Sender reputation is the reputation of your email address and is a score calculated on a scale from 0 to 100 that an internet service provider (ISP) assigns to you. It plays a critical part in your email deliverability as the higher your sender reputation the more likely your email will be delivered to your recipient’s inbox. Conversely, a lower sender reputation will result in lower email deliverability where your email could be sent to a spam folder or even rejected.
Here are a few factors that can affect your sender reputation.
Email engagement
A couple of important factors around email engagement are email opens and replies. Both these metrics show the ISP there is engagement with your emails and thus strengthens your reputation. Using poor quality B2B data or sending irrelevant email content will quickly damage your reputation as no-one will open your email, let alone reply back to you.
This post talks about the key metrics that matter in your campaign and what results are recommended for you to get – here is a quick rundown:
Between 40 to 70% of emails sent; anything below is abnormal and should be fixed, anything above is welcomed but is usually an outlier.
Under 5% of emails sent; anything above is a bad sign and should be fixed as soon as possible.
Between 15 to 30% of emails sent; anything below is a problem and should be fixed, anything above is welcomed but usually an outlier; positive replies should range from 0 to 7%.
For every five non-negative replies you schedule one demo; anything worse should be looked at (some industries have lower conversions), anything better is welcomed but usually an outlier.
For every four to six demos, you close one deal; anything worse should be looked at (some industries have lower conversions), anything better is welcomed but usually an outlier.
Spam complaints
Sending emails to people you don’t know is a large part of what an email marketing campaign is about. However, it’s vitally important your emails don’t get marked as spam as that will destroy your email deliverability.
There are 2 types of spam complaints: external and internal.
An external spam complaint is when someone manually marks your email as spam. Just because someone doesn’t know you won’t necessarily mean they will mark your email as spam.
An internal spam complaint is when someone unsubscribes from your email and then selects the reason as spam. The option to mark it as spam alerts the sender without the email provider knowing which avoids hurting your reputation.
Spam traps
Another way ISPs catch spammy email marketers is to set up spam traps. These are email addresses that are owned by an ISP which are either newly created or abandoned old email addresses taken over by an ISP to trap spammers.
Sending an email to a spam trap alerts the ISP that you are likely sending spam and can lead to being blacklisted. When obtaining poor quality email addresses, spam trap emails can also be obtained unknowingly.
Blacklist
A blacklist is a list of IP addresses, sender domains and servers that are identified to send spam. Ending up on a blacklist can have significant impacts on your email deliverability as you may find your emails hitting the junk folder or not being delivered at all.
Blacklists are mainly used by internet service providers or email providers to stop spammers from sending mail and protect the recipient from being a victim of spam or fraud.
Although you are not sending spam emails, if your emails appear to have similar characteristics to spam then there is a possibility of being blacklisted. As well as the previous points, here are a few other characteristics:
Extremely large spikes in sending emails within a short time will indicate to ISPs you are likely to be sending spam emails.
Having an unsubscribe button is really helpful to recipients who don’t want to receive emails from you anymore. Without it, they would have to mark your email as spam which would seriously damage your sender reputation.
A high bounce rate indicates to ISPs that poor quality data is being used for marketing purposes. It may look like the sender is using a bought list which is common with spam.