As a marketer, email sender reputation is something that you should keep in mind. You can spend countless hours crafting the perfect email for your prospects, but at the end of the day, if your email is landing in their spam folder, your campaign won’t be successful.
You’ve been sending emails, but have you been getting results? Marketers spend a lot of time looking for ways to optimize their emails to improve their open and click rates but often don’t take into account their email marketing sender reputation.
Put simply, email sender reputation refers to how much recipients trust a sender (shocking, right?). It’s difficult for marketers to build trust with their audience in general, but it becomes almost impossible when the majority of their emails don’t even make it into prospects’ inboxes.
Read on to learn more about email marketing sender reputation and the crucial role it plays in your overall marketing strategy.
How Email Marketing Sender Reputation Affects Engagement
Your email sender reputation builds over time, and there are many things that negatively affect your sender reputation that you might not even know about. It’s tied directly to your email domain, and it acts as a record of how well or how poorly emails sent out from your domain have performed.
While it isn’t easy to repair a poor email sender reputation, it’s possible. Crafting your email marketing campaigns with relevant content that has the right message, for the right audience, at the right time can help your email reputation recover.
Keep Reading: Guide to Crafting a B2B Email Marketing Strategy
What Affects Email Sender Reputation
It can be difficult or even impossible to identify the underlying factors that are negatively impacting your email sender reputation. Here are the four major factors to look out for that could be influencing your reputation:
- Email list quality
- Sending history
- Email consistency
- Low-quality content
- Open rates or engagement
Content mapping comes into play during these stages because a prospect’s intent will differ depending on which stage they’re actively in. By mapping the most relevant content to each stage in the buying cycle, you’ll speak more directly to each lead’s individual needs, so you’re having the right conversation with the right people at the right time.
Email List Quality
First and foremost, make sure that the contacts you’re sending to have the most recent and accurate email addresses. If an email address is outdated or even misspelled, that’s going to negatively impact your email marketing sender reputation.
That said, you should always take the time to clean your email list; and remove old data and unengaged contacts. Sending quality content to quality prospects improves your reputation and your overall outreach efforts.
Sending History
The IP address tied to your sender plays a big role in boosting the legitimacy and email reputation score of your emails. Having an IP address with an established history improves your email marketing sender reputation since it serves as an indication that everything is legitimate—your sender, content, and recipients.
This bump-up in your credibility is helpful since spammers will often change their IP addresses, which makes it nearly impossible to obtain a reputable sending history with IPs. The more legitimate you are, the more likely you’ll end up in your prospect’s inbox.
A few tools and software you can use to check your email IP and domain reputation include:
- SenderScore.org: This is a free tool provided by Return Path that evaluates your IP address against various reputation metrics and provides a score based on your email sending practices.
- MXToolbox: MXToolbox offers a comprehensive suite of tools for checking email deliverability, including checks for blacklisting, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. It provides detailed reports on your domain and IP reputation.
- SenderBase by Cisco: This is a reputation authority that provides real-time data on email traffic, assessing the reputation of IPs and domains based on various factors like volume, bounce rates, and spam reports.
- Barracuda Reputation Block List (BRBL): This is a real-time database of IP addresses known to send spam. It’s used by Barracuda Networks’ products and services but is also accessible for general use to check the reputation of your IP.
- Google Postmaster Tools: If you send a significant volume of emails to Gmail users, Google Postmaster Tools can provide valuable insights into your domain reputation, delivery errors, and spam reports, specifically within the Gmail ecosystem.
Email Consistency
Another factor that impacts your email marketing sender reputation is the volume of emails you’re sending on a daily basis, as well as how consistently they’re going out.
Mailbox providers and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) analyze sending patterns frequently to determine whether senders are following best practices or acting like spammers. It’s also important to be aware of your mailbox provider’s maximum daily sends so you can avoid having your account flagged.
For instance, Gmail only allows 2,000 emails to be sent out per day, 10,000 auto-forwarded messages, 2,000 total recipients per message (with a maximum of 500 external recipients), etc. Check out the complete list of Gmail sending limits here.
Low-Quality Content
The next factor that negatively impacts your email marketing sender reputation is low-quality content. If your email comes off as too sales-y, is filled with unnecessary links, poorly formatted, or littered with spam-triggering words, then you’re pretty much guaranteeing that you’ll end up in the spam folder. Your prospects will not hesitate to mark your email as spam, and this will greatly damage your sender score.
Here are some common spam-triggering words and phrases often flagged by spam filters:
- Free: Phrases like “free trial,” “free offer,” or simply the word “free” can trigger spam filters.
- Discount: Terms such as “discount,” “limited-time offer,” or “special promotion” might raise flags.
- Urgent: Using urgent language like “act now,” “urgent response required,” or “limited time only” can trigger spam filters.
- Money-related terms: Phrases like “make money fast,” “earn $$$,” or “get rich quick” are often associated with spam.
- Misleading subject lines: Subject lines that are deceptive or misleading, promising something that isn’t delivered in the email content, can trigger spam filters.
- Poor grammar and spelling: Excessive use of misspelled words, unusual punctuation, or poor grammar can signal spam.
- Too many exclamation marks or symbols: Overuse of exclamation marks (!!!) or symbols like $$$, %%%, or **** can make the email appear spammy.
- Phishing terms: Phrases like “verify your account,” “update your information,” or “click here to login” can indicate phishing attempts and trigger spam filters.
Open Rates or Engagement
Mailbox providers have recently begun monitoring the way their subscribers are interacting with emails. So if they notice the email you sent to a prospect has low (or nonexistent) open or click-through rates, then they’re going to start filtering out your emails based on their subscribers’ preferences. As a result, this also negatively affects your email marketing sender reputation.
Keep Reading: Ultimate Email Campaign Checklist
How To Measure Email Sender Reputation
There are plenty of third-party inbox delivery and spam filtering tools available today geared toward measuring email marketing sender reputation. When evaluating your sender reputation, you must also consider the concept of deliverability. Deliverability is your ability to successfully send emails and not land in the spam folder.
These third-party tools analyze your sender’s deliverability and will typically give you an overall sender score. They review your sender, domain, and content to generate a breakdown of what percent of your emails are making it into the inbox vs. what percent are going to spam. Most of these tools will also provide you with tips to improve your content so that it sounds less like spam.
While these third-party tools are helpful for monitoring your email marketing sender reputation, they do come at a cost. So, if your marketing budget is already tight, a better method to understand your sender reputation is to keep a close eye on your email metrics. If you notice a steady decrease in your open rates or just a lack of engagement in general, then it could likely be due to a poor sender reputation.
Ideally, your open rates should be around 18% and above. Open rates that are consistently below 10% should indicate that it’s time to take a deep dive into improving audience engagement. It’s also important to remember that average open rates will vary depending on your industry, so make sure you’re familiar with your specific email marketing benchmarks.
How To Protect Your Email Sender Reputation
Since many people overlook email marketing sender reputation, you’re already ahead of the curve if you’re aware of the various factors that influence your sender reputation score.
Apply these best practices to increase your odds of reaching your prospects’ inboxes every time:
- Don’t send to purchased lists, and make sure you’re sending to prospects who have opted in. This reduces bounce rates and increases successful email delivery rates.
- Clean your data and make sure to remove outdated or unengaged email addresses from your lists.
- Control your sending frequency in order to avoid spamming your audience. By creating a send schedule and sticking to it, you lower the odds of your email being marked as spam. Here is a good resource that covers the email-sending limits of various email service providers.
- Segment your audience. We’ve seen firsthand that our results fall short when we offer too vague a message and cast too wide a net (including too many recipients).
Key Takeaways
As a marketer, your email marketing sender reputation is something that you should keep in mind. You can spend countless hours crafting the perfect email for your prospects, but at the end of the day, if your email is landing in their spam folder, your campaign won’t be successful.
Having an accurate pulse on your email marketing sender reputation is a full-time job if you want to get the most out of your email marketing efforts. Here at Abstrakt Marketing Group, we have email sender reputation down to a science and know exactly what to do if our emails aren’t performing well. If this sounds like an area your business could benefit from, it might be time to consider outsourcing your lead generation efforts.
