In the 21st century, majority of businesses have adopted technologies to bring new customers or deal with them effectively. Sending emails for verification, order confirmations, communications, prospecting, or even sending OTP emails, businesses utilize email services. If your business is also one of those who intend to engage their users by sending emails, you would need to build sender reputation for the same. In this article, I’ll discuss what an email sender reputation is and how you can improve domain reputation.
What is an email sender reputation?
An email sender reputation is a combination of IP reputation score and its email domain reputation score. These sender scores are determined by an internet service provider (called ISP) for any organization that uses emails. With the help of this score, mailbox providers (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Zoho are some of the famous examples of mailbox providers) will decide if the email sent by an organization will be delivered to the recipient’s inbox or spam folder! In layman’s terms, this score will be the same as an online reputation that will help your emails hit the intended inboxes.
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What is the importance of a positive email sender reputation?
Any organization that sends transactional emails would know that there are a number of elements and factors that go behind ensuring good email delivery. Transactional emails by themselves are legitimate emails as they carry important information for the recipient. But, it also carries a sender reputation.
So, sender reputation is important. Its primary and most important job is to stop your emails from being flagged as spam emails, making sure you hit your recipients’ inbox and do not go ignored.
A transactional email might carry important information that the recipient might be waiting to receive at his end. If these emails do not get delivered instantly to their inboxes, it would leave a dent on your brand image and user experience. So, it is very important to make sure that you keep these factors in check and invest ample time behind it for a long term gain.
Factors affecting email sender reputation
As we know what an email’s sender reputation is and its importance, let’s understand what actually makes your emails hit recipients’ inbox. There are major four factors that will affect your IP score or email sender reputation:
- Volume of emails sent
- Frequency of campaign
- User engagement, unsubscribe rates, and complaints
- Bounce rate and undelivered emails
The above mentioned factors can answer a number of issues. And, many of them are easily fixable at the user’s end. There are various technical aspects attached to email reputation as well – for instance, managing service providers, setting up DKIM, SPF records, and so on.
Let’s check them in detail.
How to improve your email sender reputation?
So, let’s walk through the steps you would need to take to improve your email sender reputation, from updating domain authentication to using official email addresses. Here are the simple steps you can take to ensure your customers get your emails in their inbox.
1. Domain authentication (DKIM, DMARC, SPF)
One of the primary reasons your emails are not hitting recipients’ inboxes is because you have not configured the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. This might require some technical skills or you can always take help from your IT manager to get this fixed.
What are DKIM, SPF, and DMARC records?
These records are the methods to confirm your email authentication to your ISP and email service providers. This will give them assurance that your emails are attached to a specific domain and act as a form of verification on your email servers.
- DKIM [ DomainKeys Identified Mail.]
- SPF [Sender Policy Framework.]
- DMARC [Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance.]
How to authenticate your domain?
Follow the instructions to set up and authenticate your domain for the best results from email marketing:
- Set up the SPF for your domain
- Set up the DKIM for your domain
- Set up an mailbox to receive reports and messages
- Get login credentials set up from your domain hosting
- Check and update your DMARC records
2. Distribute your email campaigns
Apart from taking care of the technical items to get better email deliverability, make sure you distribute your email outreach campaigns. Whether you are trying to send marketing emails, sales emails, or transactional email, make sure to separate them with respect to relevant recipients.
With the help of SendBuzz, you can draft personalized emails and even design your AMP emails to improve deliverability. With the help of SendBuzz campaign manager, you can also segment your audience and email outreach campaigns to ensure better deliverability of your campaigns.
3. Avoid spamming
Due to modern protection laws and digital regulations, your organization has to pay attention to the addresses of the recipients you send emails to. This means removing email addresses that have not subscribed to get your email updates, the ones that are not valid, or where sending an email will get you out of compliance guidelines.
You can use double-opt in systems while you generate leads. This will make sure your recipients confirm their email addresses twice and are ready to receive email updates from you. You can also use email finder tools to make sure the addresses you have are valid and active to receive your emails to achieve maximum results.
How can you ensure a clean email list?
Here are some small steps you can take in order to keep your email list clean:
- Enable double opt-ins
- Monitor your email bounce for each email campaign
- Use third-party email check up tool to verify email addresses
- Use reputed email providers to add privacy, encryption, and improve authenticity
4. Write better emails and subject lines
To get better open-rates and results for your email marketing outreach, you should personalize text in the email body and use better copy in your subject lines to gain more click-through rates. Use subject lines that do not look spammy and include as much value as you can add in the emails for your recipients.
Avoid using all caps or putting catchphrases in emails to avoid hitting spam or promotion folders of your recipients. Try to be as relevant as you can while making the text as personalized as possible.
Conclusion
So, an email sender reputation score is generated by the ISPs, that help you land in the mailbox of your recipients when you run an email marketing campaign or are sending emails manually. If the sender’s organization has a good reputation, the probability of hitting inboxes will increase and more recipients will get your messages in their primary inbox rather than hitting spam.
Use our guide to improve your sender reputation and authenticate your mailboxes to ensure compliances and regulations are followed.