Ask anyone is in the business of email sending, their primary concern always ends up with the question – “Will my Email Land in Inbox?” And once in their life, every email marketer would have faced their emails being sent from their domain landing into the spam folder in the recipients’ inbox. One of the primary reasons behind this issue is your Reputation, and your Email Sending Reputation. Thus a strong reputation is necessary for engagement with customers and having a good reputation metrics gives a picture of how your emails are being acknowledged by subscribers.
Consecutively running an email sending reputation check periodically has a great impact on your deliverability.
Using Pepipost’s vigorous and healthy infrastructure along with email delivery tools, one can start building an IP reputation and a positive domain.
In fact, if you do not hold a good IP or email sending reputation then your email campaign is far more likely to end up in a spam folder rather than the recipient’s inbox.
Here in this article, we will talk about everything. Right from Email Sending Reputation to its types to the ways via which you can check your Email Sending Reputation.
What Is The Email Sending Reputation?
Email sending a reputation is basically a score created by an Internet Service Provider (ISP). It measures your email sending practices and determines whether you follow the standards customary by the ISP. This is a complex metric that comprises different reputations and determines email delivery practices.
There are three types of reputation to look out for-
Domain Reputation– Determines the status and rank of your domain name
IP Reputation– Associated with your IP address.
Content Reputation– Measuring the quality of the sender’s email.
IP Reputation shows how many users want email from this IP address by measuring bounces, spam or unwanted bulk mail (UBE). With the advancement in technology, it enabled ISPs to develop a new method that measures the quality of a sender’s emails via content reputation.
The content reputation is based on a set of criteria determining the sender’s email quality of the campaign content. There is a certain content which are clear triggers for ISPs’ content filters. This makes a sender’s content reputation to emails keep getting low open rates, flagged, blocked, and unsubscribed.
So it is said that IP reputation and content reputation go hand in hand and create an overall picture of a sender’s email practices. IP reputation, on one hand, determines the quality of a sender’s email sending using emailing history while content reputation analyzes the content a sender’s email has and determines whether or not the sender is trustworthy. Further for some sophisticated process or protocol, these authentication systems became more robust. This led ISPs to develop a domain reputation that measures the quality of a domain’s authenticated emails.
Email sending reputation, therefore, is a complex metric along with different reputations that determines email delivery practices developed to constant, chase and catch amid hackers who send malicious spam and the ISPs.
Why Email Reputation Matters?
Usually, the mailbox providers try to keep users’ email addresses free from the flood of spam email messages that comes from unknown users. And to do this, the internet service providers along with mailbox providers depend on reputation scores, which includes IP reputation and domain reputation, and other factors that collectively decide whether to filter or block certain email messages.
If you have a strong email reputation it acts as a signal to mailbox providers that you are following satisfactory parameters to send emails to email marketing sites.
How to Check Your Email Sending Reputation – IP Reputation?
With email marketing getting info about what others think of you is the aim and is obtainable. There are many organizations that allow for free access to the data. One that ISP and mailbox providers use in deciding whether to deliver or reject your emails. This score varies in the range from 1 to 100.
With a high score comes a higher email deliverability rate.
The range starts at 0 and ends at 100. Return Path’s Sender Score comes from non-personal data from over several inboxes from different ISPs, spam filtering, and security companies. This goes ahead by creating an image of a sender’s email sending practices.
About Sender Score
Once you know your Sender Score, then you can have actionable insight on ways to improve your reputation and placement of inbox in partnership with Return Path.
Must Read: Improve your Email Deliverability – Pepipost Docs
How Is Your IP Reputation Determined?
Having a bad or good sending reputation is very crucial for email deliverability. A high score shows the chances that an ISP will deliver the emails to your recipient’s inbox.
But if your score is less than the standard rate of 20%, your emails go to the spam folder or rejected by your ISP.
We build an email reputation through a combination of an optimized email deliverability infrastructure and email marketing habits. This service uses proactive email validation and ensures that the email messages do not bounce.
Thus, it crafts valuable email marketing messages opened by recipients and minimizes spam complaints.
If you have built a strong sender reputation then it encourages them to let you send a better volume of emails at one time. Pepipost algorithms thus adjust dynamically, giving you an advantage of greater send limits and watch guarding your web reputation constantly.
There are several tools that can help you analyze, improve and control your email reputation.
List of Tools to Keep your Email Sending Reputation in Check
Here is a list of tools that you can use to check your email sending reputation or your IP Reputation. Have a look-
SenderBase.Org
Talos Intelligence Reputation Center is a product of Cisco’s tool–Sender Base (previously) that allows you to lets you check your reputation and rank it as Good, Neutral or Poor. “Neutral” means your IP address is within acceptable parameters and can improve. Good means little or no threat activity. “Poor” shows a problematic high threat activity and your emails won’t reach their destination and get filtered. The first step is to reduce sending emails in a short time.
SenderScore.Org
SenderScore.org is a measure of the rate of your reputation. They calculate the score on a fine-scale of 0–100. The higher the score, the better the reputation of your domain and higher email deliverability. The range is on a rolling 30-day average and compares the rank of your IP address against other IP addresses. Your score can vary depending on your email sending practices and the recipient’s response. This service is by Return path.
Reputation Authority
WatchGuard’s Reputation Authority is a service for email and web security. It delivers critical protection and better performance to businesses, ISP’s as well as government organizations. It is known to block unwanted emails preventing web traffic that covers spam, malware, and malicious code, spyware, and phishing attacks. This handy tool can look up your IP address or domain, then receive a reputation score from 0-100, getting you the percentage of emails as good versus bad.
Barracuda Central
Barracuda Central retains a history of IP addresses for spammers and senders with good email practices via the Barracuda Reputation System. The Barracuda Spam and Virus Firewall is capable of blocking or allowing a message based on the sender’s IP address. The system maintains reputations on URLs by being quick in blocking an email having a poorly-rated URL contained in the message. Thus the combination of IP and reputation data of Barracuda Networks helps to determine whether a message is a spam or a legitimate email.
Trusted Source
TrustedSource is a site run by McAfee which provides the reputation score of both your domain’s email and web reputations, affiliations, domain name system (DNS), and mail server information. It also describes details on the history, activation, and associations of your domain.
How to improve your Email Reputation?
There are various factors that determine the sender’s email reputation and it is highly essential to improve the IP and domain reputation.
- Authenticate your SPF and DKIM
Authenticating your account with SPF and DKIM is one of the ways to ensures that only a precise list of IPs can send emails via your domain. This helps to keep spammers away from falsely delivering emails using your domain.
It can include DKIM as the signature in every email campaign. The DKIM is proof, whether the emails received, are domain-authenticated and valid or not.
If the signature matches, the email goes into the inbox and if not then it will go to the spam folder or gets a hard bounce. Here are a few tools to help you validate your SPF and DKIM records:
- Create sub-accounts for your different email needs
Separate your marketing and your transactional emails by forming sub-accounts. This proves to be good for organizing different types of email sending. Separating the email ensures deliverability rate issues don’t happen. Issues on marketing emails are not passed on to transactional emails and vice-versa.
For instance, transactional ticket confirmation emails go to the spam folder, because an ISPs filtering system identifies the sender as a spammer due to marketing emails which in turn could land companies into trouble.
- Take charge of your engagement data
Email engagement comprises data on how engaged your users are to your email campaigns. Users prefer to engage with emails that are beautifully designed as compared to suspicious plain text ones.
Other than this, the frequency and time of email campaigns also matter. I know ISPs to consider engagement rates high in their content filtering algorithms.
- Create a checklist for your email campaigns
Creating a checklist for your email campaigns is like an accountability log to the senders. Before they send their email campaigns they can run email checks. And can improve engagement rate and enabled authentication systems for email campaigns.
- Clean email lists and have double opt-in
Regularly cleaning your contact lists helps in preventing marketers from sending emails to inactive users, converted into spam traps. Clean lists have more engaged users as they are well-segmented.
What is a Good Sender Score?
There is always room for improvement in the sender score. According to the benchmark score set by Return-path, the Sender score reveals some important revelations.
- Complaint rate – Determines the rate at which users complain about your emails being junk.
- Unknown user rate –Invalid users in your subscription lists.
- Spam traps triggered – The email addresses that don’t belong to anyone and have the task of catching spammers and senders having poor list hygiene.
What are the metrics to look for?
As such, domains with Sender Score < 70, need to repair the sender’s reputation while Sender Score > 70 can continue to follow the best practices and optimize their email program.
Further domains with Sender Scores of 90 and above have > 1% complaint rate. An average of 0.36% spam trap hits.
Conversely, poor Sender Scores of 10 or > 7.4% complaint rate. An average of 7.53% spam trap hits.
Take Away!
Checking your Domain Reputation and IP Reputation before you begin an email marketing campaign. Why? Because it is helpful in making sure that the emails reach your recipients.
Fortunately, your email reputation is always in your hands. With these services and data algorithms, you can have accurate visibility of how the mailbox providers view your email.
Here is a tool to help you check if emails from your domain are landing in Spam – Email Blacklist Tool
In any case, if you are suffering from any Email Sending Reputation or IP Sending Reputation Issue, write to us or Contact Us anytime you wish to.
Thank you for reading and I wish you a Happy and Safe Email Sending!
