Did you know that your email sender reputation score can affect how many of your emails get delivered? In fact, it is one of the most important factors email service providers use to determine whether an email should be delivered to the inbox or sent to the spam folder. Your email sender reputation score is determined by a variety of factors, including your IP address, opt-in policy, email list maintenance, and more. If you want to protect your email deliverability and ensure that as many of your emails as possible are delivered to the inbox, you need to understand what affects your email sender reputation score and take steps to protect it.
Introduction to the Email Sender Reputation Score
Your email sender reputation score is a numerical value that email service providers use to determine whether your emails are likely to be spam. The higher your email sender reputation score, the more likely your emails are to be delivered to the inbox. The lower your email sender reputation score, the more likely your emails are to be sent to the spam folder. Your email sender reputation score is calculated based on a variety of factors, including your IP address, email content, opt-in policy, email list maintenance, and more.
How does your email sender reputation score affect your email campaign?
In addition to deliverability (spam vs non-spam), your email sender reputation score also affects how much email activity is considered normal for you. The more natural your email sending rates, and patterns are, the better the effect on your email sender reputation score.
If you have a low email sender reputation score, you need to be careful not to send too many emails, or you may be considered spammy. But you can warm up your IP address (more on that below).
Finally, it affects how often your emails are opened and clicked. If you have a high email sender reputation score, your email is more likely to be delivered to the inbox. From there, it’s up to you to create email content that recipients will want to open and click.
How is your email sender reputation score calculated?
Your email sender reputation score is a numerical value between 0 and 100 that is assigned by email service providers based on a variety of factors.
The most important factor is your IP address. Every email you send has a unique IP address associated with it. If you’re sending from a shared IP address, your email sender reputation score will be based on the collective email activity of all the users on that IP address. However, if you have a dedicated IP address, your email sender reputation score will be based solely on your email activity.
Other important factors that affect your email sender reputation score include your email content, opt-in policy, email list maintenance, and more.
One useful tool (among several) to check your own score, is Sender Score’s “Get your score” feature.
There are a number of things you can do to protect your email sender reputation score and ensure that your emails are delivered to the inbox.
IP Warm Up
If you’re sending from a new IP address, it’s important to “warm it up” before you start sending email campaigns. This means gradually increasing the number of emails you send over a period of time so that email service providers can get a sense of your normal email sending patterns.
Warming up an IP address means gradually sending more and more messages over a period of time. This way, you can better avoid the spam box, and slowly work up to your maximum email sending rate. This way your subscribers are happy, and email providers are able to better get a handle on your email (with out it appearing as a massive spam blitz).
Opt-In Policy
It’s important to have a clear and consistent opt-in policy so that people only sign up for email communications that they actually want to receive. This will help to reduce the number of people who mark your emails as spam, which can hurt your email sender reputation score.
Some email marketers believe that email should be a double opt-in process, in order to protect the email sender reputation score. When email is sent to a single opt-in list, there is always the possibility that some of the email addresses on the list are no longer valid, which can lead to high bounce rates and negatively impact your email sender reputation score.
Email List Maintenance
It’s important to regularly clean your email list and remove inactive subscribers. This will help to ensure that the people who are receiving your emails actually want to receive them, which will again reduce the number of people who mark your emails as spam.
Leverage Email Segmentation
Email list segmentation can help improve your email sender reputation score by ensuring that only interested recipients are receiving your email campaigns. It’s a way of sending specific email content, to specific subscribers (on your list), who would be most interested in those email messages.
This helps to reduce the number of people who mark your email as spam, since they would normally be getting all email (instead of more targeted email) from you if they have opted in to receive it.
Furthermore, email list segmentation can improve open rates and click-through rates, which is another factor that email service providers take into account when determining your email sender reputation score.
Monitor Reputation
There are a number of online tools that you can use to monitor your email sender reputation score. This will help you to identify any problems early on so that you can take steps to fix them. You can find a short list on the post: Email Reputation Monitoring: Why It’s Important and 9 Tools to Check Your Reputation Now.
Monitor Bounces
It’s important to monitor the number of bounced emails you’re getting. If too many of your emails are bouncing, it could be an indication that your email list is outdated or that your email content is not relevant to the people on your list.
Valuable Email Content
Finally, it’s important to make sure that the email content you’re sending is actually valuable to the people who are receiving it. If your emails are full of spammy links or irrelevant information, people are going to mark them as spam, which will hurt your email sender reputation score.
It’s also important to include real value in your email because ESPs (email service providers), including the likes of Gmail, etc., monitor the open rates of email. If your content is not interesting, people won’t open it. The more of your email people don’t open, the greater the negative impact to your email reputation (increasing the possibility of your email being redirected to spam folders).
Conclusion
By following these simple tips, you can protect your email sender reputation score and ensure that your emails are delivered to the inbox. This will also help you with building a stronger email sender reputation, and when pruning your list, a more powerful subscriber audience (that’s genuinely interested in your email content),
You can learn much more about an email sender reputation score, by visiting our Small Business Email Marketing posts. As well as find out further about Email Sender Reputation.