An email reputation or an email sending reputation isn’t widely talked about, but it is a factor that plays an important role in whether recipients will get an email from you or not.

This article will give you an overview of this powerful metric and show how to check and improve it.

What Is an Email Reputation?

An email reputation is a score given to you by an Internet Service Provider. A Sender Score is a number between 0 and 100 that identifies your sender reputation. It indicates whether you follow standards, meet current demands established by the ISP. This is the ultimate factor for email deliverability because if it is high, the chances are your email newsletter will land in inboxes; if it is low, then be ready to face SPAM filters.

An email reputation combines an IP reputation, a domain reputation, and a content reputation to create an overall score.

IP and Domain Reputation

IP reputation is a base for defining the email reputation of a sender. It helps to detect suspicious behavior by monitoring spam and viruses.

The main problem of a sender IP reputation is the fact that most people mainly use shared IPs. A sender IP reputation alone isn’t enough to determine the quality of a sender. Another important indicator for establishing an email reputation score is a domain reputation.

ISPs use different complex metrics to keep track of how your domain was and is used and decides whether it is considered as trustworthy.

The good thing about a domain reputation is that it allows you to change your IP and still get a good sending score. If you are using a shared IP address, consider purchasing a new one from a trustworthy provider. This will work only if your domain reputation is high and your domain is healthy. If this is not the case, changing your IP address won’t be of much help.

Content Reputation

A content reputation is another important metric whose score is obtained from various aspects.

A content reputation analyzes the copy of the email sent to the contacts and checks if it is valuable, non-spammy, and non-abusive. This is done in order to determine the quality of the content.

For example, if your copy includes a virus, or asks about account details of your contacts, the ISP will mark you as spam without any doubt. Also, if you notice that your open and CTRs are getting lower than usual, that’s one more indicator that there’s a drop in your content reputation.

What Can Ruin Your Email Reputation?

The most important thing for you to keep in order is the email deliverability rate. The first signs that something is wrong with your email reputation are:

• High bounce rate
• High SPAM complaints rate
• Low deliverability rate

Furthermore, if your email is often blocked, flagged, and rejected, it also indicates a bad email reputation.

So what exactly can ruin your reputation? The main reasons are:

• Use of an untrusted ESP/ shared IP
• Use of free email addresses (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail...)
• High number of spam trap hits / getting caught in a spam trap
• Being blacklisted
• Use of spam or misleading subject lines
• Use of spammy/ abusive content, or use a lot of spam trigger words
• Sending repetitive content and emails over and over again
• Use content that phishing personal information, bank account details, and other things that conflict with the privacy policy
• Emailing people too often
• Growing a recipient list quickly
• Purchasing email addresses from untrusted sources
• Low engagement rate/ open rate/ CTR

How to Repair a Bad Email Reputation

First, figure out the reason why you have a bad email reputation by analyzing all the metrics and campaign reports to get to the bottom of possible issues.

Second, if you have received a lot of complaints, analyze those, and If there is something you can do – react immediately.

Third, clean your subscription list since sending emails to unengaged contacts will ruin your email reputation even more. Remove all inactive and invalid addresses.

Fourth, run your IP and Domain through blacklist lookup regularly. It will help to identify whether you are blacklisted or not and also will provide you with guidance about how to keep your IP and Domain healthy.

How to Maintain a Good Email Reputation

An email reputation is directly linked to the deliverability rate. These metrics indicate whether your email will pass barriers and get through spam filters or end up in the spam folder instead. To maintain a good email reputation, you should follow the best practices of maintaining a good deliverability rate. Embrace technology and protect yourself with an email authentication system.

An email authentication system is based on three main pillars: SPF, DKIM, and TLS.

SPF

A Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is a protocol that helps others to understand that the email they received comes from you and not a hacker or spammer. An SPF defines which IP addresses can be used to send emails from your domain and verifies that IP address. It prevents hackers from tricking the ISP by faking domain names.

An SPF is the first thing that you need to set up before you even consider sending emails.

You should put into your SPF record all the apps that send emails on your behalf using their own SMTP. That being said, Autoklose uses your own SMTP to send emails, so nothing extra should be included in the SPF record.

DKIM

Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) is an additional layer of security that goes hand in hand with the SPF record. DKIM improves your trustworthiness by letting you associate a domain name with your email using a digital signature. When you sign your email, the system creates a unique string of characters, called the keys (private and public), that helps uniquely recognize that it’s you by encrypting and decrypting your digital signature. This will additionally authenticate your email and if everything is fine and the message has not been altered, then it can pass filters.

This will result in improving your email deliverability which in turn improves your email reputation.

TLS/ SSL

Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) are security and cryptographic protocols that also contribute to authenticity. Both are used to encrypt communication and protect your emails from intrusion. This is an additional authentication step, and it’s improving your overall score and giving you some extra points.

What more can you do?

While these three aspects are great for maintaining and even improving your email reputation score, there are some other helpful tips to go through:

• Clean subscription list to send emails to only valid and engaged contacts
• Do not purchase contacts from untrusted sources
• React to spam complaints
• Switch to dedicated IP
• Check your IP and Domain reputation regularly
• Test your email validity
• Warm-up your domain
• Warm-up your mailbox
• Run re-engaging campaigns
• Choose meaningful subject lines
• Avoid spammy phrases and words such as “Free!!!”
• Use Spintax to generate multiple text variations.

Even though earning a good reputation may be a time-consuming process, if you don’t invest enough time, effort, and resources into it, you will end up destroying the one that you already have, and at the end of a day, it will cost you much more. This is something that requires you to always monitor the situation and be ready to fix problems on time as soon as you notice them.

If you have any questions do not hesitate to initiate a live chat.

Happy klosing! :)

Your autoklose.com team!

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