I feel like I should do a bit of a David Attenborough on this one … “Here we are in the depths of the email jungle looking for the elusive sender reputation. This often misunderstood creature is rarely seen and its behaviour is still a mystery to many”.
What is sender reputation?
Ok, let’s start with what it is. Sender reputation is the way receiving email providers assess the trustworthiness of a sender using signals such as sending history, complaints, authentication and delivery failures. Some services publish a numerical score, but there is no single universal score out of 100 that all email providers use.
Whether you like it or not, the history of your sending domain and infrastructure can influence how your emails are treated. The key is to establish a good reputation through consistent, legitimate sending.
How can you check your sender reputation?
You can start with services such as Sender Score, but remember that a third-party score is only one view of the picture. Gmail, Microsoft and other receiving providers make their own filtering decisions, using signals that aren’t all public. If you send enough mail to qualify, Google Postmaster Tools can provide useful information about parts of your Gmail sending performance. Your email platform should also help you see bounces and complaints. One number on its own will never tell the whole story.
Beyond any score, look at the practical evidence. Are your messages being accepted? Are bounce and complaint rates under control? Are your authentication checks passing? Are people receiving the emails they expected? Good answers there are the best sign your reputation is healthy.
What can damage it?
Now for the bit that surprises people. Your sender reputation is not just affected if people complain about emails they didn’t want. Sending to an email address that is no longer valid, failing to keep your DNS authentication records in order, ignoring unsubscribe requests and repeatedly sending unwanted messages can all cause problems. Most of these are also common reasons why emails land in spam.
Yes… it is a jungle out there!
A few warning signs are worth paying attention to. Perhaps a campaign that normally performs well suddenly has a lot of rejected addresses. Perhaps customers start saying they found your message in spam, or that it never arrived at all. Maybe complaints increase after you upload an old contact list. None of those things automatically proves your reputation is the problem, but they are good reasons to investigate before sending the next big campaign.
Four rules for protecting your sender reputation
- Make sure that your DNS records are correct and employ best practice.
- Keep your email lists clean and up to date. Get rid of email addresses that are no longer valid. A dirty contact list costs more than you might think.
- Make sure that you do unsubscribe people who have requested it.
- Write like a real business talking to people who want to hear from you.
Why not just “avoid spam words”? Because there’s no magic list of words that decides whether a message reaches the inbox. Email providers look at a much wider range of signals, including whether recipients actually want your messages and how you send them.
I’d add one more practical point: don’t wait until you have a problem to check your sending setup. Authentication records help receiving systems confirm your mail is genuine, and I’ve explained how SPF, DKIM and DMARC work separately. Authentication won’t magically make an unwanted email welcome, but getting it wrong can make a difficult job even harder.
Can a damaged reputation recover?
What happens if your sender reputation gets bad? Emails may stop reaching inboxes and, in more serious cases, may be rejected by the recipient’s server. In short… not good!
We had one client come to us asking for help as someone had used an old list through their internal email system, and totally trashed their sender reputation, to the point where people just stopped getting their emails. It took them over a month for their domain to get back to normal. Needless to say they use us for sending to lists from that point and we work with them to keep their sender reputation high.
If your reputation has taken a knock, sending even more email to the same questionable list is not the answer. Stop and work out what changed. Remove invalid addresses, deal with complaints, check your authentication and restart carefully with people who genuinely expect to hear from you, much as you would when warming up a new email domain. And no, a change of email platform alone won’t fix an unhealthy list. Recovery can take time, and there is no magic switch that turns trust back on overnight. I wish there were. It would make life a lot easier for everyone.
Cue my best David Attenborough once more: “Having uncovered the behaviours of the sender reputation, we Homo sapiens are better positioned to understand how to live with it and, with careful application, live side by side… it’s not too late.” Sorry, I couldn’t resist. I’m a huge David Attenborough fan!