ensure that your emails identify where they’re coming from, to give the users the chance to buidl up a trust to your sending domain.
5. Mailing list cleaning: Immediatly react on unsubscribe requests and remove bounced e-mail addresses and aged, unresponsive e-mail addresses on a regular basis, so that you always send to an agil and active subscriber list..
6. Easy unsubscribe: Let users sign off easily, because if you make it too hard they will hit the spam button instead and your reputation will lower fast.

Further reading:

Three Metrics that Make Your E-mail Reputation
Your email sender reputation: the timing problem
E-Mail Reputation: An Important Factor in Restoring Trust
6 Steps to Higher Email Delivery Rates