How to Restore Sender Reputation?

Both salespeople and marketers rely on email to get the word out about the product or service they represent.

They need to get those emails to land in the inboxes of the people who fit their ideal customer profile (ICP).

One of the ways to make sure this happens? Ensure that your email address has a stellar senders’ reputation.

In this blog, we’ll go over the senders’ reputation, why it is important, and how to fix it when needed.

Read on!

Sender reputation is a measure of the trustworthiness and reliability of an organization or individual who sends emails based on various factors such as the quality and relevance of the emails they send, the volume and frequency of emails, and the level of recipient engagement.

Why should you care?

Well, if your sender reputation is bad, your emails might end up in the spam folder or not even get delivered at all. ISPs and ESPs judge your rep based on things like spam complaints, email bounce rates, and how often people open and click your emails.

To keep your rep in good standing, just make sure you follow email best practices: get permission to send, make it easy to unsubscribe, and send interesting content people actually want to open.

Do you like sending emails that never get read?

Neither do we!

That's why having a good sender reputation is so dang important. See, internet and email service providers use fancy algorithms to determine whether your emails make it into someone's inbox or get sent straight to spam. And trust us, you don't want to end up in spam.

So, what goes into this reputation score, you ask?

It's all based on your sending history, content quality, recipient engagement, and complaint rates. Basically, if you send excellent, relevant content that people engage with and don't complain about, you're golden. But your IP reputation will suffer if you're being spammy and annoying.

Why should you care about this?

Well, having a positive sender reputation means your emails are more likely to reach people and get them to take action. This means higher engagement rates, more conversions, and happier customers all around. On the other hand, a bad reputation can lead to blocked emails, fewer clicks, and potentially significant damage to your brand image. Yikes.

Long story short, if you want to ensure your emails get read (and not just deleted), it's time to focus on your sender's reputation.

Your audience - and your bottom line - will thank you.

The first step is to ensure your email is authenticated via DNS settings.

We’ve written extensively about SPF, DKIM, and DMARC as necessary to authenticate your email address on the blog already.

The reality is that without at least one of these methods, your email address and domain will always be viewed as suspicious by other ISPs and will never make it to your prospect. Your copy can be exceptional, but without these technical details out of the way, useless.

The best authentication is to ensure all three options are in use, but at least one will significantly affect your email deliverability and sender reputation.

We mentioned it previously, but having an additional email address in a domain or more than one domain is incredibly useful.

Having a dedicated domain and email address specifically for sending out email campaigns, newsletters, or cold outreach is a very effective way to avoid lowering your senders’ reputation and the spam folder. Also, consider a dedicated IP.

Your output will be consistent and, if your reputation is ever lowered, you can utilize another address while improving your main one. You can even create email chains between different addresses to seed your reputation for the better.

You should always revise all email content.

It’s easy to forget, for example, that signatures often have images or links in them, both things you want to avoid when it comes to cold emailing a prospect list.

Or that certain words are automatically considered to be spam.

And while your boss may want to include a white paper or study as an attachment in your outreach, you need to help them understand this will only damage your sender reputation and send you straight to spam.

A concise email with just enough personalization, demonstrating awareness of the prospect's pain points, is the way to go.

Keep your copy clean, and you’ll land in the right place.

Keeping email volume is consistent, but it's time to slow down or pause if you’re constantly hitting the spam box. This is typically because ISPs can tell you are sending out many emails at once but not receiving as many replies.

This identifies you to them as a spammer, even if that is not what you are doing.

Slow down to 30 a day or pause sequences altogether while working on fixing your senders’ reputation, either via seeding or a warm-up tool.

One of the easiest ways to fix your senders’ reputation is to use a warm-up tool such as Unfiltered.

Unfiltered creates email conversations to make your email look busy and reputable. It automates the creation of engagement with the email address you use for outreach, helping make it credible to other ISP spam filters.

After all, if your email sends and receives responses, it is less likely to be a spammer simply sending out mass emails with malware or other malicious purposes.

And you are not a spammer, so warming up your email is absolutely vital when fixing sender reputation.

Senders’ reputation is important in landing your email in your prospect’s inbox.

Whether you’re sending out cold outreach, newsletters or campaigns, if your address's reputation is not good, you will not see success.

To ensure your reputation is good, make sure to test it constantly. And if you need to fix it, follow the steps outlined above.