5 Pieces of Advice on How to Restore the Sender’s Reputation
This is the guest post written by Donald Fomby.
With so many startups, firms and international companies utilizing email marketing as a means of raising brand awareness, some will inevitably become more welcome than others in inboxes across the globe. Whether you have an already developed email marketing strategy in place or are looking for ways to generate relevant leads by introducing it to your business model in the near future, the sender’s reputation of your campaigns should be taken into account.
According to 99 Firms, the average email open rate across all industries is just above 20%, while 43% of users will report the received email as spam if they don’t recognize their name or email address from previous subscriptions or opt-ins. This means that the longer you rely on email for your promotional and sales campaigns, the better your odds at low sender’s reputation may become over time.
However, there are ways to mitigate the growing dissatisfaction with your current approach to email marketing through careful retooling and reevaluation of your content strategy going forward. That being said, let’s dive into what makes the sender’s reputation so important as well as several practical pieces of advice on how to control your own brand’s email perception in the future.
What Determines a Sender’s Reputation?
We are all guilty of marking certain emails as spam in our Inbox tabs from time to time. Whether it’s free giveaways, quick ways to make money online or exclusive, one-time offers (which repeat day after day), these emails are unwanted by most anyone out there.
While your own email campaign efforts may not have ill intentions or malice behind them, the way you word your subject line, opening hook and subsequent text will determine whether or not your email is seen as spam or not. When all is said and done, a sender’s reputation is measured by two distinct factors:
IP address reputation – Indicates how much users want or don’t want to see content from that particular IP address.
Content quality reputation – Indicates how relevant, original and thought-out the contents of your email are.
The combination of these two elements will put two and two together in the email system’s algorithm and determine whether or not your email has the necessary sender’s reputation needed to land into a user’s Inbox folder.
Utilizing tools such as EasyMail7 will allow you to avoid being registered as a spam sender and help facilitate successful email campaigns due to its intuitive marketing system. Once you have a handle on your sender’s reputation and rethink your approach to email marketing, your brand will enjoy several benefits going forward:
- Long-term building of brand credibility and consumer trust
- Access to concrete email performance metrics
- Higher website traffic and engagement rates
- Higher conversion and sales rates
Advice on How to Restore Your Sender’s Reputation
1. Work on your campaign consistency.
The secret to improving your sender’s reputation lies in building consistency throughout your email activities. This doesn’t mean you should frequently contact your mailing list or increase the amount of concurrent campaigns.
Instead, email content’s consistency revolves around copywriting, professional writing etiquette and brand representation. Try to use more branded content elements in your emails, including a footer element with your contact information and/or business’s visual elements to add credibility to your emails.
Remember – the sender’s reputation is determined by how frequently and in what ways people interact with your emails. If you send too many emails, rely on cheap, alarmist calls to action (such as ACT NOW AND SAVE 10%!), you will likely be marked as spam more often than not.
2. Audit your mailing lists.
Even though individual recipients may have opted into receiving your emails months or years ago, their opinions and decisions may have changed over time. Just because people have decided to not open your emails or to report them as spam doesn’t mean your sender’s reputation should suffer for it.
In order to amend for that, you should audit your email lists via a Realtime Email Analytics tool before any major campaign takes place. Some of the elements which should be taken into consideration prior to contacting your mailing lists with new content include:
- Your content’s engagement rates
- Email print and forward rates
- Recipient’s email content engagement client
Once your content is sent to the mailing list, the tool can be used to track its performance and determine whether there are bottlenecks present in the form of mass spam reports or a lack of engagement on your recipients’ part. This will help you determine your sender’s reputation more clearly and allow for further refinement of your email strategy in the future.
3. Repurpose less, personalize more.
While it may be easier to simply send repurposed email content to your mailing list and only change minor details from campaign to campaign, remember that content reputation is a major factor in your sender’s reputation. Repurposed email generally spells “spam” in the eyes of recipients, which will have a huge impact on your email marketing’s performance if handled without care.
This means that you should pay close attention to the way you word sales pitches, subject lines, as well as the general copy of your email. The best way to approach content marketing via email is to personalize your approach as best as you can to facilitate a level of customers’ identification with your brand.
Given that you are relying on mailing lists for your email marketing, you should use first or last names for your leads and address them as such throughout the email. That way, each person will have a better reason to open, read and engage with your email, thus improving your sender’s reputation in doing so.
4. Keep an eye out for opt-outs.
As we’ve mentioned previously, individuals who are simply “done” with your brand may signal their decision to stop receiving your emails by marking you as spam and calling it a day. While this may be beneficial for them, it will drop your sender’s reputation for no good reason.
A great way to preemptively clear out your mailing lists from time to time is to use an Email Verifier tool designed to filter relevant addresses from irrelevant, broken or outdated leads. Relying on such a tool in your email marketing strategy will allow you to quickly scrub your mailing lists from addresses which will negatively impact your reputation through simple filtering and scanning methods.
Doing so will greatly increase the effectiveness of your campaigns and leave you with prospective email leads to work with rather than to hope for the best and send your content to every contact on the list without any vetting.
5. Make email interaction straightforward.
Lastly, the best way to ensure that your sender’s reputation stays optimal is to ensure that emails are engaged the way you intend them to be. This can be done in several ways, most commonly by clearly telegraphing what the recipient should do about the content they’ve just read.
For example, if your email’s intention is to have consumers purchase one of your products at a discount, the link to do so should be clearly marked and pointed toward in the email. Emails with long-form text, lack of clear direction or any visual content which can illustrate the point of your email will quickly find itself in the Spam or Trash folders.
Likewise, calls to action followed by hyperlinks, discount codes, testimonials and other sales incentives present in the email will also boost your engagement rates beyond opening the email. That way, your emails will not only be opened and read but also acted on, raising your sender’s reputation as well as conversion and revenue rates.
Playing the long game (Conclusion)
Once you have restored your sender’s reputation, the next item on your agenda should be to maintain it at optimal levels in the indefinite future. As you have been able to determine its faults and bottlenecks once, you should keep an eye out for potential bumps and problems in your email marketing strategy at scheduled intervals. By opting for an Email Marketing Bundle you will be able to stay ahead of the curve on your mailing lists, performance analysis and mail workflow automation at all times.