When deciding whether to put your email in the inbox or the spam folder of a user, inbox service providers (ISPs) consider several factors, including ways to improve your email sender reputation. To put it another way, a significant factor in your email deliverability is your sender’s reputation.
Your sender reputation may even place you on an email blocklist in the worst situation (if your reputation is really poor). Sender reputation is crucial, as you may guess. What good is it to send out a transactional email or an e-commerce campaign with amazing design and tailored content if it is never read?
ISPs aren’t often completely open about their delivery and mailbox placement policies. Nonetheless, Gmail offers its Google Postmaster Tools, which allow you to see how Gmail views your sender reputation. You can expect that other email clients use comparable metrics to assess your sender reputation since Gmail is one of the biggest participants in the email industry.
Tips To Improve Your Email Sender Reputation
1. Keep Your Email List Clean
Regularly cleaning and updating your email list is crucial for maintaining a healthy and effective email marketing strategy and is one of the best ways to improve your email sender reputation. By removing spam traps, invalid email addresses, and unengaged users, you ensure that your list remains accurate and relevant.
This practice helps boost your email open rates, as the recipients on your list are more likely to engage with your content. At the same time, it reduces your bounce rates, which occur when emails are sent to invalid or inactive addresses. Both of these factors directly contribute to improving your sender’s reputation, which is a critical element for successful email campaigns.
A strong sender reputation ensures that your emails reach the inbox rather than being filtered into the spam folder. These engagement metrics—open rate and bounce rate—are among the most important indicators for enhancing your sender reputation and ensuring long-term email marketing success.
2. Use An Email Warm-Up To Increase Your Engagement Rate
Your email sender reputation suffers if you don’t warm up your emails. Your email reputation is preserved with email warm-up. The practice of encouraging good user interaction with an email address in order to establish and maintain a favorable email sender reputation (IP and domain reputation) with mailbox providers is known as “email warm-up” or “email warming.”
The process of email warm-up entails progressively sending more emails while keeping the engagement rate high. Sending emails that are read, responded to, flagged as essential, and taken out of spam is what this entails. You show inbox providers that you are a trustworthy and engaging sender who merits being in the inbox by doing this.
3. Make It Simple To Unsubscribe
Providing your readers with an easy and accessible way to unsubscribe from your emails is a key practice for maintaining a positive relationship with your audience and preventing any potential abuse concerns and an answer to how to improve your email sender reputation. While it can be disappointing to see subscribers leave, offering an opt-out option ensures that they can gracefully exit without causing friction.
This approach is much more effective than allowing them to flag your emails as spam, which can negatively impact your sender’s reputation and deliverability. When users unsubscribe voluntarily, it signals to email service providers that their emails are legitimate and not unwanted.
Moreover, it fosters trust with your audience, as they appreciate the transparency and control over the emails they receive. By respecting your subscribers’ preferences and making the process simple, you maintain a cleaner, more engaged email list, which can lead to better open rates and more targeted communication moving forward.
4. Make Use Of Double Opt-Ins
It might initially seem like an unnecessary extra step to ask your subscribers to confirm their email addresses before adding them to your mailing list. However, this confirmation process, often known as double opt-in, provides significant benefits for both you and your subscribers.
First, it ensures the legitimacy of the email addresses on your list, reducing the chances of having fake or invalid addresses that could hurt your open rates and deliverability. By asking for confirmation, you can be more certain that the emails you send are reaching real and engaged users.
More importantly, this supplementary step allows your subscribers to verify that they genuinely want to receive your communications. It prevents situations where people might inadvertently sign up or be added to your list without their consent, reducing the likelihood of complaints or unsubscribes later. Ultimately, double opt-in improves the quality of your email list and strengthens trust with your audience.
5. Selecting A Highly Reputed Email Service Provider Is Important
According to the research, the top three mailbox providers that end up in your recipients’ inboxes are Google Workspace (Professional Gmail), Office 365 (Exchange), and Zoho. The deliverability of all the others is much lower. Given that Google, Microsoft, and Zoho control the majority of the mailbox market, this makes perfect sense.
To get into the mailbox of a Zoho, Gmail, or Outlook account, who could be more suitable than a Gmail, Outlook, or Zoho address? Pick one of these three as one of the ways to improve your email sender reputation. After it’s finished, you may utilize an outreach tool that will send your email sequences from your inboxes automatically.
Use Brevo (formerly Sendinblue), MailChimp, MailerLite, or SendGrid for opt-in emails. These are the ones that have the highest email reputation rankings on MailReach, according to our statistics.
6. Verify If You Have Been Blocked
Even if you’re a legitimate sender providing high-quality content, it’s still possible to find yourself on a block list. Being on a blocklist can severely impact the success of your email campaigns, as it prevents your messages from reaching your subscribers’ inboxes. Blocklisting often occurs due to factors such as high bounce rates, frequent complaints, or suspicious sending behavior, and it can happen to even the most reputable senders.
Therefore, before launching your next email campaign, it’s crucial to check whether your domain or IP address has been flagged on any blocklists. If you’re on a blocklist, your emails are more likely to be filtered into the spam folder or not delivered at all, which can drastically reduce your open rates.
Additionally, a high bounce rate, often caused by invalid or outdated email addresses, can negatively affect your sender’s reputation, making it even more challenging for your emails to land in the inbox. Regularly monitoring and maintaining a clean email list helps ensure your communications are received as intended.
7. Establish Appropriate Authentication Procedures
Before you start sending emails, it’s essential to ensure that your SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and BIMI records are properly set up as an answer to how to improve your email sender reputation. These authentication protocols are crucial because they act as your identity verification documents in the world of email delivery.
Think of mailbox providers as the bouncers at an exclusive club; they determine who gets in and who gets blocked. By setting up these records correctly, you essentially prove to the mailbox provider that you are a legitimate sender and not a spammer or fraudster.
SPF (Sender Policy Framework) helps verify that the sending server is authorized to send emails on your behalf. DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) adds a digital signature to confirm the email’s authenticity. DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) helps protect against phishing attacks.
Lastly, BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) allows your brand logo to appear next to your emails, increasing trust. With all these elements in place, your email has a much better chance of landing in your recipient’s inbox instead of being flagged as spam.
8. Don’t Send Too Many Emails
When performing cold outreach, it’s crucial not to exceed 150 cold emails per day, ideally per domain or email address. Sending too many emails in a short period can raise red flags for email providers, making your account appear spammy and damaging your sender’s reputation. By limiting your daily cold emails to a reasonable number, you ensure your actions resemble those of a person, not a mass marketing campaign.
This is important because email services are designed to detect and block automated, bulk senders. Based on extensive testing, we’ve found that your email deliverability improves significantly when you send fewer cold emails each day.
Overloading your email system with too many cold outreach messages can negatively affect your open rates and even land you on blocklists. Therefore, it’s recommended to keep your outreach within the range of 100 emails per email address or domain, allowing you to maintain a positive sender reputation while still reaching out effectively.
9. Avoid Sending Out Material That Seems Spammy
It should go without saying that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are highly skilled at detecting and filtering out potential spam. If your email resembles spam in any way, ISPs will likely categorize it as such, regardless of your intentions. To prevent this, it’s crucial to avoid certain red flags that are commonly associated with spam messages.
For instance, excessive use of exclamation marks, spammy language such as “free,” “guaranteed,” or “limited time offer,” and an over-reliance on images can all raise alarms for ISPs. Additionally, emails that include excessive emoticons or other flashy elements are more likely to be flagged as spam.
When this happens, ISPs may refuse to deliver your email to your recipient’s inbox, and instead, it could end up in their spam or junk folder. Over time, this can tarnish your sender’s reputation, making it even harder for your future emails to reach their intended audience.
Why You Should Improve Your Email Sender Reputation
In the digital age, email marketing remains a powerful tool for businesses to connect with customers, but its effectiveness hinges on one crucial factor: ways to improve your email sender reputation. This reputation determines whether your emails land in a recipient’s inbox or get filtered out as spam.
Improving your email sender reputation is not just a technical concern but a critical step in ensuring your emails reach the right audience and foster trust with your subscribers. A strong sender reputation is built on factors such as consistent email engagement, low bounce rates, and the avoidance of spammy practices.
ISPs (Internet Service Providers) assess your reputation based on how recipients interact with your emails. If your emails consistently garner high open rates, minimal complaints, and few hard bounces, ISPs are more likely to view your emails as legitimate and deliver them to inboxes. On the other hand, poor engagement or frequent complaints can lead to your emails being marked as spam, severely damaging your reputation.
One of the main reasons to focus on improving your sender reputation is to ensure high deliverability rates. Emails that are flagged as spam or blocked by ISPs won’t reach your audience, rendering your marketing efforts ineffective. A poor reputation can also limit your future email marketing potential, as ISPs may begin to block all emails from your domain, making it harder to establish trust with new subscribers.
Moreover, a good sender reputation enhances the overall effectiveness of your email campaigns. With improved deliverability and engagement, your brand builds credibility, leading to better conversion rates and customer loyalty. Ultimately, investing time and resources in maintaining a solid email sender reputation is key to ensuring your marketing messages are seen and acted upon.
FAQ
Q: What affects the reputation of an email sender?
A: Sender reputation is influenced by a number of factors, such as recipient engagement, list acquisition, best practices for list maintenance, sending IP reputation, and sending email/domain reputation.
Q: How does one define a good sender reputation?
A: A bad sender reputation might be the cause of a persistent drop in open rates and an overall lack of engagement. Open rates of 18% and above are often indicative of a robust and active list. You must take action to increase audience engagement if your open rates are routinely less than 10%.
Q: Sender reputation is decided by whom?
A: The reliability of your brand as an email sender is referred to as sender reputation. Inbox providers arrange emails in a customer’s inbox according to a number of differently weighted criteria that affect your sender reputation.
