How many of your emails are reaching your customers’ inboxes? According to columnist Tom Sather, it may be fewer than you think.
When is the last time you cursed the amount of spam reaching your personal inbox? If you are using one of the major webmail providers (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, or Outlook.com), it’s likely been a very long time.
Over the years, email providers have gotten pretty sophisticated with their email filtering, moving away from filtering spam based on content rules and keywords, to looking at sending behaviors that correlate to spamming practices.
This filtering is referred to as reputation filtering. While less spam in the inbox is good news, the bad news is that permission-based marketers still struggle to reach the inbox, often because they’re running afoul of the same rules that spammers break.
What Makes Up A Reputation?
Reputation scores are assigned to every IP address, just like every person also has a credit score. If no email is being sent over an IP address, the reputation score is zero, which tells the email providers to treat new emails being sent from these IP addresses like a dog on a short leash (much like how people with no credit history are given small amounts of credit when first applying for credit).
Besides mailing history, email providers and spam filtering companies also look at subscriber complaints, how many non-existent addresses a sender is mailing to, how many decoy accounts or spam traps receive email from an IP address or domain, and many other factors.
Taken altogether, these signals provide a pretty good predictor if email is spam or not. Email marketers can see what their email reputation is by looking up their Sender Score. Sender Score is a proxy for one’s email reputation and indicates one’s potential to reach the inbox, or spam folder.
Why Reputation Matters In Email Marketing & How You Can Change Yours
