Step 1 Will Help Save Your Sender’s Reputation
If you are sending emails from an ESP like Aweber or Getresponse etc. Be sure that there’s an ‘unsubscribe’ link in your email. And easily visible in your email, allowing a subscriber a way to be removed from your list. All autoresponder emailing services automatically configure this for you. Also don’t try to disguise it by using small light text hidden where your subscriber can’t find it easily.
Let them unsubscribe, it’s 100 times better than marking you as spam. They’re just tire kickers anyway and can ruin your domain reputation if they click ‘mark as spam’. Let them go gracefully.
There’s 1 score you can’t check
Interestingly enough, you can compare sender reputation to your borrowing credit score. Only there’s no place you can go to check and see what it is. It’s kept hidden by the ISPs, (gmail etc). The better your sender reputation, the better chance your emails will be delivered to the inbox instead of the spam folder. Or not delivered at all.
There are two types of reputation, first is IP reputation and second is domain reputation. IP is the IP address from which the email is sent. Your autoresponder, (commercial ESPs like Aweber, Getresponse, ActiveChampain etc).
Your domain reputation is tied to the domain name, (mydomain dot com, Mydomain dot net, org and such). The thing is you have no control over IP reputation. That’s up to the ESPs and why they’re so picky about what you say in your emails because all web based autoresponders share their IP addresses with other clients. So what you say and act can ruin it for others.
But your Domain reputation is another story. You do have some control. As in, don’t write crazy claims and not follow a few simple rules. People engaging with your email is one of the top priorities.
What can you do to improve sender’s reputation?
Engagement!
What can one do to improve your domain reputation? One is engagement, probably the most important.
What does engagement mean?
- Think of your open rate, how many subscribers are opening the email and spending time reading it. Meaning they’re not just checking fast and deleting it.
- Your click rate is anyone clicking your links inside your emails.
- Is anyone replying to your emails? Ask questions to try to get a reply.
- If people just delete your email without opening it first, it may cause your reputation to go down a little. If emails are opened and deleted quickly, your reputation may go down.
- If subscribers open and spend time reading your email, your reputation will improve. If opened, and a link clicked, your reputation will go up.
- If opened and subscribers hit reply and write back to you, your reputation will start to improve.
The more engagement the better. If 10% of your subscribers engage with the email, the ISPs like gmail will see that people want to read these emails from this particular domain, so let’s deliver to the inbox, instead of the spam folder.
A higher domain reputation means emails from your sending domain (SPF and DKIM) are less likely to get filtered to a recipient’s spam folder or inbox.
But what if your current open rate is low?
Segment your list into two. Separate your openers from your non-openers subscribers. Set Up a High engagement segment and start sending emails to that segment. This will automatically send your open rate percentage up. (great subject lines are important too).
For instance instead of a 1% open, it goes up to 10% to 70% opens or more, just by list segmentation. The reason is these subscribers open your emails. Doing this one thing can improve both IP and your domain reputation score.
Your goal is to keep open rates to at least 10% otherwise ISPs will consider your emails as low engagement which can bring down your sender’s reputation score.
Your Emails will get delivered to the inbox/primary folders when your sender reputation is high.
Gmail tells us it needs to verify to deliver emails to the inbox:
- 1. Consistently sent from the same IP Address
- Use the same “From” domain for each type of email
- Sign messages with DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail)
- Publish a SPF Record (Sender Policy Framework)
- Publish a DMARC Policy (Domain-based Message
- Authentication, Reporting & Conformance
As you can see gmail dominates the email list of subscribers.
Conclusion
Something to remember is, It is not an exact science because ISP’s are always changing, but improving your domain reputation and testing gives you a fighting chance.
So Test-Test-Test and be the carful good guy with with content.
A good senders reputation is the best thing you can strive for, (domain reputation).
An interesting statistics: What is the most common ISP people use on my subscribers list;
- Average @Gmail domain is: 71%
- Average @Yahoo domain is: 8%
- Average @Hotmail and @AOL domains: 4.6%
- Average other domains; 12.3%
As the statistics show, gmail dominates the domains used for email accounts.
What do you think? Did you ever have email delivery problems?
Let me know in the comments.
Until next post,
Ken Stronach
You’re only one open and click away!