Understanding sender reputation

You will learn

Learn about email sender reputation, and why it is an important concept to understand for good deliverability. Maintaining a positive sender reputation is essential to maximize your emails’ likelihood of being successfully delivered.

What is sender reputation

Sender reputation refers to the trustworthiness of your brand as an email sender. Inbox providers determine your sender reputation based on multiple differently weighted factors, and consider this when sorting emails in a customer’s inbox. Senders with a positive sender reputation are more likely to have their emails delivered into customers’ primary inbox, while senders with a poor sender reputation are likely to see their emails placed into spam or worse, not delivered at all. 

Any domain (e.g., From Address domain, branded sending domain, click tracking domain, etc. ) and IP address you use for your email marketing has its own reputation that inbox providers consider when determining your overall sender reputation. It is important to maintain a good sender reputation on your domains and IP address to have strong email deliverability. 

What influences your sender reputation

There are a number of factors that can influence your sender reputation. These include:

1. Who you send to and how they engage
   What your recipients do with email sent by your brand has the strongest impact on sender reputation. Engagement is the key to the inbox. Your database needs to be full of legitimate recipients who opted in (this will reduce negative engagements such as spam reports or unsubscribes), but also clean of unengaged recipients; otherwise, you risk hurting your deliverability performance and sender reputation. 
2. Your sending habits
   The frequency and volume with which you send can impact your sender reputation. Inbox providers monitor for spikes in volume abnormal to regular cadence. Additionally, sending too many emails in a short period of time can overwhelm customers and lead to spam complaints, while sending too few emails can result in lower engagement and a weakened reputation. You should create a sending schedule based on email engagement to achieve strong open rates and maintain a positive relationship with your subscribers.
3. The content of your email
   Inbox providers use spam filters to review your emails’ content and determine whether or not your emails reach the inbox. While it’s possible to observe trends in spam filter behavior, spam filters are designed so that they are difficult to evade and it is important to follow best practices to avoid them.
4. Your sending infrastructure
   The configuration of your sending infrastructure can impact how your sends are delivered and received by your customers. Inbox providers consider the sending reputation of both your sending domain and IP address when determining how to sort your emails. Implementing email authentication protocols can also protect your sender reputation by preventing spoofing and verifying your identity to inbox providers. 

For more information on email deliverability best practices to help prevent issues in these areas, see our guide on understanding email deliverability.

Common issues that negatively impact sender reputation

Some common issues that negatively affect your sender reputation are:

• High bounce rates
  Bounce rate is a measurement of how often your emails bounce. A bounce occurs when an email is either not successfully delivered or is rejected by a recipient's inbox provider (like Gmail or Yahoo).
• High spam complaint rates
  Spam complaint rate measures how often subscribers mark your emails as spam.
• High unsubscribe rates 
  Your unsubscribe rate measures how often subscribers opt-out of receiving your email marketing. An unsubscribe occurs when a profile clicks your unsubscribe link or adjusts their consent in your subscribe and manage preferences pages. 
• Low engagement rates
  Engagement refers to how people are interacting with your emails after they receive them, and it is important to maintain high engagement rates for good deliverability. 
• Poor data integrity and list health
  List health refers to the quality of the profiles you have on your lists. It is important to have engaged profiles on the lists and segments you send to in order to maintain good deliverability. 
  

It is important to monitor these rates to mitigate deliverability problems and quickly address any issues that impact your sender reputation. If you are seeing these issues with your sends, you should take action to repair your sender reputation. 

Additional resources

• Understanding email deliverability 
• Troubleshooting decreasing KPIs