As you saw in the last chapter, inbox providers aim to clear inboxes of anything that might irritate users. They will use all available signals to determine which messages are dangerous or irritating. These signals help to build reputation scores.
Reputation scores are compiled either directly by providers or by companies that specialize in combating spam. It’s essential to remember that each operator has their own way of calculating a sender’s reputation score.
Just like in real life, a bad reputation is hard to shake off, meaning that your past actions (good or bad) will continue to impact your present. It’s much easier to lose a good reputation than to build one.
Consider What Impacts Your Reputation
Reputation is calculated differently by each inbox provider and spam filter. Furthermore, several components make up a reputation:
According to the sender’s IP address, which is your email delivery server’s physical address.
Based on your domain names: whether this is the email address’s domain name, where your messages are being sent from, or other domain names within your emails (image hosting, links, etc.).
Your email fingerprint: spam filters now have ways to identify an email campaign’s fingerprint. They can recognize similar messages that have been sent from several different settings and monitor their reputation.
Universal Reputation Signals
Inbox providers pick up on signals and use them to work out whether a message is wanted or not. These signals can be divided into two main categories: universal, used by almost all spam filters and inbox providers, and behavioral (which we’ll look at shortly).
Spam Complaints
The worst signal of all!
When a contact marks a message as spam, the sender suffers significant deliverability consequences. If lots of recipients generate a spam complaint, these consequences can be disastrous.
Incorrect Addresses
Sending your emails to various incorrect addresses shows that you have a flawed data-cleansing system or that you’re using old email lists. It could result in a high bounce rate and a significant impact on your reputation.
Spamtraps
A spamtrap is an email address used by inbox providers or the anti-spam industry to trap spammers. These addresses can be created from scratch and disseminated online or be old email addresses abandoned by previous users. After several months of inactivity, inbox providers can recycle abandoned email addresses as spamtraps.
Behavioral Reputation Signals
Unlike the three universal signals you’ve just seen, all inbox providers don’t use behavioral signals. It may be because the service is not very sophisticated, they have no way of recording these signals, or (like in France) legislation does not allow you to look at what a user does in their mailboxes.
For inbox providers, it makes sense to use all possible signals, including behavioral, which include:
Opens
Deletes
Clicks
Flagging
Moves
Replies
Unsubscribes
To give you an example, if the majority of your contacts delete your emails without opening them, that signals that your messages are of no interest to anybody. It will impact your reputation.
The chart below shows the primary positive and negative factors on your email reputation.
Negative signals are in red, and positive ones in green. Universal signals are at the top, with behavioral signals at the bottom.
Calculate Your Reputation
As you’ve seen, you don’t just have one single reputation. You may even have several scores generated by a single operator. Therefore, there is not one single reputation score that will let you know where you stand. Though most email services and spam filters are pretty secretive about sender reputations, it is possible to get hold of reputation data from some of them:
Google Postmaster Tools - https://postmaster.google.com/: You can check your domain and IP reputations for Gmail.
Microsoft SNDS - https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/: Check the reputation of your IPs for Microsoft Outlook.com (Hotmail).
Sender Score - https://www.senderscore.org/: Your reputation scored out of 100 by Validity’s reputation measurement tool.
Build Your Reputation
We’ll discuss deliverability best practices in more detail later on. Just know that you can optimize deliverability by reducing your negative signals and increasing your positive ones.
If you look closely at the recap graphic above, you’ll see that this is more marketing than a technical challenge. Deliverability is based more on recipient satisfaction and engagement than your sending platform’s quality or technical configuration.
Let’s Recap!
Reputation aims to work out whether your contacts want to receive your emails.
Reputation sticks: your history follows you.
There are universal signals: spam complaints, bounces, frequency, spamtraps, etc.
Behavioral signals: opens, clicks, unsubscribes, replies, moves, etc.
To improve your reputation, you need to improve subscriber satisfaction.
Next chapter, we’ll take a look at how to monitor your deliverability and detect incidents.
