Email Reputation

One of the most important things for small businesses to bear in mind when advertising their products – if you successfully run an email campaign, then you can potentially see a large increase in your viewer numbers for pages that you linked to in your emails.

However, there is one thing that you need to bear in mind when launching an email campaign: email reputation. However, many people are unaware of this aspect of email campaigns. What is it, and why should you bear it in mind?

What Is Email Reputation?

Email reputation is a simple measurement of the practices that you use in your outgoing emails. There have been several standards established by a group of ISPs. ISPs use these standards to filter spam and unwanted emails and ensure that the people you’re looking to contact will get only emails that they’d want to receive.

To cut a long story short, your email reputation is similar to a credit rating. It can take time to earn a good reputation, but you can also easily destroy it if you’re not careful.

There are three main components of Email Reputation:

  1. Bounce Rate – This is the number which is figured out by dividing the number of messages returned as undeliverable by the number of emails that you’ve sent.
  2. Complaint Rate – is calculated by dividing the number of people who report your messages as spam by the number of emails that successfully deliver.
  3. Spam Trap Hits – this figure is the number of messages which get delivered to addresses that are explicitly used to trace and catalog spam.

Even a slightly poor email reputation will cause some messages that you send to land in the spam folder. Your email reputation is a key component of your overall business reputation, so it’s important to maintain it. If you keep your email reputation high, then you’ll ensure good engagement on your emails.

If you keep good engagement on your emails, then more and more people will be able to view your website, and therefore, your content. This is a truly meaningful way to measure the success of a given email campaign: the uptick in hits that you receive getting snippets of your content our there.

Related : 10 Most Secure Email Providers

How To Fix Your Email Reputation

There are many different ways to improve your reputation. These tips are something that you should definitely consider if you have a low email reputation, as maintaining a good reputation will improve clickthrough on your emails, no matter what.

Some key tips include:

  • Reduce your complaint rate by not sending unsolicited mail. If you make sure only to send mail which the recipient will want to receive, then they will not only not complain about your mail, they will also be more likely to view your website and, thereby, your work.
  • You could improve engagement my using more personalized content in your emails. For example, if someone has been searching for a given product on your site, then you could increase your email engagement by sending them emails that contain content relevant to the products they’ve been browsing.
  • You can make sure to include an easy way for people to unsubscribe from your mailing list. As much as this may seem counterintuitive, you can actually keep people on your mailing list if they can easily see that there’s a way out if needs be.If you include an evident unsubscribe link, then your business reputation will change to represent that you are a more transparent business. Nowadays, this is an important aspect when big businesses like Amazon are under fire for being so comparably faceless. Additionally, a clearly visible unsubscribe button is required to comply with GDPR.

What Impact Could A Bad Email Reputation Have On Your Business Reputation?

This is a relatively simple question to answer: a bad email reputation will lead to your emails not landing in people’s inboxes at all.

As I said at the start of this article, an ISP often looks at your sender reputation in order to determine whether or not to process your email. The worst-case scenario in that situation would be that an ISP wouldn’t even process your email request. In that case, the recipient simply wouldn’t receive the email that you sent.

This can lead to a vicious cycle, in which bad sender behavior will lead to a bad sender reputation. If you have a bad reputation, then you may want to take drastic action to rectify that. Thereby, your statistics may continue to worsen, leading to more drastic action, and so on.

Find: 10 of the Best Free Email Signature Generators

Wrapping Up

So, to sum up: email reputation is extremely important. It can make the difference between your new email marketing campaign is a failure or a roaring success. If you make sure to bear in mind some of the tips that I’ve shared in this article, then you’ll be sure to maintain your email reputation, and thereby improve the results of your new email campaign.

Author Bio: Mary is a passionate blogger and the chief editor at her own content marketing company PRable.com. Since college, she’s been interested in break-through technology and technical writing about innovative products and services that change our everyday lives for the better. She’s also interested in web design and photography.