What is email sender reputation?
Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com’s Smart Email Marketing Guide
Your sender reputation is the single most influential external factor in whether or not your email is delivered. Just like your reputation as an individual, your reputation builds over time. Every email you send can affect that reputation positively or negatively. Every spam complaint, every list with anything more than a tiny percentage of undeliverable addresses, can detract from your sender reputation.
One of the difficulties with reputation services is that there’s no central reputation service where you can clear your name if you’ve made a mistake. There are many services, both open and proprietary. Most large anti-spam organizations (such as IronPort and BorderWare) have their own reputation services which their clients use. So risking a good reputation for quick payoff – perhaps by sending one really spammy email – can have far-reaching, even global affect on your ability to deliver emails!
This is an excellent way for preventing spammers from reaching addresses on the lists that they’ve purchased, stolen or randomly generated. Spammers develop a negative reputation very quickly, and need to keep hopping IP to continue delivering their spam (thus the proliferation of botnets).
There are some major problems with some reputation services though. The biggest is that most use the sender IP address to assign the reputation. But what happens if you’re sending emails from your shared hosting provider, and someone else on that server is sending spam? Well, you would be blocked, because the shared IP address has a bad reputation. Fortunately, ‘next generation’ reputation services are popping up, such as the BorderWare Security Network. These track reputation on a per-user and per-domain (for IP) basis, so it prevents you from being blocked because of someone else. Hopefully, for the sake of legitimate email marketers, other reputation services will follow suit!
So if there’s any advice I can give you to help you maintain a good reputation, it’s this: don’t spam! Don’t send email with subjects and copy that spam filters will flag. Don’t send a lot of unsolicited email, because people will report it as spam. Allow people to unsubscribe if they want to, as I already explained. And keep your lists clean! Anything other than a very low undeliverable rate can hamper your reputation.
Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com’s Smart Email Marketing Guide
