What is Sender Reputation?
Sender reputation is the way mailbox providers measure the trustworthiness of a sender’s email. It is based on a variety of metrics, including spam complaint rate, unknown user rate, volume, spam trap hits, and blocklistings.
- Sender Reputation tells mailbox providers whether or not you are a good sender.
- Your sender reputation reflects your practices, not mailbox providers or your ESP.
Why Does Sender Reputation Matter?
- Mailbox providers use sender reputation to determine if your emails should be sent to the inbox, the spam folder, or blocked completely.
- Poor sender reputation can cause your email to be blocked or delivered to the spam folder.
- The result of a poor sender reputation is less email delivered to your subscribers’ inbox, which can reduce your ROI from the email channel.
What Are the Main Drivers of Your Sender Reputation?
List Hygiene: Who is in your email database
- Unknown Users are email addresses that were once valid, but have been abandoned or are no longer in use.
- Spam Traps are email addresses specifically designed, maintained, and monitored to catch abusive email traffic and to identify poor data practices.
Engagement: What those subscribers do with your email
- Negative Engagement
- Generating spam complaints by marking your email as spam or junk – The #1 reason for a decline in your Sender Reputation.
- Deleting your email without opening it.
- Not reading your email.
- Positive Engagement
- Marking your email as Not Spam or Not Junk.
- Opening or replying to your email.
- Moving an email to a folder.
Tips for Managing Your Sender Reputation
Complaints Best Practices
- Only acquire subscribers through acceptable means of consent.
- Send a welcome message highlighting the good content subscribers will receive from you.
- Give subscribers a preference center so they can choose what they want to receive.
- Make it easier for subscribers to unsubscribe rather than complain.
List Hygiene Best Practices
- Send to permission-based lists.
- Email your list regularly.
- Monitor the age and activity of your email addresses.
- Re-engage or remove inactive subscribers.
- Remove unknown users immediately.
- Know how your server processes bounces.
Engagement Best Practices
- Set appropriate expectations.
- Ensure subscribers recognize your brand.
- Send emails your subscribers want.
- Manage your email frequency.
- Respect all unsubscribe requests.
- Use segmentation, personalized content, and triggered emails to increase relevancy.
