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Oct 1, 2021 | 5 min read
Black Friday is just around the corner, and retailers are sending out emails that advise customers to shop early. But out-of-stocks and supply chain woes might not be the biggest worries during the busiest email season of the year.
Your sender reputation can determine whether your email goes to the inbox or the spam folder – or gets blocked outright. Do you know whether ISPs see you as a reputable sender whose recipients want your emails or a potential threat?
You can’t run a high-quality email program with a low-quality list or sketchy sending behavior. If your emails go mostly to spam or lie unopened in inactive inboxes, you’ll lose potential sales and top-of-mind engagement. Even worse, it could send your deliverability into a downward spiral.
You probably have some idea about your ability to reach inboxes if you have been paying attention to delivery reports. If you’re seeing less than 90% inbox delivery (not just message acceptance), you will need to act immediately before you begin ramping up email volume and frequency for the holidays.
Repairing your sender reputation takes time – you can’t fix it with a single change. But everything you do now to clean up your list and manage sending behavior will help. Use this time now to tune up subscriber acquisition, take steps to block or filter out unwanted addresses and pay attention to the inactive and nonresponding addresses on your list. Even if you have good deliverability, you should do a check-up now to make sure your email lists and sending practices are in their best shape ever.
If you want to scan your list quickly for problem addresses, use our no-obligation Free List Check service. It will reveal whether your list has issues with invalid addresses, suspected spam traps and forced sign-ups.
Retail analysts predict that the holiday shopping season will begin even earlier this year as concerns about supply issues will push consumers to head to stores or place orders quickly. This is good news because it gives you more opportunities to improve your sender reputation. You even have time to flag, correct and validate addresses on your full list and start the season with a sparkling clean list. You also can check all of your acquisition sources to find and close off the ones that deliver mostly lower-quality addresses.
If you rely on the open rate to measure customer engagement, your job just got harder. A new feature in Apple’s iOS 15 operating system now automatically fetches email content, so detecting whether a subscriber actually opened and read an email will be even less reliable. Learn more and get tactics you can use now to prepare your data in this FreshAddress/DMi Partners video, Preparing for the Holiday Season Under iOS 15 Privacy Rules.
It’s a good reminder that open rates have always been a relatively unreliable measure of customer engagement. Even before iOS 15 came along, many opens went undetected because the tracking pixel in the email was blocked.
Also, lack of email activity doesn’t always equal lack of brand interest. The “nudge effect” of seeing your brand name and subject line in the inbox can prompt customers to go right to your website. It also can keep your brand name top of mind until they’re ready to buy.
Clicks and conversions have been beer measures of customer engagement. But you also can check website activity before and after you send an email campaign and look for corresponding spikes in visits and activity.
Sender reputation: Sender reputation refers to the reputation of your email sending IP address that signals to email inbox providers whether or not you’re a spammer. It’s based on factors such as the content quality, quality of contacts, and engagement levels of previous emails sent from your IP address.
Sender Sore: Email sender score like a credit score assigned to your IP by private deliverability services. It’s measured on a scale of 1 to 100 and reflects the reputation of your IP address, which is a factor in determining whether or not you’re filtered out as a spammer. You can check yours for free here.
Here’s how Gmail’s spam filter defines and differentiates email senders:
You can’t fix your sender reputation or solve deliverability problems overnight. But the sooner you begin, the sooner you will see results. These seven tips will help you get started: