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. If you are an email marketer or someone who sends promotional emails and doesn’t see the desired results, there are chances that your emails are being flagged as spam. One of the reasons behind this could be your sender score.
In this guide, you will learn what sender score is, ways to check your sender score, factors affecting it, and how you can improve it.
What is sender score?
A sender score 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.
Your sender score is determined by measuring the performance of your IP address and domain over several factors, such as spam complaints, bounce rates, engagement on your emails, etc. The score is primarily used by spam filtering systems and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to indicate the originality and overall reputation of the sender. A higher score will place your emails in the inbox of your recipient, whereas a lower score will land them in the spam folder.
Here is a simple way to understand how your sender score translates into your sender reputation and email deliverability:
| Sender Score Range | Sender Reputation | Email Deliverability |
|---|---|---|
| 80-100 | Excellent | Emails are very likely to be delivered successfully |
| 70-79 | Good | Emails are generally delivered, but there is some room for improvement |
| 50-69 | Fair | Some emails might be filtered or marked as spam |
| Below 50 | Poor | Many emails may end up in spam folders |
How to check your sender score
You can find your sender score by using dedicated online tools. Remember, the tools may give you different results. This is because these tools rely on different factors and algorithms to give you a sender score. You can check your score on each one of them and compare the results.
Sender Score
Senderscore.org is a free tool that lets you check your sender score by adding a few 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.
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.
A good score indicates that there are minimal harmful behaviours associated with your IP or domain, neutral means you are on a fair level, but a few of your emails are likely to hit spam folders, and poor means you have poor email deliverability.
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.
Reputation metrics
IP reputation and domain reputation are the two metrics influencing your sender score. The trustworthiness of your IP and domain are determined over time by observing your history of sending legitimate emails, email engagement rate, unsubscribe rate, and so on. Be mindful of the possibility of your IP or domain being blacklisted because if they are blocked, it will negatively impact your sender score.
Domain warmup levels
Warming up your domain means increasing your email frequency gradually. If your email frequency spikes overnight, it will negatively affect your sender score, as it is seen as an unusual activity.
Email engagement
The way your audience responds to your email also impacts your sender score. The metrics that impact your sender score are open rates, click rates, form submissions, etc. Higher engagement rates usually translate to a better sender score and vice versa.
Content quality
The quality of the content directly impacts your sender score. When your audience doesn’t like your email content, they lose interest in receiving your emails, and stop engaging with them, eventually flagging your mails as spam or unsubscribing from the mailing lists. In both cases, your sender score is likely to decrease.
Bounce rates
Bounce rates reflect the emails that did not reach your recipients. A high bounce rate affects your sender score negatively, indicating that you have an outdated email list filled with invalid email addresses.
Spam reports
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.
How is sender score related to IP or Domain Reputation?
IP reputation is directly linked to 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 has a bad sender reputation, it will affect the IP 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.
Just like IP reputation, sender score and domain reputation affect each other in a feedback 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 signaling to ISPs that emails from the domain are trustworthy. Similarly, a strong domain reputation immproves the sender score by ensuring that emails are less likely to be marked as spam.
| IP Reputation | Domain Reputation | Sender Score | Email Deliverability |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | High | High | Excellent email deliverability |
| High | Low | Moderate | Moderate sender score |
| Low | High | Poor | Poor sender score |
| Low | Low | Very Weak | Very weak sender score |
How to improve sender score
If you find that your emails are landing in spam and you have a poor sender score, here's how you can improve it.
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.
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 a feedback, taking a survey, and playing a game etc. within the email itself. When recipients get to interact with the mails you send, they are less likely to mark your emails as spam and it also increase engagement.
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Send emails consistently
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.
Manage your email list
Maintaining a clean and updated email list is one of the best ways to prevent a decline in your sender score. It includes removing inactive or invalid email addresses, segmenting your email list based on engagement, and so on. Here are some other things you can try:
- 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.
- Follow sender guidelines released by Yahoo and Google in 2024
The 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.
- 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 his 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 upon 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.
