7 Best Practices to Improve Your Sender Reputation

A good email marketer and small business owner knows that it’s not enough to craft well-designed, engaging internet email marketing campaigns in Miami.  

You also need to make sure that they end up in your recipients' inboxes and not in their spam folders. Otherwise, your recipients can’t receive your emails and you can’t improve customer satisfaction and retention, build brand awareness and increase revenue.  

So, how exactly can you make sure that your emails always land in your recipients’ primary inbox?  

You need to have a good sender reputation!

In this article, we will discuss everything you need to know about sender reputation, how it impacts your deliverability rate, and the best practices follow.  

Without any more delays, let’s get started!

What is Sender Reputation?

Sender reputation refers to the score internet service providers assign to your email domain. It measures the trustworthiness of your emails and signals to email inbox providers whether you're a spammer or not.  

The better your score, the higher the chances that your mail will be authorized by an ISP and delivered to your intended recipients.  

A low sender score, on the other hand, may cause your service provider to divert your emails to your spam folders, and sometimes the emails might not get delivered at all.  

Why is Sender Reputation Important?

• Increases your email deliverability rate. Email service providers (ESPs), like Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail, and others look into your email authentication, open rates, number of fake addresses, and other metrics that form your sender reputation. The better your sender's reputation is, the more your emails will likely end up in your recipients' inboxes.  

• Blocks spammers and protects recipients from fraud. Your sender's reputation signals to email service providers if you’re a spammer or not. ESPs seek to protect users from cybercriminals who hide behind successful brand names to trick users into giving them their personal information.  
• Determines the level of success of your email campaigns. If you have a good sender reputation, it reflects that your subscribers open and engages with your emails. If your sender's score is low, it's a sign that you need to work on your internet email marketing campaigns in Miami.  

5 Factors That Can Lower Your Sender Score and Reputation

Email providers monitor the behavior and evaluate the risk potential of your IP address. These algorithms primarily check your IP address’ previous activity, specifically if you engaged in spam-like schemes. Here's how ESPs assess your sender's reputation:

• Too much volume and frequency of your emails. ESPs track how many emails your company sends during every internet email arketing campaign in Miami and how often you send them. If your reputation score is low and you’re sending a massive number of emails frequently, you will look suspicious and internet service providers might blacklist you. To prevent this, only send emails to people who opted in and ask them how many times a week or month they want to hear from you.  

• SPAM reports/complaints. You don’t want subscribers to mark your emails as spam because this signals to ESPs that your company purchased email lists. ESPs will then restrict your mailing activities. To prevent this from happening, clean your email list, personalize the subject line, and use a familiar name and email address.  
• Soft/hard bounces. Email bounces happen when your emails could not be delivered to your intended recipients’ inboxes. Soft bounces are temporary problems, but hard bounces occur because you sent an email to an invalid email address, misspelled domain names, or because the receiving server no longer exists. To fix this, do a double opt-in to make sure your subscribers gave you the right email address and they spelled it correctly.  
• Lack of user engagement. Your recipients’ behavior towards your emails also matters. When they open and engage with your emails, it demonstrates that they like the content you’re providing them. Low open rates, on the other hand, show that your subscribers are ignoring your emails or because you offer poor email content.  
• High unsubscribe rate. If your recipients unsubscribe from you, it could be a sign that you're sending them irrelevant emails, you're sending them too many emails, or they were never the right fit for your company.  

How to Determine Your Sender Reputation

Each ESP has its unique system on how to score an IP address' reputation, and it's not open to the public. However, there are tools you can use to help you gauge what your sender's reputation is.  

• Sender Score
• TrustedSource
• Barracuda Central
• Google Potmaster Tools

• Microsoft Smart Network Data Services (SDNS)

Aside from these tools, here are the other ways you can check your sender's reputation:

• Set up email addresses with several inbox providers. Then, send emails to these addresses. If you received all the emails you sent yourself, chances are you have a good sender reputation. If most of your emails end up in the spam folder, you have a poor score.  
• Inspect your IP address and domain in deny listing. Deny listings are a collection of IP addresses that were marked as spam by the recipients or caught sending unsolicited emails.  
• Check your open rate and click-through rate. If your recipients are not engaging with your emails and they're getting marked as spam, your sender's reputation is low.  

Improve Your Sender Reputation by Following These 7 Best Practices

1. Start Slow

If you have a new business email, don’t get tempted to launch huge internet email marketing campaigns in Miami and send hundreds of emails every day. Doing this comes off as very spammy to ESPs.  

It’s best to start slow and send between 150 to 400 emails to leads, colleagues, staff, friends, and maybe even family. Your goal is to generate positive engagement on your new email address first to show email providers that you’re trustworthy and not a spammer.  

If you send 10,000 emails at once and the bounce rate is higher than 10%, you’ll likely get blacklisted.  

As you build your email list, you can start increasing the volume and frequency of your email campaigns.  

Here are some tips on how to get positive engagement from your email subscribers:  

• Personalize subject lines.
• Avoid using spammy words in your emails.  
• Make sure your emails are mobile-friendly.  

• Use a familiar From address to ensure your recipients know the email is coming from you.  
• Tailor the content of your emails according to their needs and wants.  
• Keep your emails short and engaging.  
• Avoid using clickbait subject lines.  

2. Send Emails Consistently

The frequency of your emails can impact your deliverability rate. It’s why you need to ask your subscribers how many times they want to hear from you in a week or month.  

If they say it’s okay that you send them emails twice a month, make sure that you only send them emails twice. Nothing more and nothing less.  

If your emails are inconsistent, people will lose interest in what you have to say. Aside from this, email service providers will also notice your inconsistency, and it will raise a flag for them.  

When your recipients know when they can expect to receive a newsletter from you, they’ll look forward to it. This can result in high engagement rates and boost your sender's reputation.  

Avoid overloading your subscribers’ inbox because it's annoying and they'll likely block you or report you as spam.  

3. Update Your Email List Regularly

To reduce your bounce rate, boost your engagement rate, and increase your sender’s score, refresh your email list and weed out subscribers who are inactive or have invalid addresses.  

Doing this ensures that your emails will only reach those subscribers who want them. This increases the chances of your emails getting opened.

4. Use Double Opt-In to Keep Your Email List Clean

Sometimes, people sign up to a mailing list with a fake email address to profit off your promotions.  

A double opt-in policy adds a step in the email subscription process. It requires users to confirm their interest and verify their email addresses. Only those who have a higher level of user interest will double opt in.  

This policy ensures that your reputation or delivery rate won’t suffer because of the emails you sent to non-respondent addresses.  

5. Determine If You’re on The Blacklist and Work to Stay Off

If you’re having deliverability issues, your IP address might’ve been blacklisted by anti-spam groups and independent organizations without you knowing.  

To confirm, you can use tools like WhatIsMyIPAddress or MxToolbox.  

If your IP address has indeed been blacklisted, here's how to get yourself off the list:

• Go to the spam list operator’s website.  
• Reach out to the operator and ask them to remove you from their list or look for instructions on how to get yourself off  

Here’s how to prevent your IP address from getting blacklisted:

• Use double-opt-in for your email subscribers.

• Include an unsubscribe link and let them know in your emails so they can opt for that instead of blocking you or marking you as spam.  
• Clean your email list regularly. Get rid of inactive addresses and fake ones.  
• Personalize your email content and avoid sending email blasts with generic messages.  
• Secure your server to protect your IP address and email domain from bots or malware that can hijack your network server.  
• Avoid manually typing email addresses into your database to prevent typos. This prevents you from sending emails to non-existent addresses.  

6. Tailor Your Email Content

It's crucial to tailor your email content according to what each of your recipients likes and wants because this makes it more intentional and less generic.  

It catches their attention and motivates them to engage with your emails. In fact, personalization increases open rates and drive revenue by as much as 760%.  

You can use customer data to serve highly personalized email content. Aside from addressing them by their first name, you can also recommend other products that are related to their past purchases.  

You can also provide useful tips that are relevant to their recent purchase, craft personalized deals and discounts they’ll likely respond to, and follow up about the items on their cart.  

7. Use Call-to-Action to Start a Genuine Conversation with Your Subscribers

Encourage your recipients to respond to your emails and start a conversation through interactive emails. By giving people the opportunity to share their thoughts and ideas, you can gain insights into how your customers think, and what their needs and preferences are.  

It’s also a great way to generate genuine interactions with your subscribers. To do this, end your emails with a question to which people can respond, including polls or surveys, interactive calculators, and other interactive forms.  

Take Your Miami Email Internet Marketing to The Next Level!

Email internet marketing remains to be one of the most effective strategies for generating leads online, especially for small businesses. In fact, email marketing has an ROI of $36 for every $1 spent.  

Emails can help you achieve business goals. However, to harness the power of emails, you need to make sure your campaigns reach your intended audience first.  

Otherwise, you won’t be able to generate leads, get conversions, and secure sales.  

Follow the seven best practices we shared above to boost your sender's reputation and ensure that your emails land in your recipients’ inboxes and not in their spam folders.  

At Digital Resource, our internet marketing experts will work with you to create a custom email marketing strategy that will boost your deliverability rate and get the leads you need to grow your business!

Contact us today to get started!

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