Every business sends emails to its customers. The most critical of these are transactional emails such as OTP, verification and password-reset emails. If they don’t reach their recipients, your email sender reputation could be to blame. This article explains what an email reputation is and ways of improving it.
Why is an email sender reputation important?
Email sender reputations play a vital role in the deliverability of emails. A bad email sender reputation can hinder the company’s abilities to send their marketing messages or communications. There are several ways to enhance your email sender reputation. For instance, always use double opt-in for subscriptions, provide clear opt out instructions, do not send emails too frequently, and more. One should consider using a monitoring service which will send alerts if there is a problem with your account enabling prompt action before it gets too far.
How a positive email sender reputation can change your life:
Those who have ever sent transactional emails understand that there are several aspects which must be considered for better email delivery. Although transactional emails are legitimate by themselves, however their consideration goes beyond just the legit concern of sending these types of messages. For example, one needs to think about the email sender reputation because this is a technical consideration.
Why should you care about this reputation? The main reason behind this is preventing your messages from being seen as spam or junk so that they might be completely ignored or not landed in someone’s inbox at all.
Transactional emails have significant information that customers are eagerly waiting, therefore if you do not deliver these emails instantly it can have a great effect on your brand and the user experience. Thus, it is essential to focus on those things which influence the email sender reputation score. By neglecting these aspects, you will not just heavily affect your ROI but also add to your stressors and work burden.
Factors Affecting Email Conveyer Reputation
At present, we’ve established the significance of determining factors that make email sender reputation important and make sure your mails reach the recipients’ inboxes. Thus, we will review four crucial elements that might influence an IP rating.
- Volume of transmission
- Regularity in dispatching
- Users’ contribution, grievances, and opting-out
- Rate of bounce-back messages and undelivered claims
But don’t worry, as most of them are quite easily correctable. There are degrees of errors that may occur which can take longer or shorter but can still be corrected; and this is what we will discuss next.
How do I make my email sender reputation better?
At this point you should expect us to guide you on improving your email sender reputation through domain authentication and creating a professional email address among others. You shall ensure that your customers receive their important transactional messages in time by observing the measures discussed below.
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Authenticating Your Domain (SPF, DKIM, DMARC):
The main reason your e-mails may not arrive in the inboxes of recipients is due to incorrect configuration of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. It should be fixed knowing only a little bit about the technology used. However, we will just discuss its fundamentals here.
Notable records include SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
These are methods used for email authentication which confirm to ISPs and mail providers that an e-mail sender is authorized to send an email from a particular domain. They work as a sort of validation on your e-mail sending server.
- SPF stands for Senders Policy Framework
- DKIM means Domain Keys Identified Mail
- DMARC is short for Domain based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance
What is the process for authenticating your domain?
There are certain guidelines to adhere to when setting up SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, as shown below:
- Configure SPF record for your domain
- Configure DKIM records for your domain
- Readiness of mailbox to receive reports
- Login details on domain hosting
- Verify whether there is an existing DMARC record
- Altering DMARC Policy
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Do send emails to the relevant ones only. Email spamming is not allowed :
One thing that you need to remember is that you have to avoid sending out emails to anyone who does not exist, and this is as a result of modern compliance regulations. What this means is that one must be a good digital citizen and make sure they are sending it to valid addresses only and that the sender has adhered to all the compliance guidelines.
By employing double opt-in methods, you can verify your recipient’s address easily and without stress. It requires someone to agree twice before getting an email from you. An initial mail containing clicking buttons may be sent to them while they are still inquiring about their validity on your site, before redirecting them using a link given in a body message itself for the submission or checking box confirmation about receiving future messages from the sender.
If you’re also counter parting in case marketing emails must be sent separately from transaction-based ones, then these tips might help:
Keeping Your Email List Clean
A clean mailing list that is compliant with all regulations must be maintained all the time. For this purpose, you should abide by the guidelines below:
- Keep track of the bounce and spam rates
- Allow double opt-in
- Regular list hygiene using Suppression list and other features
- Utilize a credible email service provider (ESP). Emailidea Mail provides a safe, encrypted, privacy-protected and ad-free email service that has been specifically designed to host business email
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Refrain from using subject lines that look like spam
The subject line also influences the first impression of a user. It is pointless to enhance the technical aspects of email sender reputation if the contents in your emails do not urge them to open them. To prevent this, it is important to know how to write an effective email as well as when to send one. For legitimate transactional emails, it is best to get straight to the point. At the same time, spam filters are also watching for the titles that sound like spam ones. Do not use all caps or catchphrases such as "Guess what we have in store for you!" Though you can always have some fun with subject lines, keep them brief and on-topic.
Conclusion
Email sender reputation is the score that is generated by ISPs and used by mailbox providers to determine whether an email is being sent from a trusted source. When the reputation of the organization is low, it is likely that the message will end up in spam/junk folder rather than inbox.
Following these simple guidelines will help to improve your organization’s sender reputation, in compliance with regulations and ensuring that mailboxes are fully authenticated.