Today, I’m talking about the elusive Sender Reputation Score. It’s like a credit score for your email sender reputation, and it can make or break your email marketing program!
To learn more about this mystical score or talk about how we can make yours the best it can be, visit https://gregsnewby.com/contact/ and send me a note today.
TRANSCRIPT
Howdy!
Do you ever wonder why some of your emails never reach inboxes?
Today I want to talk about a dirty little secret of the email marketing industry called the sender score. It’s just a little hidden metric that might be affecting your email deliverability.
You might be following all the best practices, or feel like you’re doing that anyway, but you’re still landing in the promotions folder of your contacts.
Or even worse, you might be landing in the spam folder!
Nobody wants that!
The thing about it is though it’s not always about content or design.
The sender reputation score is kind of a hidden score that email service providers use to rate you.
But not everybody really knows about it.
So let’s talk about it for a second.
The sender score is like a credit score, but for your emails, and it’s calculated based on your sending reputation.
So kind of like the credit score, good sending practices increase your score and negative actions, like spam complaints, decrease your score.
And, depending on where that score is on each ESP’s scale will determine if you get in
the inbox, the promotions folder, or spam folder.
Each ESP does things a little bit differently so it’s not universal across all platforms. But there are some things that you can do to make sure that your score is as high as possible.
So let’s run through a few of them.
First off – double opt-in. It’s not necessarily a requirement but it’s definitely a good thing that can help out and make sure that your subscribers are actually interested in receiving emails from you. Which reduces greatly the chance of spam complaints.
Spam complaints is a big driver of this.
Another thing you’d want to do is list cleaning. Regularly clean your list and remove inactives and hard bounces.
Sending to hard bounces and people who don’t respond to your emails all the
time is really going to tank your sender score.
You also want to avoid spam trigger words like “sale” or “buy now” or anything that sounds kind of salesy and spammy.
You also want to avoid excessive capitalization and exclamation marks.
I mean just think about an email that you would get and just from the eye test it’s like, this looks like spam. Don’t do that because it’s going to be marked as spam.
Another thing you can do that’s a little bit more technical is authenticate your emails, You can implement things like SPF, dkim, dmarc, things like that to work on email authentication.
If you use a reputable email service provider to send your emails, it’s probably already taken care of for you.
If you’re self-hosting your email server then that’s a different story. You’ll need to talk to your devs and make sure that all that’s taken care of.
Another good thing to do is have a consistent sending volume and just maintain that consistency. Because sudden spikes in sends and just massive blasts that are atypical of what you normally do can raise red flags with ESPs too.
This one I know is going to be really kind of mind-blowing for you, but you want to have engaging content.
Right?
That’s what we’re all trying to do, but engaging content actually helps increase your sender reputation score – higher open rates and higher click through rates – they signal to ESPs – it’s kind of like the opposite of spam complaints – that signals to ESPs that your emails are valued and that you’re providing information people want.
And then, honestly, one of the biggest things and traps that I see people fall in all the time is purchasing lists.
Do NOT – let me back up and repeat that for the y’all in the back – do NOT buy email lists.
They can lead to high bounce rates and spam complaints. And that’s just going to tank your reputation as quickly as possible.
The people on there have probably never heard of you they have no idea why they’re getting emails from you.
Just don’t do it. It’s not worth the risk.
So that kind of rounds out the list of things I want to talk about today.
Some of these are a little technical, in the weeds. But don’t worry! I’m here to help you out with it.
Be sure to visit https://gregsnewby.com/contact/ and let’s discuss what you’re doing to stay in inboxes and out of the spam folder!
But if you’re already in the spam folder, don’t worry! It’s not too late.
I can help you out with that, too.
So visit https://gregsnewby.com/contact/ and let’s get it figured out for you.
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