Email marketing is the most preferred marketing channel because of its numerous advantages. It is cost-effective, allows for personalized and targeted communication, has scope for automation, and the results can easily be measured. So, write an attractive subject line, draft an email copy, add some appealing visuals, and send it across to your recipients. Sounds like an easy win, doesn’t it? But that isn’t always the case.
Irrespective of how interesting and engaging your emails are, they will fetch you results only when they reach the inboxes of your recipients. Email clients aim to minimize clutter by ensuring users see only relevant and desired emails. They rely on various factors to decide which messages should get delivered to the inbox, which ones are sent to the junk folder, and which are blocked outright. One of the most important factors is your sender score.
In this guide, you will learn what we mean by sender score, the factors that affect it and how you can monitor and improve it.
What is sender score?
Sender score, as defined by the Sender Score tool, is a numerical representation of your sending reputation. It is determined by measuring your performance across key metrics like IP reputation, domain reputation and your past email-sending behavior.
You may also call this email sender reputation as it defines the overall reputation of the sender.
How to check your sender score
While there’s no particular way to find out the exact sender score or sender reputation, as all mailbox providers evaluate your email reputation differently by giving different amounts of importance to the factors that affect your overall reputation, there are third-party and mailbox-specific tools that can help you get an overall idea of the same. So, different tools might give you different values.
1. Google Postmaster
Google offers a free tool, Google Postmaster, for email senders to monitor their email deliverability. It helps you assess your domain and IP reputation. This tool acts as a reputation lookup of your domain with Gmail users. So, if most of your subscribers are Gmail users, you can get an extensive report on improving your domain's reputation.
💡 Related guide: How to use Google Postmaster tools
2. Yahoo Postmaster
Yahoo Postmaster is a tool designed to help email senders monitor and enhance their email deliverability to Yahoo Mail users. It provides insights into your IP reputation, domain reputation and other critical metrics.
3. Microsoft SNDS
Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) is a tool Microsoft provides to help email senders monitor key metrics, such as IP reputation, spam complaint rate, and activity involving Microsoft spam traps if they send emails to Outlook, Hotmail, or Live users.
4. Sender Score
Senderscore is a free third-party tool that lets you check your sender score by adding details about your IP and domain. Visit the home page and enter your domain or IP address, you will be directed to the next step, where you have to add your first name, last name, work email, and country.
As you hit the ‘what’s my score’ button, you will get information about your SSL certificates, DNS records, and the list of IPs used with the respective sender scores.
5. Talos Intelligence
Talos Intelligence from Cisco is the best tool to use when you want to assess the reputation of your IP and domain in real time. The tool represents your sender score as good, neutral, or poor.
Factors affecting sender score
Several factors affect your sender score. Understanding these factors will tell you how your emails are being perceived by mailbox providers.
1. IP reputation
IP reputation is directly linked to the sender score. Your IP address is where your emails originate from. If multiple senders with varying sending practices share the same IP, the actions of one can impact the reputation of all.
For instance, if 5 senders use the same IP address to send their emails and one of them is sending spammy emails, it will affect the reputation of all 5 negatively. This means even if you have a good sender score, your emails can land in the spam folder if you are using an IP address with a bad reputation or sharing an IP address with a bad sender.
2. Domain reputation
Sender score and domain reputation affect each other in a loop where good or bad practices in one influence the other. A high sender score, achieved through good sending practices, positively impacts domain reputation by signalling to email clients that emails from the domain are trustworthy. Similarly, a strong domain reputation improves the sender score by ensuring that emails are less likely to be marked as spam.
3. Email sending frequency and volume
Warming up your domain means increasing your email frequency and volume gradually. If your email frequency and volume spikes overnight, it will be considered suspicious activity and will negatively affect your sender score.
4. User behavior
The way your audience responds to your email also impacts your sender score. Engagement metrics like open rates, click rates, form submissions, etc. signal how your emails are received by your recipients and whether or not they are relevant to them. Higher engagement rates usually translate to a better sender score and vice versa. This can also be a result of the quality of the content that you’re sending.
6. Bounce rates
Bounce rates reflect the emails that did not reach your recipients. You can have high bounce rates when your email list hygiene is poor, you have non-validated emails in your email list or you don't have authentication protocols set up. A high bounce rate affects your sender score negatively.
7. Spam complaints
When your emails are flagged as spam, your sender score and IP reputation take a hit. High spam complaints send signals to the email service providers that your emails are unwanted, and thus, continuing to send emails that are marked as spam damages your sender reputation and may even lead you to get blacklisted.
How to improve sender reputation
If you find that your emails are landing in spam and you have a poor sender score, here's how you can improve it.
1. Personalize your emails
Create personalized email content meant to cater to every individual recipient, and you will automatically have higher engagement rates, leading to an improved sender score. This could mean subject lines and email introductions addressing the recipient by their name, product recommendations that are curated for the specific recipient and so on.
2. Use interactive emails
Interactive emails allow users to interact with the different elements of the email. AMP-powered interactive emails even allow dynamic content to be displayed in your interactive emails. These emails allow your recipients to perform actions like submitting feedback, taking a survey, playing a game, etc., within the email itself. When recipients get to interact with the emails you send, they are less likely to mark your emails as spam, and it also increases engagement.
3. Maintain consistency in email volume
Maintain consistency when you send emails to your recipients because the frequency of your emails impacts your sender score. Even if you want to increase the number of emails sent to a targeted email list, do it gradually over a period of time. For instance, if you send 50 emails per month to your users now and intend to start sending 1000 emails a month, you must increase the frequency gradually so that there isn't a sudden spike in the number of emails sent by you but a gradual growth over time.
4. Implement a sunset policy
A sunset policy is a strategy to get rid of the email addresses that are no longer engaging with the emails you send. So, by following a sunset policy, you can increase email engagement because you will send emails to only those recipients recipients interested in receiving your emails.
5. Follow sender guidelines released by Yahoo and Google
The email sender guidelines issued by Yahoo and Google for email marketers sending bulk emails are effective from February 2024. These guidelines focus on three aspects - email authentication, spam complaints, and the ability to unsubscribe from email lists.
6. Use double opt-ins
A double opt-in is when a user subscribes to your emails, and an email is sent to the user to verify the subscription. The user is added to the email list only when he clicks on the link and verifies the subscription in the email. This process ensures that your email list has the email addresses of genuinely interested people.
Conclusion
Now that you know what a sender score is and how it impacts your email deliverability, it is time to act upon it. Follow the email-sending guidelines and work on the factors affecting your sender score to increase the likelihood of your emails reaching the inboxes of your audience.
Remember, improving your sender score will take time but gradual efforts will show long-lasting results. With the right strategies, you can not only improve your sender reputation but also ensure that your audience is receiving content that they genuinely like, which is far more important and ethical nonetheless.
