If you are currently facing problems regarding spam complaints and excessive bounces, it’s probably because your email reputation needs some kind of improvement.
In short, the sender reputation is how mailbox providers perceive your email address. You might ask yourself the following question: “how do providers judge and give a score or a classification to addresses?”.
Mailbox providers evaluate the responses of your audience in relation to your messages. When your subscribers react negatively to your pieces of communication, for instance, generating many spam complaints and blocklist requests, providers will be attentive to your email address and might block the future messages you send, making it harder to reach legitimate mailboxes.
That is why it is so important to take care of your email reputation. Read this article if you want to know more about this subject. We will teach you how to check your reputation and some positive attitudes to improve your deliverability.
- What is email reputation?
- Why does a high score reputation matter?
- Tools to check your sender reputation
- Protect your email reputation
- Get help from an email verifier
What is email reputation?
Organizations and institutions that usually send a lot of emails are evaluated by Internet Service Providers (ISP). The ISPs classify email senders, giving them scores, considering their behavior on the internet and how certain audiences react to delivered messages.
When companies or institutions get a high grade, it means their audiences have a positive response and attitude, considering the messages they receive.
These email senders have a good email reputation, which means they are more likely to reach real mailboxes and engage in communication, creating more opportunities for conversion and sales in marketing campaigns.
On the other hand, when different audiences make spam complaints and send blocklist requests to the same email address, we can say this specific email sender has a terrible email reputation. Consequently, ISPs will start blocking the messages, because their job is to make the internet a safer place, and they have to reduce the circulation of spam and other dangerous emails.
There are some obvious signs that can reveal to you that you have a bad domain reputation. If you feel represented by any of the following characteristics it means that you need to fix your email reputation.
- A high volume of bounces.
- Your email address appears on a public blocklist, such as SpamHaus.
- Low opening rates and poor engagement.
- Low conversion and sales numbers.
- Many unsubscribe requests.
Be attentive to the metrics and numbers because they will tell exactly how good or bad your domain reputation is.
If you are a legitimate email sender but have a bad email reputation, it’s probably because you are sending messages to the wrong audiences, sending emails to invalid addresses, or both.
Why does a high score reputation matter?
Email marketing campaigns are effective when you want to reach customers on the internet. When companies work only with online sales, they are even more relevant, not to say the only way to reach people.
When your email reputation is hurt, you will face many obstacles to reaching customers. How will you sell products or spread ideas and brands if your messages are blocked, that is, not delivered at all?
All the effort and time spent to come up with interesting messages to your audiences and your communications end up in spam folders. The work of a whole team is wasted, unfortunately.
That’s the reason why you must protect your email reputation at all costs. It’s the only way to make sure your messages, which were carefully written, will land in real mailboxes and generate engagement.
Tools to check your sender reputation
Your metrics and results can tell you whether or not your reputation as a sender is good. But if you perform the analysis of your metrics and they show mixed or confusing results you can check your email reputation using online tools, such as Sender Score, BarracudaCentral, and TrustedSource.
These three platforms will give you specific insight into your email reputation. One of them is the Sender Score, a platform that is going to evaluate your sending email IP and give you a score for your domain reputation. Sender Score will consider some relevant aspects and patterns in your sending messages behavior, such as:
- spam complaint rate;
- infrastructure;
- the quantity of sent emails;
- reject rate;
- and more.
If you get an 80+ score, your email reputation is adequate. If you are below that mark, you have to review your habits and fix your email reputation.
If you want to learn more about the Sender Score you can check the content about sender score that SafetyMails prepared to answer all the doubts that you have about it.
Protect your email reputation
In order to protect your email reputation, and make sure your messages are delivered, opened, and read, you can adopt some of the best practices to optimize your communication with your audience.
Keep reading to know more about the main strategies to keep your email reputation safe.
Monitor your email delivery
Metrics tell everything you should know about your email reputation. When you monitor your email marketing metrics and keep track of the behavior and patterns of your campaigns, it’s easier to change what is hurting your deliverability.
While you monitor your campaigns, don’t forget the following aspects:
- watch the sending volume: don’t send too many messages at once, neither spend too many days without sending any message;
- set up a schedule: your audience must hear from you frequently, but not all the time. When you have a schedule, you can better organize your campaigns;
- pay attention to bounce rates: there is a reason for bounces so you must figure it out and correct it;
- keep track of conversion and sales rates: these are the best rates to evaluate the success of your messages, when they are too low, you should turn the warning sign on and review your strategies.
The best thing to do when you want to protect your email reputation is to correct wrongdoings before they cause any damages to your domain and email address. Monitoring your metrics gives you the chance to do so.
Analyze your bounces
No one is free of bounces. They are common and may occur for a variety of reasons. You may be unable to eliminate all of your bounces, but you sure can control them. You have to know that there are two kinds of bounces:
- hard bounces: it’s a permanent error, and it happens when you try to contact an invalid email address (which probably doesn’t exist);
- soft bounces: it’s temporary, and can happen due to provider malfunction, weak connection (both on the sender’s and receiver’s part), or a full mailbox.
Understand what kind of bounces are causing damage to your campaigns and make sure your hard bounce rate is controlled, which you can do by cleaning your email lists.
Maintain your email list clean
Removing invalid addresses and all kinds of emails that can destroy your domain reputation is the best way to keep your email list clean. Save only the emails that bring engagement to your campaigns.
When your lists are fully optimized, you can control a high volume of bounces and reduce the chance of being marked as spam. That’s how you build a solid email reputation online and have more success in conversion and sales.
You can maintain an email list clean by running email validity checking periodically and have an effective Opt-in policy to prevent invalid or dangerous accounts from reaching your lists.
Adopt an opt-in policy
Sending emails to confirm a new membership is a positive practice you can have as an opt-in policy. You must bend over backwards to protect your email reputation, as well as your domain and deliverability, and thinking about email list management is essential in such an aspect.
The important part is to make sure this user exists and is active and responsive. It is also important to have the users’ permission to send emails to them because it can reduce the likelihood of being marked as spam or being blocklisted.
This way, it’s easier to keep your lists clean of disposable emails and other dangers from the online world.
If you want more tips and ideas you can check the content about email list management that SafetyMails prepared and learn how to protect your deliverability and deal with your subscriber lists.
Get help from an email verifier
An email verifier will guarantee you only have active and valid email addresses in your lists. It’s the most worthwhile tool to protect email lists.
Email verifier for mailing lists
Having clean email lists is primordial for the success of your company and its email reputation online. Counting on an email verifier for mailing lists will make you:
- eliminate invalid accounts faster;
- enjoy integration with other tools for email marketing;
- reduce bounces and avoid being blocklisted;
- be free of disposable emails and other temporary addresses;
- avoid losing leads because of typos.
There are many benefits that an email verifier can offer. Make sure to choose the most adequate platform, and don’t miss the chance of improving your online performance, hence your company’s ROI.
Real-time email verification API
With an email verification service, such as SafetyMails API, it’s possible to prevent invalid accounts from reaching your database from the very start.
When you have a real-time verification API installed in your forms and landing pages, the checking for validity happens as the new user is still typing the solicited information. It completely eliminates typos and fake addresses.
Now that you learn all about email reputation, learn also how to eliminate typos and fake information from your mailing lists with SafetyMails.
SafetyMails has an expertise in prevent your whole strategy went to waste because you ended up with several addresses that are not fit to use. In other words, using our email verifier, your collected addresses are real, and can generate engagement.
In case of typos, the service can solicit corrections and reviews, making sure you don’t lose a promising lead. Everything happens in real-time and the email checker api is accurate and fast.
Would you like to know us better? Test now and check emails for free!
Choose SafetyMails email verification tool and see how easy it is to make sure no invalid or harmful addresses get to your subscriber lists!
