In email marketing, deliverability is one of the key points that measure campaign success. One way to increase deliverability is through having a good email sender reputation. Your email campaigns will be blocked, rejected, bounced, ignored, or sent to the spam box without it.
To start with building your sender’s reputation, you need to do IP warming first. Know what its other benefits are, how to do it, and the other reputation-building tips by reading until the end.
What Is Email Sender Reputation?
An email sender reputation is your stature as an email marketer that defines your trustworthiness for sending email campaigns. Think of it this way: We know that we need to take the bar exam first and handle a few cases to be a legitimate and known lawyer.
Without a license to practice law and the experience, potential clients would say: “I don’t trust you.” or “I don’t even know who you are.”
This is exactly what would happen in email marketing. Without a good email sender reputation, internet and email service providers (ISPs and ESPs) won’t accept your email campaigns and also won’t deliver the messages to your recipients’ inboxes because you cannot be trusted.
How to Build Good Reputation for Your Email Campaigns
1. Warm Up Your IP
IP warming is the process of gradually increasing the volume of campaigns you send to your customers every day according to a predetermined schedule. For example, you can warm up your IP using an x2 predetermined schedule. You can also make your own sending schedule that fits your desired monthly sending quota.
This means that every day, you double the amount of email you send using a single and new business domain, email address, and IP address to your mailing list subscribers. Warming your IP helps ISPs and ESPs to analyze your sending behavior and engagement rates, which also helps build your sender’s reputation.
2. Avoid Using a No-Reply Email Address
There are two big reasons why you shouldn’t use no-reply email addresses. One, customers HATE it. They can’t reach out to you, especially if they want to ask questions about your products or require assistance. They also can’t share feedback, praise, or comments.
Two, they decrease deliverability. Some ISPs, customers, and network spam filters are set to automatically send emails with no-reply addresses into the junk or spam box.
3. Have an Opt-Out Process
Some customers will eventually want to stop receiving emails from you, and you’ll never know why. Without an opt-out process, they’ll set their mailbox to send your email campaigns to the spam box automatically.
This will hurt your sender’s reputation a lot and potentially lead your domain, email address, and IP address into being blacklisted from multiple ISPs and ESPs. With every email campaign, you create and send, always provide a clear link for your customers at the bottom if they want to opt-out.
4. Send Only Relevant Content
Relevant content is based on the interests and preferences of your customers. It’s the primary reason why they subscribed to your mailing list in the first place. You probably had some content that they liked and wanted to receive more like it.
If you send content that is not relevant to your customers, your engagement rates will plummet. Why? For example, customer A and customer B have different interests. Customer A likes your product review content, while customer B likes your newsletters.
Both customers have a high chance of not opening the content they aren’t interested in. one-size-doesn’t fit all in email marketing. And the more your campaigns are ignored. The closer you’re to being labeled as a spammer by ISPs and ESPs – totally the opposite of building a good sender’s reputation.
Always segment your customer into lists according to their preferences and interests. Then send content based on their segments. Better yet, make your campaigns even more personalized.
5. Keep a Clean Mailing List
By all means, avoid buying mailing lists to grow your customer pool. Mailing lists can contain spam traps, bots, or inactive addresses. Major ISPs and blacklist providers use spam traps. They scan your campaigns for spammy elements such as sales words.
Once you’re caught in the spider’s web, you might find it hard to get out and repair your damaged reputation. The one thing spam traps, bots, and inactive addresses have in common – they don’t engage in your emails, which adds disengagement rates.
And if your purchased list manages to have active users, you’ll just end up being reported as a spammer because they never gave consent to receiving your emails.
6. Make your Campaigns Recognizable
Do your best to make your recipients open your campaigns. Stand out in their inbox—craft attention-grabbing subject lines. Use your company’s name in your email address. And keep your campaigns safe, avoiding the use of NSFW content.
7. Setting Up a Subdomain
Subdomains are necessary to ensure long term email deliverability. How? Using a single parent domain for sending your marketing campaigns is pretty risky. If some customers mark your marketing emails as spam and you’re sending transactional emails as well with the parent domain, you might face future problems when sending future transactional emails.
You’ll want to avoid that because transactional emails are essential. By using a subdomain, you’ll be able to separate marketing mistakes such as low engagement rates from your parent domain, and your transactional emails will always arrive in your customers’ inboxes.
Final Thoughts
In a nutshell, building a good sender reputation is gradually increasing the sending volume of attractive, well-crafted, and relevant emails every day. You also need to provide your customers an easy way out of your mailing list and allow them to reply to your campaigns while keeping out dirty email addresses from your mailing list.
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