What Does Sender Reputation Score Mean for Email Marketers?
Sunday, November 24, 2013
Email marketing campaigns can generate revenue for your online business on condition that are wisely executed. Therefore, sending mass mail campaigns require comprehensive planning and strategy in order to keep your "sender reputation score" at "right" level.
First of all, let's take a look at the importance and relevance of sender reputation for email marketing campaigns.
As you may already know, sender reputation decides whether your email goes to the subscriber's Inbox or gets marked as spam and goes to the Junk box. If you are concerned about your reputation, there are various things you should always remember about, especially if you send a large number of emails.
Sender reputation is related to the server IP address that you use for sending email campaigns. Basically, Internet Service Providers (ISP) evaluate a sender's reputation by giving different weight to several metrics associated with email marketing. It is important to understand these metrics in order to make your email marketing campaign more effective.
According to the research carried out by the Return Path institution, about 20% of non-spam emails are sent to the Junk box and never reach their recipients. If you seriously think about executing professional email marketing campaigns, we recommend that you get familiar with the following factors that influence your deliverability rate:
Large email lists: Internet Service Providers like to mark large volume senders and make it more difficult to deliver their emails to the recipient's Inbox. This way ISPs protect their users from spammers who (as you may already know) send emails in high number. To avoid this problem you can simply use our email marketing tool. By doing so, you will be able to send unlimited emails to your contact and minimize the risk of your message being sent to the Junk box.
Low quality contact list: When can we say the contact list has a poor quality? When our list is built with emails that did not "opt-in" to receive our communication and its contacts are not interested in our product/service. Ex. Purchased contact lists. If you have purchased a contact list, we recommend that you delete it immediately. If not, sooner or later you will be marked as a spammer and your sender reputation score will be affected.
Number of complaints: You must have noticed a small button in your Inbox that lets you mark an email as Spam. Most Internet users are familiar with the "Report Spam" and will use this option if they need to. How to minimize your spam complaints? Make sure that all of your readers are "opt-in". Do you receive a large number of complaints? If so, you may already have a "bad" reputation.
High bounce rate: We can identify 2 bounce rates:
"soft bounce" - when the email cannot be delivered due to a temporary issue such as a full Inbox;
"hard bounce" - where the email cannot be delivered due to a permanent issue such as a closed account.
ISPs are mostly concerned with hard bounces and you should always unsubscribe or even delete bounced email addresses. Bear in mind: even having one email that comes back to you with bounces can negatively influence your deliverability.
Track your key performance indicators: always track your complaint and delivery rates. By doing so, you will be able to monitor any changes that may affect your sender reputation score and act accordingly to the situation.
Many marketers around the world do not know how to effectively protect their sender reputation score. However, the solution is not complicated at all. First of all, you must remember about practicing good list higiene that is essential to the successful deliverability of an email campaign.
Couple of weeks ago in one of our post we highlighted some tips on creating a valuable contact list. In our opinion gathering contacts that are interested in our product/service is not especially difficult, but it certainly takes time. That's why some of the marketers do not want to spend time on practicing "healthy" contact lists and decide to purchase them from third parties. Sooner or later they all will be punished and then it will be your turn to take over.
Tags:
Email Marketing, Marketing
First of all, let's take a look at the importance and relevance of sender reputation for email marketing campaigns.
As you may already know, sender reputation decides whether your email goes to the subscriber's Inbox or gets marked as spam and goes to the Junk box. If you are concerned about your reputation, there are various things you should always remember about, especially if you send a large number of emails.
Sender reputation is related to the server IP address that you use for sending email campaigns. Basically, Internet Service Providers (ISP) evaluate a sender's reputation by giving different weight to several metrics associated with email marketing. It is important to understand these metrics in order to make your email marketing campaign more effective.
According to the research carried out by the Return Path institution, about 20% of non-spam emails are sent to the Junk box and never reach their recipients. If you seriously think about executing professional email marketing campaigns, we recommend that you get familiar with the following factors that influence your deliverability rate:
Large email lists: Internet Service Providers like to mark large volume senders and make it more difficult to deliver their emails to the recipient's Inbox. This way ISPs protect their users from spammers who (as you may already know) send emails in high number. To avoid this problem you can simply use our email marketing tool. By doing so, you will be able to send unlimited emails to your contact and minimize the risk of your message being sent to the Junk box.
Low quality contact list: When can we say the contact list has a poor quality? When our list is built with emails that did not "opt-in" to receive our communication and its contacts are not interested in our product/service. Ex. Purchased contact lists. If you have purchased a contact list, we recommend that you delete it immediately. If not, sooner or later you will be marked as a spammer and your sender reputation score will be affected.
Number of complaints: You must have noticed a small button in your Inbox that lets you mark an email as Spam. Most Internet users are familiar with the "Report Spam" and will use this option if they need to. How to minimize your spam complaints? Make sure that all of your readers are "opt-in". Do you receive a large number of complaints? If so, you may already have a "bad" reputation.
High bounce rate: We can identify 2 bounce rates:
"soft bounce" - when the email cannot be delivered due to a temporary issue such as a full Inbox;
"hard bounce" - where the email cannot be delivered due to a permanent issue such as a closed account.
ISPs are mostly concerned with hard bounces and you should always unsubscribe or even delete bounced email addresses. Bear in mind: even having one email that comes back to you with bounces can negatively influence your deliverability.
Track your key performance indicators: always track your complaint and delivery rates. By doing so, you will be able to monitor any changes that may affect your sender reputation score and act accordingly to the situation.
Many marketers around the world do not know how to effectively protect their sender reputation score. However, the solution is not complicated at all. First of all, you must remember about practicing good list higiene that is essential to the successful deliverability of an email campaign.
Couple of weeks ago in one of our post we highlighted some tips on creating a valuable contact list. In our opinion gathering contacts that are interested in our product/service is not especially difficult, but it certainly takes time. That's why some of the marketers do not want to spend time on practicing "healthy" contact lists and decide to purchase them from third parties. Sooner or later they all will be punished and then it will be your turn to take over.
