Imagine you’ve crafted the perfect email. You’ve written engaging content, personalized it for your target audience, and ensured your design is visually appealing. But once you hit send, your email goes nowhere. Instead of landing in your subscribers’ inboxes, it’s met with a quiet demise, sent straight to the spam folder. This can happen for several reasons, but a poor email sender reputation is often to blame. In this post, we’ll explore how to improve your email sender reputation so you can stop worrying about inbox delivery and start focusing on engaging your audience.

Inframail’s email infrastructure solution can help you improve your sender reputation so your emails get delivered and your audience can engage with your content.

Table of Contents

• What Is Email Sender Reputation?

• 4 Ways to Check Your Email Sender Reputation

• How to Improve Sender Reputation

• Start Buying Domains Now and Setup Your Email Infrastructure Today

What Is Email Sender Reputation?

Email sender reputation refers to the score or trust level assigned to an email sender by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) based on the sender's behavior, including: 

• Email practices

• Engagement rates

• Complaint history

A good sender reputation ensures that emails land in inboxes rather than spam folders. Various factors affect the email sender’s reputation.

The Components of Email Sender Reputation

Email sender reputation is a combination of IP reputation and domain reputation. Let’s discuss them separately.

IP Reputation: What Is It and Why Is It Important? 

Each email service provider (ESP) offers a set of IPs they use to send emails. The majority of them are shared between thousands of accounts. Purchasing dedicated IPs is also an option, but the latter is much more costly, so most senders rely on a shared IP. Each address has a reputation on the Internet that tells mail servers if they should trust emails from that source. The servers take it seriously, as most failed deliveries result from poor reputations. This reputation doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It’s also not something you can build overnight. A good reputation takes years to build, yet it can be ruined with a failed email campaign. 

Domain Reputation: What Is It and Why Is It Important?

Domain reputation is also closely related to your sender’s reputation. Using a battle-tested IP from one of the best ESPs or mailbox providers won’t help much if your sending domain is known in the network for mailing unsolicited messages. Similarly, having a great sending history behind your domain name won’t guarantee excellent results if the IP you use has a poor reputation. This is relevant, for example, to free Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo! accounts that are commonly used for sending spam. If you’re sending a high volume of emails, you want to use more sophisticated solutions.

What Factors Affect Email Sender Reputation?

Here are some key metrics that impact your email sender’s reputation:

• Spam complaints: The number of recipients that hit ‘Report as Spam’ on your marketing emails. The more frequent such behavior is, the worse your email spam reputation will be.

• Spam traps: accounts set up by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). They look just like any other email account, but sending an email to one is likely to get you on one of the publicly available blacklists.

• Bounce rates: The number of emails that fail to get delivered. Bounces can be soft or hard. The former implies temporary email delivery problems, while the latter usually occurs when an address you’re emailing doesn’t exist. Read more about soft and hard bounces in this article.

• Sending history: This broad term covers things like sending volume and frequency. Spam filters pay particular attention to this factor. 

• Engagement: Focuses on your past performance and considers click, open, and reply frequency.  

• Unsubscribe rates: The rate at which your readers have previously unsubscribed. Your employees could unsubscribe from your emails, hurting your reputation.  

It all comes down to the performance of your previous campaigns. Do you have an organic mailing list with engaged recipients? Your sender’s reputation will most likely flourish. Are you receiving frequent complaints and landing in the spam folder because you bought a mailing list on one of those sketchy websites? Say hello to the poor sender reputation.

Related Reading

• Why Are My Emails Going To Spam
• Email Deliverability Rate
• Email Monitoring
• Email Deliverability Issues
• Email Quality Score
• Bounce Rate in Email Marketing
• How To Avoid Email Going To Spam
• Why Do Emails Bounce
• SPF or DKIM
• How To Check If Your Emails Are Going To Spam

4 Ways to Check Your Email Sender Reputation

1. Use Tools to Measure Your Sender Score

Measuring your sender score is a great place to start when checking your email reputation. Specialized tools can help you analyze your email-sending behavior and understand how your domain and IP reputation scores compare to others. 

Here are some to get you started: 

• Sender Score: This tool assigns you a sender reputation score from 0 to 100 (much like a credit score) and shows how your IP address ranks against the email sender score of others.

• Barracuda Central: This tool provides businesses with an IP reputation and domain reputation checkup.

• TrustedSource: This service, run by McAfee, provides basic insight into your sender reputation score and data about the DNS and mail server.

• Google Postmaster Tools: This tool helps senders track email data, such as their IP and domain reputation, delivery errors, and more.

• Microsoft Smart Network Data Services (SDNS): Microsoft’s SNDS provides insight into data points like the IP reputation, the number of spam traps you deliver to, and spam complaint rates.

2. Send Messages to Yourself

Another great way to check if you have a high reputation score or a bad reputation with inbox providers is to send messages to yourself. You can set up multiple email addresses with several mailbox provider services to test how your reputation affects email deliverability. Then, you can send emails to these new email addresses and analyze the results. You have a good sender reputation if all emails arrive in the inbox. But if most of my emails are in the spam folder, that’s a sign that my sender score is low.

3. Check Deny Listings of Your IP Address and Domain

A deny list is a collection of IP addresses or domains that have been caught sending out unsolicited emails. Your domain can be added to deny listings if the emails you send end up as spam trap hits or are marked as spam emails by recipients. You can use tools like MxToolbox, DNS Checker, and Netcore to see if your IP or domain names are on any black listings, which can cause deliverability issues. If your details are on a denied listing, your email reputation has a higher chance of declining.

4. Analyze Statistics and Identify Patterns

Sender reputation has much to do with how recipients interact with your emails. For example, if you see metrics like your open rate and click-through rate decreasing and more emails being marked as spam, you can expect your reputation score to drop. On the other hand, higher engagement from recipients is a good sign for your sender’s reputation, and you can expect more emails to end up in recipient’s and subscribers’ inboxes. Use these patterns to determine what you’re doing right and what you can improve. Pair it with the other measures I discussed above to get an accurate idea of the sender’s reputation.

Related Reading

• DMARC vs DKIM
• Importance Of DMARC
• What Is a Soft Bounce Email
• Email Deliverability Checklist
• What Affects Email Deliverability
• Why Is Email Deliverability Important
• Email Bounce Rate
• Fix Email Reputation
• Improve Sender Reputation
• Email Hard Bounce
• Email Deliverability Tools
• Email Deliverability Best Practices
• Best Email Domains

How to Improve Sender Reputation

Identify the Problematic ISP ASAP

Poor sender reputation can happen to anyone. In June 2022, we experienced an issue with our email reputation as we noticed our inbox placement had gone from 98-99% to less than 90%. Uh-oh. If this is happening to you right now, here’s what to do: The key here is to identify which ISP you’re having difficulty with and send only to your most engaged audiences for that ISP. 

Optimizing Email Deliverability: Leveraging Engagement-Based Segmentation

While this will drastically reduce the number of people you’re reaching with your emails, it will improve your engagement rates and ensure inbox placement. This step will indicate to your mailbox provider that your emails are not spam and that your readers engage with them. We used Litmus Email Analytics to identify subscribers who use Gmail to open our emails and segmented that audience into those who engaged in the last 10/30/45/60/90 days. We then suppressed Gmail subscribers who hadn’t opened in the previous 10 days. Then, we slowly increased volume, week by week, and tracked engagement.

Identify Risky Email Automations and Turn Those Off

Campaigns such as win-back email campaigns are risky. After all, they are reaching out to an already disinterested audience. The chances of them opening your emails and engaging with your content could be higher. Email automations your subscribers and customers might not engage with include: 

• Cart abandonment emails 

• Re-engagement campaigns 

Even though these email flows can sometimes work to revive disengaged customers and subscribers, they have a higher likelihood of going unopened and not clicked on than transactional or other emails in the promotions tab in Gmail. If these campaign emails do not lead to engagement, it will further harm your email reputation. Turn these campaigns off to improve your engagement rates if you have a reputation crisis.

Contact Your Postmasters for Help

Once you’ve taken steps to remedy your deliverability issues, but it’s still not working, you can also contact your ISP postmasters. A postmaster is the administrator of an email service. They deal with spam emails and sender reputation. Once you’ve identified your problematic ISP, send them a report using these forms: Gmail and Yahoo Mail. 

Navigating Postmaster Communications to Resolve Email Deliverability Issues

Outlook Gmail’s postmasters may not respond. So, until you see an improvement in your inbox placement, keep notifying Gmail of your issues through their postmaster contact form—advisably every week. 

Outlook and Yahoo Mail will likely respond to you via email within three to four days. Their response will indicate whether they’ve found issues with your email domain and are working on a fix or haven’t seen any problems.

Start Increasing Send Volume When Engagement Rates Increase

Only once you see an uptick in engagement rates can you start sending emails to more people again. For example, if you previously only sent my campaigns to people who had opened my emails in the last 15 days, I can now raise the bar to 30 days. Monitor the new results and then rinse and repeat until you hit your typical, full sending volume. 

For acquisition-related campaigns (where you’re contacting new/unengaged subscribers), having a secondary dedicated IP address can protect your primary IP address (used for campaigns that drive business goals and need to have reasonable inbox placement rates). At Litmus, we’ve onboarded a secondary IP address and a secondary sending subdomain for acquisition programs, cart abandon programs, and re-engagement nurtures.

Email Sender Reputation: Best Practices to Avoid Future Issues

Hopefully, you’ll never have to deal with a dip in reputation like we did. (Phew, we’re so glad that’s over.) In the meantime, though, there are proactive steps you can take for your email marketing program: Think about your send frequency: Subscribers who see your brand name pop up again and again in their inbox may start to get annoyed—especially if you’re using segmentation or personalization in your emails. 

Personalized Email Preferences: Boosting Engagement While Protecting Sender Reputation

The game’s name is Engagement, so give your subscribers the option to choose which emails they receive from you. This example from underwear brand ThirdLove is a great way not only to gather more first-party data from your subscribers but also to make sure that you’re sending the right emails to the right people: 

“There’s this expectation that you always need to send an email,” says Email Marketing Manager Tracie Pang. “But if you’re continuing to send emails without engagement, it’s going to affect your sender reputation. Sending to your list multiple days in a row like that could lead to more than one spam complaint because they’re tired of hearing from you.”

Make the Unsubscribe Easy

Similarly, make it as easy as possible to unsubscribe. No more “hacks” to get around legal requirements. Don’t fear the unsubscribe email list! It’s much better to have a slightly smaller list with higher engagement than an extensive list of people who don’t want to hear from you. If you don’t make it easy to unsubscribe, you’ll just see a spike in spam complaints—hitting your sender reputation hard. 

“Some spam complaints could come from not having an easy unsubscribe,” says Pang. “You should have a one-click unsubscribe button to comply with Gmail and Yahoo, but also because it’s the best way to make sure someone isn’t just marking you as spam out of frustration.” Focus on minimizing those instead. To comply with Gmail and Yahoo’s sender requirements (including deliverability rules), you must maintain a spam complaint rate of 0.3% or no more than three spam reports for every 1,000 messages. Your deliverability (and your bottom line) will thank you.

Clean Your Email List Regularly

Make it a regular to-do to clean out those email lists. First, you’ll want to filter out common typos (like gmial.com or yaho.com) or bounced email addresses. If you’re seeing many of these emails, consider doing double opt-in instead of single opt-in for your email acquisition. Yes, it adds an extra step for subscribers—but it also ensures you’ll never add a fake email address to your list.

After that, sift through your email list based on engagement. Anyone who hasn’t opened an email in 60 days should be tagged for a re-engagement email campaign. Sending a re-engagement campaign is a last-ditch effort to see if they want to stay on your list. If they don’t engage with that email, it’s time to say goodbye.

Don’t Send Out Spammy-Looking Content

If it looks like spam, ISPs will likely treat it as spam. Don’t use all-image emails, spammy words, too many exclamation points, or too many emojis. If your message looks spam, ISPs could refuse to place it in your reader’s inbox. This will negatively impact your reputation.

Don’t Forget to Remove Disengaged Users

Keep tabs on your email marketing metrics to determine if your readers are still engaged like: 

• Open rate

• Click-through rate

• Conversion rate

If your readers have become disengaged, you can send a re-engagement email or create a sunset policy to remove them from your email list.

Don’t Use a Shared IP Address

As mentioned above, using a shared IP means sharing your IP reputation with other senders. Of course, this can be good if you’re a new sender and want to piggyback off an IP with an established reputation. This can backfire if the other senders on your IP have bad email-sending habits. Use a dedicated IP address to avoid these problems.

Don’t Buy Email Lists

This is a surefire way to disaster. Purchasing email lists will likely lead to higher complaint rates – when recipients mark your content as spam if the emails you bought are all legitimate. Purchased lists are not validated, and the recipients on them have yet to opt-in to receive messages from your service. Even if you think these lists might contain some legitimate leads, the risk to your sender reputation is too high.

Related Reading

• Email Monitoring Software
• Soft Bounce Reasons
• Check Email Deliverability Score
• Soft Bounce vs Hard Bounce Email
• SalesHandy Alternatives
• GlockApps Alternative
• MailGenius Alternative
• MxToolbox Alternative
• Maildoso Alternatives

Start Buying Domains Now and Setup Your Email Infrastructure Today

Inframail revolutionizes cold email infrastructure, offering unlimited inboxes at a flat rate. Microsoft powers the deliverability. Inframail also provides dedicated IP addresses and it scales its cold email outreach efforts efficiently:

• Agencies

• Recruiters

• SDRs   

What Are the Benefits of Using Inframail? 

Inframail boasts an array of features designed to simplify cold email deliverability. First, the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup is automated to ensure your emails get delivered and that you avoid the spam folder. Every Inframail user has dedicated email servers for optimal sender reputation. The company offers 16-hour daily priority support for any deliverability issues that may arise. 

How Does Inframail Simplify Cold Email Deliverability? 

Traditional email providers charge per inbox, leaving you wrestling with technical configurations. Instead, Inframail streamlines the entire process. The company handles the complex infrastructure setup while you focus on reaching more prospects.