How to fix email reputation in no time

Suppose you want your emails to get directly into your ideal prospects’ inboxes. To ensure they will, you must ensure your deliverability. Among numerous factors that impact the deliverability, the reputation of the domain, and the email server IP plays a crucial role.

Do you know what actually impacts the reputation most? Do you know how to identify the reputation, handle it, or enhance it? Read on to find some answers & helpful tips to fix your email sender reputation.

How to identify domain reputation?

To determine domain reputation, receivers frequently monitor of every approach your domain is utilized in a message and how that message is ending up performing in the inbox. On the basis of this data, major ISPs use algorithms that are complex to ultimately “score” your domain, identifying that score when scanning future messages for establishing a level of trust. The better your domain reputation identifies at a certain receiver, the less likely the future messages you’ll send will end up in a spam folder.

That means there’s no requirement of just one huge domain reputation, which is floating out there in cyberspace. Rather than that, a domain has limitless reputations unique to the exclusive scoring processes a certain receiver employs. Also, you’re probably not forwarding the exact content & volume of messages to all receivers, so as an instance, it’s expected that Gmail’s seen minimum slightly different engagement from the users they have than Yahoo.

How to Improve email reputation?

Now, let’s cherish the master tips to skyrocket your domain reputation and what you should avoid while sending emails:

Don’t use a purchased list

In a perfect strategy, your list would be created by active, engaged fans of the brand you have. All of them would have personally requested to receive your emails and constantly engage with your brand.

Let’s be real; creating an opted-in email list is undoubtedly difficult, so numerous email marketers try taking shortcuts. One of the commonest is to purchase a third-party email list. This mistake might rapidly lead to a tarnished email domain reputation, which might take months to recover.

Your email list’s quality is pretty crucial in email deliverability. Email providers consider numerous factors when determining where to put your emails: bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, and engagement, are a few of the crucial ones.

The low-quality addresses that you get on a bought list can certainly elevate the chances of your emails landing in the inbox for someone who’s on your email list.

A healthy email list straightforwardly means a Healthy domain reputation.

Building a robust domain reputation consumes time, and there really isn’t any easy shortcut. Your deliverability will certainly drop down in case you’re sending your emails to form an IP address having a low reputation. However, is you use a clean IP, there isn’t any guarantee of high deliverability in case your domain reputation is poor or so.

Be relevant

Recipients that personally chose to join your mailing list are attentive towards your brand or service. You need to bring them relevant and high-quality content.

By collecting data on where your clients got familiar with your brand, and which content of yours they have engaged with, you can conveniently segment your audience, so every individual receives content relevant to his/her interests.

Badly-coded emails are filtered out by ESPs. No matter if your email passes through ESP filters, if you design your emails poorly, it may make your readers mark it as spam in case it renders poorly. Poor email formatting certainly gives no good impression, which leads to lower engagement, and of course, decreases domain reputation.

If in doubt, in the majority cases, a plain text email performs better and makes it’s way easily through spam filters than a poorly formatted email.

Stay complaint-free

Spam complaints are among the quickest ways to decrease your email domain reputation. The majority of the good marketing automation platforms won’t even let you send emails in case your complaint rate is pretty high.

Stay consistent

Sending inconsistent email volumes over time are looked upon as suspicious by ESPs. Practice a consistent email sending schedule. Send volume to stay in a safe zone and good graces with all inbox providers.

Stay out of spam traps.

ESP’s (Email service providers) and anti-spam organizations use abandoned or fake email addresses as a method to “trap” spammers (or marketers following weak email list hygiene).

These addresses won’t bounce, as email service providers are intentionally keeping them open. If you get caught in this email marketing, then it’s equivalent to getting stuck in a police sting operation. You won’t win at all.

Keep bounce rates low.

Email bounces are classified into two major types: hard and soft bounces.

Hard bounce Email addresses should be removed. Certainly, these are email addresses gone out-of-date, misspelled, fake, or senders who have just blocked you. Continuing sending to hard bounces is pointless since you aren’t gonna get any engagement from them. If you continue, then they’ll only hurt your sender reputation besides lowering your overall deliverability.

Soft bounces take place when the email addresses are fine and valid, but delivery failed due to some reason. This could include several reasons, such as the email server being down temporary when the message was sent, a full inbox, and so on. Now, in case this was a previously active address, trying to resend your emails a cool idea. However, if it keeps bouncing, taking it off your list is the best practice.

Ensure your emails are properly authenticated

Undoubtedly, email authentication is crucial.

Authentication protocols are one among several different ways ESP’s verify email senders besides preventing spammers, hackers, etc. from reaching your inbox.

Emails failing to pass authentication are more prone to be classified as spam or risky by ESPs. It’s worth putting the time to ensure your marketing emails are sent with proper authentication.

Authentication methods are primarily of three types — DKIM, DMARC, and SPF. We could conveniently write a complete article on each of these; however, here are the basics on each of those three:

• Sender Policy Framework (SPF ) — this permits you, the sender, to figure out which mail servers have the authority to send an email for your domain.
• Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) — DKIM utilizes an encrypted digital signature to ensure that the emails are really coming from that specific domain they say they are, and not “faked” or altered in transit.
• Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, & Conformance (DMARC) — Brings the receiving server the options regarding how to handle your email in case it fails DKIM and SPF authentication. Besides that, it provides reports that notify you who’s sending emails from your domain.

Keep your recipients’ interest spiked.

Your business’ success depends on your customers; make it your email program’s goal to maintain their interest.

You own your subscriber email list, unlike social media followers. There’s no gatekeeper charging you on every occasion you send an email. However, subscribers prove to be valuable only if you can reach them. Ensure sending emails with evergreen and highly valuable content on the right time spot for each subscriber. That way, you can keep them happy and fully satisfied with your service /product long after the initial transaction.

The Conclusion

A domain tagged with a bad reputation score can certainly be repaired. The way towards a high reputation highly depends on your perception of your clients’ interest in your newsletters besides the level to which cybercriminals can interfere with your outgoing emails. Hence, a bad reputation score isn’t set in stone, but you can turn it around by making your email marketing operation perfectly compliant with the good practice rules and guidelines mentioned above.