What is Negative Email Sender Reputation and How To Avoid It?
The reputation you establish in the market becomes a deciding factor of whether your business will thrive or get sabotaged eventually. A good reputation can help you win clients while a bad one can make your clients drift away with a fall in revenues.
Similarly, in the world of b2b email marketing, a bad email reputation can make your email marketing efforts go in vain and affect your email deliverability. Since email marketing is still one of the most effective ways of reaching customers online, you simply cannot take the risk of your emails ending up in spam due to your bad email sender reputation.
Therefore it is crucial to maintain a good email sender reputation and that’s exactly what we are going to help you with today!
Let’s start with understanding the term better…
What is Email Sender Reputation?
The email sender reputation is a score that Internet Service Providers (ISP) assign to a business that sends emails. Usually, the ISPs assign email senders a score based on several factors.
The better the score, the better your email domain reputation. However, a lower score can make a service provider divert your emails to the recipient’s spam folder. In some cases, the emails might not get delivered at all.
Hence, maintaining a strong email reputation score is essential to optimizing your marketing efforts. This post will guard against harming your sender reputation and maintain a high email sender score.
What Results in Negative Domain Reputation?
Following are the most common reasons why you receive a low sender reputation score:
The recipient often reports your messages as spam.
There are lower open rates for your emails.
There is a high bounce rate due to sending emails to multiple addresses.
How to improve email sender reputation?
1. Email Volume
The volume of emails that you send on a daily basis is one of the important factors. Try should try to equally distribute the email marketing campaigns.
A consistent volume of email campaigns where you ensure there are no sudden spikes or drop will help you. Meaning, if you are sending emails twice a week and suddenly boost the volume to three times a week due to some offer or festive then it will create a problem.
There can be times when you wish to send out more emails than normal like on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. However aim for every day, consistent schedule of the email blast.
2. Ensure periodic Database Cleaning to Reduce Bounce Rate
Bounced emails are those which did not get delivered to the user mailbox. In such cases, the email is returned to the sender's email address along with a fail message. Bounced emails are categorized into 2 kinds namely hard bounce and soft bounce.
Hard Bounce- When you try sending an email to an email address that does not exist or is incorrect then it is called hard bounce. This happens in circumstances when the user server has blocked incoming emails, or email address/ domain is incorrect or the address no longer exists.
Soft Bounce- Soft bounces on the other hand results when the recipient mailbox is full or there is some issue on the server. Normally this can be a temporary issue and are not as bad as hard bounces, but in any case, your delivery rate gets impacted
Spam complaints are the reports that the user registers against the unwanted emails that land in their mailbox. Too many of such complaints can get you blacklisted by the ISPs. In order to avoid such spam complaints ensure the following:
Use a permission-based email list
Avoid using database bought or rented by a third party
Make an opt-in list to ensure the user shares a valid email address
Do not bombard the subscribers with too many emails
Provide an option to unsubscribe to the user and ensure that you remove such email ids from your database
4. Avoid Spam Traps
A spam trap is a false email address which is used to detect the spammers. The number of spam traps has increased in count is the past couple of years. Statistics have shown that the number of spams has considerably reduced from 60% to 25% over a period of the last six years. Following up the precautionary measures covered in the previous pointers like preparing your own opt-in email list, periodic database cleaning, consistency in email campaigns etc will keep you away from getting trapped by such spam traps and will keep your sender reputation in good health.
5. Avoid Being Blacklisted!
Email Blacklists are the list of email or IP addresses which are identified as spammers and get blocked. The impact of being blacklisted may range from minor to a complete stop but the deliverability gets hampered in any case. Once you discover that you have been blacklisted, it is a good idea to scrutinize your email marketing practices before you request clearance from the blocked list.
Having gone through the reputation check the marketers should make sure to improve the deliverability. Without email landing, in the user inbox, the open rates would stay low and so will the email marketing campaign performance. Clearout.io helps in email verification that ensures lower bounce rates and higher deliverability leading to a good sender reputation and email engagement.
Email marketing is a business strategy that can help you bring maximum clients and higher revenue. However, it can be possible only when you maintain a strong sender reputation. Follow these 5 best practices to avoid a negative reputation and thrive your business with healthy email marketing practices.