Do you know your email sender’s reputation is key to getting your campaign delivered? While focusing on creating the best content and subject line that will drag readers into a funnel, you are missing one of the most crucial aspects of a successful email marketing campaign. Content is king, but when it comes to email communication channels, ensuring your emails reach your subscribers’ inboxes matters more than anything, turning sender reputation into a top priority for companies.
Sender’s reputation is so powerful that you cannot run campaigns and enjoy the benefits of an email communication channel if it is terrible. Internet service providers care about it even more than you do. Why? Because reputation says a lot about the company, its history, and current behavior. It goes a long way playing a decisive factor for many good reasons. Therefore, you should also care about it.
Let’s get to the bone of this crucial factor by uncovering its basics and importance and learning how to calculate the sender score using the best tools in the niche. Afterward, we will discover the best practices to improve sender reputation, ensuring your efforts, time, and money invested in email marketing strategy are well spent.
Check the sender reputation
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First things first: what is the sender’s reputation?
Sender reputation can be described in much the same way as a traditional company’s reputation, that in business terms, refers to how customers, stakeholders, and passers-by view a corporation. In the email channel, it means a public perception of the company by email providers, subscribers, and some crucial parties of the email environment. It comprises IP reputation and domain reputation.
IP reputation
IP reputation is a complex term that measures the behavioral quality of an IP address. It forms based on several crucial characteristics, such as spam traps, email volume, bounce rate, number of unknown or fake email addresses, and email frequency. It also considers how many unwanted requests the company sends, how many spam complaints the company has, or whether it is associated with malware, dangerous domains, or suspicious locations. It even has an IP history, meaning the IP address bears an undeniable imprint if the malicious behavior has been detected lately.
These tiny yet crucial aspects help gauge the risk associated with an IP address, contributing to the overall sender’s reputation.
Domain reputation
Domain reputation is the “health state” of your branded domain. Much like IP reputation, it is determined by numerous factors such as level of engagement or spam complaint rate. It is considered across the vertical, including the domain name you use in your official email address, the domain used inside the newsletter content, the Return-Path domain, and the DKIM signing domain.
On top of that, it is not a singular term. It combines all unique reputations with receivers.
IP and domain reputation center by Talos
Which factors affect the sender’s reputation?
There is no one-size-fits-all approach for measuring email sender reputation. Each mailbox provider determines whether your email should be delivered to the recipient based on its unique algorithm and crucial factors. However, all of them consider some standard aspects so that a company can reach the audience by nailing them.
Here is the list of the most crucial ones.
Quality of subscription list
ISPs consider the contacts to whom the company’s IP address sends messages. If a company sends to non-existent email addresses or constantly gets into spam traps, it may indicate that it has bought or got the subscription list illegally. “Scrapping” or “purchasing” subscribers is a horrible practice that needs to be stopped. Therefore, it drastically damages a company’s reputation and decreases its credibility.
Level of engagement
Mailbox providers monitor the open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, and complaint rate to understand the quality of the content in the emails. The users’ behavior towards an email demonstrates the value company delivers to the recipients, thereby uncovering its methods and behavior in the email channel.
For instance, if the click-through rate is too low, this might mean that the company adopts “dirty” practices to win over clients or get subscribers by tricking them. You should know that CAN-SPAM Act forbids inducing users to view an email message through a misleading email subject line. Not only does it lead to fines and legal issues, but it also damages the sender’s reputation.
Sending volume trends
Email sending volume and frequency may say a lot about the company’s intentions and behavior, especially regarding new players in the field. The deal is new IP addresses that have just entered the market will not send a massive number of emails frequently simply because they do not have a large subscription list yet. Therefore, if a new IP address sends tons of digital newsletters, this looks utterly suspicious and requires extra monitoring.
Even well-established companies with thousands of subscribers may look suspicious to ISPs if they start bombarding their customers.
Age of the domain
ISPs analyze sending history to determine the legibility of the IP address when they first meet it. Age is the first factor they consider because it has a solid correlation to many factors related to the deliverability rate.
If the domain is young, then it calls for particular attention. If the domain is old, it has a rich history and a sender reputation score that tells a lot. Across the domains we test, the ones that consistently reach the inbox carry an average age of 9.3 years, underscoring how much maturity weighs on a sender’s standing.
Domain history by GoDaddy
Unsubscribing rate
Unsubscribing rates could mean many things, but all of them are important for ISPs to decide whether to let digital newsletters from the company in or not.
While the rate is within the normal range (according to OptinMonster, it should be below 0.5%), the company is fine. If it is high, this indicates a problem somewhere with the email campaign. For instance, it might signal to mailbox providers that the company is sending low-quality content or spam emails that overwhelm or irritate their clients.
Soft bounces and hard bounces
Both these metrics drastically influence the sender’s reputation. They give vital information to the ISPs as well.
Soft bounces demonstrate temporary problems with delivering the message to the recipient caused by the server, mailbox, or message. For instance, the server was down, the mailbox was full, or the message was too large to be accepted by the mailbox provider. This might indicate that the company uses unreliable software or has a poor email system.
Hard bounces, however, indicate serious problems. For instance, they signal that the subscription list has fake email addresses. Having a high volume of invalid email addresses on the list is dangerous to deliverability and the sender’s reputation because they trigger spam filters.
SPAM complaints and traps
Everything concerning SPAM is bad for an email marketing campaign and strategy. Some believe it to be the worst-case-scenarios for these two reasons.
First, a mailing list including spam trap addresses can signal that the company has acquired subscribers, not legally. For example, a company has bought it or used tools to “harvest” emails from websites.
Second, it signals that the company doesn’t use an opt-in strategy. This means the subscription list is full of disengaged subscribers or subscribers who have not consented.
These situations force ISPs to monitor the company closely and do additional checks before allowing it to reach the inboxes.
Blacklist
Spam complaints and traps may easily lead to blacklists. Although the size and notoriety of the blacklist matter, as a rule, it has damaging consequences for the company.
Companies that are blacklisted have a high chance of being rejected before ever reaching the recipients. If you are on a blacklist used by a primary email provider, your digital newsletter will never see the subscriber. The good news is that a clean record is the norm rather than the exception: our benchmark data shows only 0.27% of domains we test appear on a domain blacklist, while 6% of sending IPs land on an IP blacklist (94% are clean).
To make matters worse, nobody notifies you about being blacklisted. It is also tough to get out of this list. Not only will you damage your sender’s reputation and, therefore, deliverability rate, but you will lose your precious time in recovering from this situation.
Why is it important to improve sender reputation?
Sender’s reputation does not appear out of nowhere or can be built overnight. Establishing and strengthening it may take years and a lot of effort, money, and human resources. However, the sad truth is it can be ruined with just one failed email campaign or one wrong decision.
ISPs are merciless in protecting recipients from malware, spammers, and attacks. Poor sender reputation means that the company may hurt the recipients. Therefore, ISPs should thwart all its attempts to reach the inbox to protect them. To make matters worse, you cannot avoid a negative domain reputation by switching ESPs. It will follow you everywhere.
Ensuring the legitimacy and quality of the sender’s reputation is the way to prove ISPs that the company means no harm to the recipient, and their emails may pass the barriers and reach the inboxes.
There is more. When sender’s reputation is well-established, it does lots of good for the company. For instance,
- It creates a solid foundation for running email marketing campaigns.
- It positively impacts the health of the overall email system.
- It ensures email delivery.
- It provides a more consistent inbox placement.
- It increases the deliverability rate.
- It decreases throttling.
- It affects email campaign performance.
- It indicates the level of engagement, providing valuable insights for improvement.
- It ensures time, money, and effort are well spent.
- It reinforces overall brand identity improving the company’s credibility and trustworthiness.
- It even helps to fight against cyberattacks. Companies with good IP reputations assist ISPs in identifying and suppressing cybercriminals, spotting malicious intentions, sending suspicious emails to the spam folder, or blocking them entirely.
Lastly, tracking and improving the sender’s reputation is crucial because it can be easily destroyed. Even if you do not purchase your subscription list, there are still a bunch of reasons that may lead to a poor sender’s reputation, for instance:
- Unhealthy subscription list.
- Poor segmentation.
- Poor quality email content and design.
- Inconsistency with email campaigns.
- Spam traps and blacklists.
However, the biggest issue lies in shared servers. As a rule, young companies do not buy dedicated hosting, using less expensive options. They share IP addresses between thousands of accounts. If some of these accounts earn a bad reputation, it will also affect others by default.
How to check email sender reputation?
Email sender reputation is how mailbox providers rate your sending, and each one expresses it differently. Google Postmaster Tools rates a domain or an IP as Bad, Low, Medium or High. Microsoft SNDS reports a green, yellow or red filter result. Yahoo publishes no rating at all. Only Validity’s Sender Score reduces it to a single 0 to 100 number, and that number describes an IP address rather than a brand.
A strong reputation means your emails reach the inbox without a fight. A weak one means mailbox providers trust you less and route more of your mail to the spam folder or reject it outright. For a sense of the wider picture, our benchmark data puts the global email deliverability health score at 89 out of 100 across the messages we test. That is a different measurement from any provider’s reputation rating, but it shows how much room most senders still have. Depending on where they sit, companies build strategies to improve sender reputation.
So, how to define your sender’s reputation score? Use professional instruments for that. Here are the top 3 in the niche.
Unspam is a professional platform created to determine email deliverability and test emails against spam. It looks up your sender reputation by IP address and domain, analyzing many crucial factors. It checks blacklists, determines whether SPF and DKIM are correctly set up, defines the performance of domain suffixes, and sees whether reverse DNS is in place.
On top of that, it identifies the potential issues with accessibility, highlights problems with email design, and even checks for broken links in your emails.
The critical advantage of Unspam lies in the report that it generates. It assembles all vital information under one roof, giving the company quick access to crucial details concerning email campaigns.
Google Postmaster is a multifunctional platform that comes with numerous capabilities. Although it primarily helps email marketers analyze email performance by tracking crucial metrics, still finding data about the company’s sending domain and IP address to define the sender’s reputation score is among its primary responsibilities.
It gives insights into reputation by diagnosing factors vital for Gmail. It even shows the rate at which emails pass SPF, DKIM, and DMARC protocols giving a deep insight into the email system that is crucial to taking corrective action when necessary.
Sender Score is Validity’s free 0 to 100 rating of a sending IP address, recalculated in most cases on a rolling 30-day average. It reads complaints, sending volume, external reputation, unknown users and rejected messages, so it measures the IP you send from rather than your brand or your domain.
Because it is one vendor’s proprietary measurement rather than a signal any mailbox provider publishes, treat it as an IP health check rather than a prediction of inbox placement. What Sender Score measures and what it misses sets out the bands and the limits in full.
How to improve sender reputation?
Improving sender reputation is a programme rather than a single fix, and it breaks into five jobs: protect the domain before you send, perfect the list you send to, maintain the habits that keep you trusted, recover quickly when something slips, and fortify against the next problem. Our guide to email reputation management works through all five in order.
Three of them move the number fastest, so they are worth naming here.
Warm up a new domain rather than sending at full volume on day one, and collect addresses only from people who chose to hear from you. A double opt-in costs you signups and buys you deliverability.
Keep spam traps out of the list, because a single trap hit can undo months of careful sending. If you are listed, open the delisting request the same day rather than waiting to see whether it matters.
Then watch the signals that move before placement does: complaint rate, bounce rate and engagement by segment. Scheduled inbox placement monitoring and an automatic spam test turn that from something you remember to check into something that reaches you.
Conclusion
Getting your emails in the inbox sounds like the most straightforward task: create an email, choose the target audience, and hit the “send” button. However, in practice, it is a true challenge with many obstacles. If you want to face it with music, it is crucial to take your sender’s reputation seriously since it is a decisive factor in the delivery of your emails and the efficacy of email campaigns.
Improve sender reputation by hitting the essentials and adopting the best practices in the niche. Start by benchmarking where you are now. Depending on the score, take corresponding measures. Hit the essentials: comply with permission policies, secure a dedicated server for your company, and do all vital preparations, such as authenticating the email address and warming up the domain. Then follow professional tips to raise the sender’s score.
