Learn Why Sender Reputation is Important to Your Email Marketing Strategy and Ways You Can Ensure Yours Isn't Tarnished
How Important is Email to Your Marketing Strategy?
Using email as a part of your marketing strategy? You aren’t alone. 64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach customers every day. Email marketing is a major business itself and our go-to way of marketing to subscribers. Why? Email marketing is personalized and is one of the few marketing tools that give you almost 100% control over the click rate.
Email marketing is so loved, in fact, that 4 out of 5 marketers prefer that marketing channel to social media, and would give up the latter if they had to make a choice. (Litmus, 2020) That’s saying something.
Email marketing was valued at $7.5 billion back in 2020 and is projected to increase to $17.9 billion over the next five years. (Statista, 2021)
Haven’t delved into email marketing yet? Email has the highest ROI over other forms of marketing - digital or not.
We all love email, right? So long as it isn’t spam, of course.
Spam. Nobody likes it. Neither in your mailbox nor on your plate. We can all recognize spam emails. The subject lines are obvious and the sender domain is often laughable.
Have you received emails from winbig@makeyourfortune.ru or yourdreamhome@lotterywinnersrus.shop ?
Would you ever even open emails from these domains? Of course, you wouldn’t. They would be blacklisted and never reach your inbox.
Now here’s a horrible scenario- - what if your email address, your domain name, was on a blacklist?
“There is one marketing method that has maintained its claim to fame. Email marketing still promises to deliver the highest ROI of all marketing channels—$42 back for every dollar you spend.” Forbes.com
What is Email Sender Reputation?
We’re sure you’re not on an email blacklist. Let’s keep it that way! Your email sender reputation is like your marketing’s FICO score. You don’t want that dragged through the mud.
Sender Reputation is about Internet Service Providers (ISPs) Like Yahoo or Gmail, and others, evaluating how trustworthy an IP address and domain are. They then decide whether to forward the sent emails to the recipients' inboxes, put them in the spam folder, or block them completely.
You can, and probably have, also manually added emails to your spam list depending on the sender or the subject line.
The email Sender Reputation can be divided into three areas:
IP Reputation
Domain Reputation
Content Reputation
“E-mail sender reputation is an evaluation of your disposition as an entity sending emails. If you send good emails and follow best practices while doing it, your reputation will improve, while sending spammy emails or irritating your audience will result in your reputation declining.” Entrepreneur.com
How is Sender Reputation Determined?
In addition to the reputation of your IP address and domain name, email services look at other factors to determine how likely your email is going to be spam and, therefore, end up in the trash. Some of those factors are:
The quality of the email addresses themselves, to whom you are sending e-mails.
The level of engagement with those emails -- are they being opened? Are they bouncing?
Are you sending a great volume of emails multiple times a day? Here the benefit of segmentation and smaller subscriber lists are important.
As mentioned above, the quality of content is a factor. Are there links to spammy domains found within your email content? Too many affiliate links? Items with a large volume of data such as videos, suspiciously zipped files, or copyrighted materials not belonging to you.
Your email reputation is not cut into stone. It is like any other score -- Google’s Core Web Vitals, your Social Media followers, or the standing of your favorite baseball team. One day up, the next day down depending on what you, or they, do.
You can gauge your sender reputation by testing your Sender Score. This measures how healthy your email program is on a scale of 0 to 100 based on how mailbox providers view your IP address.
If your Sender Score is below 70, you need to repair your Sender Reputation. You can calculate your score on Return Path: https://senderscore.org
“A free service of Return Path, the Sender Score algorithm rates the reputation of every outgoing mail server IP address on a scale from 0-100. Your Sender Score will continue to change depending on your email sending habits and the responses of your recipients.” HubSpot
How Can I Retain My Great Sender Reputation?
Cold emails are a great way to expand your horizons and reach a new audience. However, these emails are of little use if they don't reach the primary inbox.
So every promotional message you send reaches the recipient, you should make sure your email sender reputation remains squeaky clean!
To ensure your e-mails retain their good name, the most important thing you can do is to use a dedicated email marketing service.
Here are five other ways you can help keep your great sender reputation intact:
Test Your Emails Before They Go Out
Do all the links on your email work? Are the images showing? Is there anything not working on a mobile device? Check your grammar, and ensure your email is formatted correctly for every platform. Our message might be great, but it can be usurped by a poor messenger. A poorly worded CTA or an incorrectly spelled word can make the difference between a sale and having your email ridiculed on Twitter.
Spam filters can also see if similar content is being used in your e-mails. Don’t just change the title of your Christmas email to your Spring email. Your customers have short memories but they do have memories. Duplicate content is also not something that Google doesn’t like – spam filters see it, too.
If your system does not offer you a good tool to check e-mail campaigns before they go out, then please drop us a line. With our Email Suite Team, we’ll be happy to help you. If you’ve got questions, we’ve got answers!
Always Segment Your Email Lists
Those email addresses we receive are permission to market, not spam. Did Mr. Macintosh subscribe to emails about your new product? Or did he subscribe for emails on his birthday? Sending people information they didn’t ask for is asking for an unsolicited unsubscribe and possibly a complaint.
Segmentation isn’t just to help boost customer loyalty and conversions, it can help save you wasted e-mails.
“Marketers who use segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue.” HubSpot
Ensure You Have Personalized Subject Lines
Can you really afford to send another email with a boring subject line? No. Check your email trash. How many of those e-mails were never opened? Why? Obvious spam sender or a poor subject line? When we search for something in Google, those page titles decide for us very quickly which we will click on. The same goes for email subject lines.
“Short, clearly-written wording is key to a good subject line. But size matters -- at least in the subject line of your emails. Various studies show that the best opening rates for emails were those with a subject line containing six or seven words. “ Andrews Wharton
Check the Score of your IP address and your Domain name
Email hygiene is everything. A clean email is a delivered email and can help keep you off a blacklist.
A blacklist is a list of IPs from which SPAM or even hack attacks have been registered and therefore end up in such a blacklist. Such blocking lists/blacklists are used by many providers to prevent SPAM in advance if possible. So if the IP of an outgoing mail server (this could be your computer) is in one or more such lists, many incoming mail servers will not even accept communication from that server anymore.
Another way to land on a blacklist is if the domain name of your website has been flagged for spam mails. Your domain name is normally the same as your email address.
You can check the score of your IP address here: https://www.ipqualityscore.com/ip-reputation-check
Check the health of your domain name here: https://mxtoolbox.com/domain
Ask People to Unsubscribe
Your domain’s Sender Reputation can suffer if followers unsubscribe themselves at high rates. This is another reason to segment your lists and proactively ask people to unsubscribe. Yes, you read that correctly. Honestly, it’s okay to remove people from your mailing lists.
Look at your conversion rates – are they 25%? Then 75% of your emails went to people who weren’t interested. Why are you bothering the good people? Be nice and unsubscribe them. People are more likely to unsubscribe themselves if they are receiving irrelevant content from you.
Your Sender Reputation is Our Reputation
Andrews Wharton is known for sourcing data across the entire marketplace and curating it for your unique needs. We understand the importance of accurate, verified, and compliant data. We literally built a company on it! You can Be Certain, we know how fundamental data is to the future of your business.
