Maintaining email reputation¶
Your reputation as a sender is crucial for the deliverability of your emails. Maintaining a strong email reputation is easier when your email follows these guidelines:
Send emails that are relevant and correctly formatted
- Wanted emails (clear opt-in during the sign-up process)
- Relevant emails have content that is interesting and helpful to the reader
- Correctly formatted HTML prevents filters flagging the email and users
will complain
- Review your email templates to ensure they are formatted well
- Review sample content
- Avoid:
- All capital letters, special characters, and excessive punctuation.
- Overusing terms such as exclusive, urgent, one-time only, free, cheap, pre-approved, $$$, and 100%
- Red fonts or other colors that are non-accessible
- Subject line:
- Keep it short (<72 characters)
- Offer value and create a sense of urgency
- Avoid:
- Review your email settings
- Is the
from
header clearly you? - Is the
reply-to
configured correctly?
- Is the
- Use a testing service such as Mail Tester to learn how your email rates against various important metrics.
List integrity is everything
- How you build your list is critically important
- Bad contact lists lead to increased bounce rates and spam complaints. These harm email reputation.
- List hygiene: where you build your list and how well and often you update
your list
- If Contacts are not reading your emails after multiple sends or extended periods of time, it makes sense to remove them from your lists. One spam trap is a recycled spam trap. These consist of email addresses which were valid in the past, but were abandoned and picked up by mailbox providers to detect senders with poor email list hygiene who are not removing Contacts who are no longer engaged with their content.
- A typo spam trap is also something to consider while cleaning your list. These are email addresses which contain spelling or other typographical errors and are indicative of poor address collection practices such as no double opt-in, sloppy data entry, or no address validation.
Important
You should not use Campaign Studio to purge your list for hard/soft bounces and inactivity. This damages email reputation and may result in suspension of your Campaign Studio instance.
- How you build your list is critically important
No wild swings in email volume
- Regardless of the amount, ISPs like consistent volume each week or month.
- Swings in volume hurts deliverability, and seems suspicious to the ISP. Planning email campaigns and cadences in a calendar help manage volume per week or month (for ISPs) and send frequency (for recipients.)
Few spam complaints
- If email recipients complain to ISPs or mark your email as
junk
orspam
, ISPs can and will block your sender domain. - Keep the complaint rate below 0.1% of emails sent.
- Evaluate your content (subject line, email body copy, images), your list, and your send frequency, and gauge the overall risk if even 1 in 1,000 recipients complains about your email.
- If email recipients complain to ISPs or mark your email as
Avoid spam traps or honeypots
- A pristine spam trap is an email address created by the ISP for the sole purpose of catching spammers. When a company sends to such an address, it tells the ISP that they’re engaging in illegal email address harvesting, or their practices for list hygiene are too weak.
- Having even one of these on your email list causes instant and deep damage to your email reputation and deliverability.
Low bounce rates
- If your bounce rate is at 2.0% or greater, it tells the ISP your subscribers are not engaged or you have poor list hygiene. - Bounce Management tips from Campaign Studio.
Zero blocked list appearances
Some ISPs block a sender domain if it appears on even one of the top blocked lists: Spamhaus, Barracuda, Invalument, and Spamcop
Having a strong sending reputation is the only way to help convince administrators to remove your IPs from their list.
Campaign Studio uses a best-of-breed ESP (SparkPost), which maintains the relationship with the ISPs. This also means if one of our customers is getting too many complaints, hard bounces or includes a spam trap address, then SparkPost makes it harder for that company to get their marketing emails delivered.
For more information on best practices for email delivery, contact your Customer Success Manager.