5 Ways to Improve Your Email Reputation and Delivery Rates

What’s your email reputation? When it comes to the deliverability of your emails, your reputation as an email sender plays a major role. The better your email reputation, the more emails make it to the inboxes of your recipients. Here we discuss 5 key email-marketing practices you should focus on to help optimize your email reputation and delivery rates.

Deliverability Depends on Reputation

According to a recent study by Return Path—a leading email delivery services company—approximately 20% of permission-based commercial emails are not being delivered to their intended inboxes. In other words, 20% of legitimate emails from organizations are being diverted to bulk/spam folders or completely blocked, undelivered, or dropped.

It used to be that content was the major factor determining whether your emails made it through the spam filters and were delivered. In another Return Path study, however, email sender reputation was found to be the primary cause of filtering:

• 77% of delivery problems were because of sender reputation.
• 23% of delivery problems were attributed to content, but 6% of that was directly linked to the reputation of the domains included in the content.

Check Your Email Reputation

Knowing your email reputation is the first step in improving your email delivery rate. Your email reputation is the measurement of the quality of your list and the extent that you follow best email practices. To find out what Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and other email receivers think of your email-marketing program, visit SenderScore.org. At this site, you get free access to data the ISPs and other email receivers use to decide whether to accept or reject your emails. You simply input a domain or IP address and, in return, you’ll get a score from 1 to 100 (with 100 being the best). With this score, you’ll know whether you need to continue following best email practices to protect your high score, or take action to improve your reputation. Plus, if you have a problem with your email program, you’ll have a good idea of the scope of that problem.

Email Practices That Determine Reputation and Deliverability

Once you’ve determined your reputation (and the extent to which you may have an issue), the next step is to identify your email practices that could be improved or that you should maintain. The following are the main areas of an email-marketing program that affect sender reputation:

1. Your email bounce rate
   Sending an email to an address that’s unknown or doesn’t exist causes a bounce. Because people can periodically cancel or change their email addresses, bounces are expected. Bounce rates can vary dramatically, but with a well-managed list, you should be able to keep the rate low. At FulcrumTech, for example, we typically see bounce rates for our clients of less than between .5% and 1.5%.

   Bounce rates are dependent on:

   • The frequency of your mailings. If you email periodically, there’s a greater chance that more of your list will have email addresses that have changed. Those who tend to email regularly and not too infrequently will typically exhibit low bounce rates.
   • Whether your email list consists of more consumers versus B-2-B customers. Consumers tend to change their email addresses more frequently.
   • How quickly you remove the bounced email addresses. If you keep sending emails to the same addresses that bounced, your reputation will suffer. A high number of bounces means you’re not managing your list properly—resulting in a poor quality list.

   During an email audit that FulcrumTech conducted for one client who regularly sends to a list of thousands, we discovered they were sending to the same bounced addresses every day. And they were using a well-known email service provider. So by simply cleaning up their list and getting rid of these repeatedly bounced addresses, this client was able to experience improvement in their email deliverability.

2. Your unsubscribe performance
   Your unsubscribe performance is an important indicator of your list quality and best email practices. If you send relevant content to subscribers who are expecting emails from you, your unsubscribe rate should be low. Generally, a high unsubscribe rate will contribute to a poor reputation.
3. Your spam complaint rate
   Getting marked as spam by recipients is worse for your email reputation than people simply unsubscribing. Your spam complaint rate is yet another measure of whether you’re sending relevant emails to people who are expecting it. And, with a spam button, the ISPs are getting a direct message that your email is not wanted. Too many of these, and your reputation will suffer. To help maintain a good quality list, it’s important that you get in your ISP’s feedback loop. This means the ISP will let you know who marked you as spam, so you can be sure they’re unsubscribed immediately.
4. Your blacklist status
   It’s important to regularly check to see if your domain or IP address is included in blacklist databases. If, suddenly, large amounts of your emails, or emails to a certain domain, are not getting opened, the likely culprit is your having been added to a blacklist. If you’re on a blacklist it’s likely you mailed to a spam trap or have been viewed as a repeat offender by ISPs. This would result in your emails being blocked or directed to the spam/bulk mail folders of your recipients. While there are numerous blacklists, Spamhaus and SpamCop are two examples.
5. Your email provider’s reputation
   You can think about your IP address as the “conduit” or pipe through which you send emails. So if you’re working with an email service provider (ESP), your reputation depends on their reputation, as well. And if you’re working with one of the email marketing companies that work with hundreds of other organizations and share an IP address with them, keep in mind that your reputation—and deliverability—can be negatively affected by those other organization’s email practices.

That’s one of the reasons why FulcrumTech uses Lyris for a number of our clients. With important protective mechanisms in place, this major ESP has an outstanding reputation for having clients with high-quality email practices. At FulcrumTech, we also have the experts, guides, and tools to help you better comprehend and solve your email deliverability issues. Click here to email us or give us a call today at 215-489-9336 to learn more about how we can help you improve your email reputation and delivery rate.