That's why you need to understand the importance of your sender reputation and how to protect it.
But before we get into it, what is sender reputation?
What is sender reputation?
In short, your sender reputation is a score that is assigned to you by an ISP (Internet Service Provider). This score is what matters the most: if it is high, your emails are delivered safely. If they fall below a certain threshold, they are classified as spam, and in the worst case scenario… your emails are rejected outright and not delivered at all. Your sender reputation is determined by a variety of factors, including but not limited to:
The number of emails you send
How many recipients mark your emails as spam?
How many recipients complain about your emails?
How often do your emails trigger the ISP spam trap?
Are you included in norway phone number library any blacklist?
How many emails are returned to you ?
What is your open rate, click rate, conversion rate, and unsubscribe rate?
How is your subscribers' engagement?
Based on all of these factors and more, some not necessarily made public, ISPs assign you your sender reputation score and it will govern your email marketing campaign. Your success depends entirely on keeping your sender reputation score above a certain threshold.
The factors listed above will definitely hurt your sender reputation and this article aims to give you the knowledge to fight against anything that can harm your sender reputation.
Clean up your list!
If you look at the list of causes above, you'll find that almost all of them can be avoided by cleaning up your email list.
It is very likely that not all of the email addresses on your list are valid, and of those that are, not all of them are likely to engage with your emails. These emails will cause problems such as you ending up sending a lot of emails, of which many are invalid, and many more that will never be opened, clicked on, or otherwise interacted with. Additionally, invalid emails will be bounced , which will hurt your IP reputation score.
Another point to consider is that people who don't interact with your emails and still find out that you're emailing them will either unsubscribe or worse, file a complaint. The former will affect your domain authority and the latter is a direct stab at your reputation as a sender.
All of these problems can be very cleverly avoided if you take advantage of the incentive and clean up your email lists . Cleaning up your email list will leave you with a list of contacts that are all valid and likely to interact with you, and as long as valid emails and consistent interaction are maintained, your sender reputation will not suffer. It will even grow over time if you manage your campaign well.
Boost your campaign!
The simple truth is that your sender reputation, domain authority, IP reputation, all of these will improve organically if you send emails to people who will actually engage with your emails. But you can also try to increase the engagement of your campaign . So take steps to increase your engagement rates and do yourself the favor of protecting your sender reputation and the strength of your campaign.
The good news is that there are many ways to do this easily and effectively. You can explore ways and take steps to increase your open rates – there are a variety of subject line categories you can explore to grab your recipient’s attention.
You should also segment your lists, which will allow you to only send emails that are relevant and valuable to your possibly thousands and thousands of subscribers. Naturally, by only sending them content that is meaningful to them and aligned with their tastes and needs, you increase the likelihood that they will open your emails and engage with them. In addition to segmentation, you should also do targeting and retargeting.
Both segmentation and retargeting are processes that ensure you send the right email to the right person at the right time, by tracking their activities. If you are a chocolatier, doing something as simple as sending an email titled “25% off dark chocolate” when you notice they have visited your website in search of dark chocolates will immediately have a positive effect on your campaign and therefore your sender reputation.
These are things you should be doing with your campaign anyway, and they have the huge benefit of improving and solidifying your sender reputation score as well.
It goes without saying that keeping the human nature of your customers in mind will benefit you as well. At every step of the way, you should focus on building trust with them . You can improve the success of your campaign and further protect your sender reputation if you know your customers. Finding out what they like and dislike about your marketing strategy will allow you to address their concerns before they unsubscribe.
You can do this by employing a survey email and perhaps giving your subscribers an incentive to take the survey by offering them a chance to win something for completing it. As an added benefit, the data you gain from the survey can be used for more than just fine-tuning your strategies to protect your sender reputation. You can use this data to segment your email list more precisely and target your subscribers effectively.
Ideally, you can use a feature-rich opt-in system like the one provided by Poptin to create an opt-in popup that will collect some details about customers right from the start. Poptin allows you to design different popups for different visitors by monitoring their behavior and segmenting them using several different methods. A system like this will allow you to collect important details as subscribers sign up so that you can send them emails that are relevant to them right from the start of the campaign.
Any email marketer needs to keep an eye on their metrics to ensure they are on the right track with their email marketing campaign. As such, one of the key metrics you need to keep an eye on is your sender reputation. If the others, such as open rates or conversion rates, go down, you will be able to take action relatively easily. If your sender reputation goes down and you are unable to send emails, you will be stuck in a paradoxical position that you do not want to be in.
Keep the above points in mind when monitoring your campaign, cultivate a respectable sender reputation score, and ensure you achieve the success you deserve for your email marketing campaign.
