Good email marketing brings customers back to your website after their first purchase. However, new product launches, sales, and promotions are only effective if they reach your customers’ inboxes. It’s important to build your sender reputation to avoid the spam folder.

What is Sender Reputation?

Email sender reputation is a score that email service providers (ESPs) assign to every individual and business email. This score is determined by several factors and impacts the deliverability of future emails.

The lower your sender reputation score is, the less likely your email will be delivered successfully.

How to Maintain a High Sender Reputation Score

When starting a new business email, the sender reputation score will be positive enough for emails to go through. Frequency of emails, receiver engagement, and quality of emails all factor into the email address’s trustworthiness and future sender score.

What ESPs Look For

1. IP and Domain Reputation
   1. ESPs review the sender history of both the IP address and specific domain. Frequently sending low-quality emails, too many emails, or emails with high bounce rates will negatively affect your score.
2. Recipient Engagement
   1. Consistently low open rates, link clicks, replies, etc., will lower the score. This is also true if recipients mark your emails as spam or you have high unsubscribe rates.

Ways to Keep Your Score High

1. Clean Email Lists
   1. Review and remove inactive or invalid email addresses to reduce bounce rates.
2. Avoid Spam Trigger Words
   1. ESPs keep a list of spam trigger words. If terms such as “free”, “100% satisfied”, and “limited time” are not used in the context of real promotions, your email can be flagged as spam.
3. Personalize Emails
   1. Use audience segments to send appropriate email content to specific groups.
4. Email Marketing Campaigns
   1. Intentional newsletters with thought-out design and copy will lead to better engagement metrics and increase sender reputation.

Develop email marketing campaigns with intention. By avoiding bombarding audiences with frequent emails and maintaining high-quality content, a business email address should have a high sender score, leading to happier customers who engage and follow through on goals.