Sender reputation
Your sender reputation determines your trustworthiness on the internet. It determines how email clients view your IP adress, which influences their decision to accept or reject your email. There are several factors which influence your reputation, which is why it is important to manage your database effectively, send good content and keep your users engaged. We will now describe some factors and give some tips on improving your reputation.
Influencing factors
Identification
It is important to always identify yourself when sending your emails. There are a lot of people out there who have malicious intentions and might try to scam people by pretending they are someone they are not. Several safety mechanisms have been developed over the years to protect the internet from these malicious intentions, but this also means that you have to put some extra work into proving you are really the one sending email. SMTPeter's sender domains are a great way of setting up complicated things like SPF, DKIM and DMARC. After you set up a sender domain you can focus on your business, while we take care of your messages.
Database
Your database (probably) contains a lot of information. Your profile data often comes from the users themselves, but not all users provide useful and correct information. If an email bounces or is marked as spam this is bad for your reputation. Therefore it is important to manage your database well.
Users should always be able to unsubscribe. Not only is it required by law, but annoyed recipients might report your email as spam otherwise, which is bad for your reputation. If you add the link you can also determine how you will handle the unsubscribe in your database.
Bounce handling is also very important. If you have misspelled or non-existing email adresses you may receive bounces from them. Bounces are bad for your reputation, therefore it is best to remove email adresses that repeatedly generate errors and bounces.
A double opt-in is also an effective way to ensure the validity of the adress and the desire of the profile to receive your emails. When using a double opt-in you send new subscribers a link, which they first have to click to confirm that they really want to receive your email. They should not receive any mails other than the confirmation mail from you until they have confirmed their email adress.
Email content
Every email receives a spam score, which is also important to your reputation. Tips to lower your spam score include adding a text version, avoiding 'spammy' words and keeping your HTML clean. Email clients can also detect an abnormal ratio of pictures to text and hyperlinks that don't go to the URL they display.
You also want to engage your users to prevent them from marking the email as spam. Be sure to make every email interesting and relevant.
