What’s Your Email Sender Score?

Great webinar by Tom Sather, director of professional services at Return Path, “Building Reputation and Spurring Email Engagement in the Age of Social and Mobile.”

Tom providing some excellent insights for someone for which email is just one of many tools used to reach, and engage in a dialogue with, customers and prospects.

While new media are creating new ways to interact with customers and prospects, email continues to be a primary communications channel.  As such it’s critical to ensure you are still following best practices to get the most from this channel.

According to Mr. Sather:

• 20% of legitimate email routinely goes undelivered
• 3.5% ends up in the junk or bulk mail folder
• 16.3% never makes it to the inbox of the recipient

Why?

• 90% of all email sent is spam and ISPs and email providers are filtering email to reduce the amount of spam that reaches inboxes.

ISPs use your “sender reputation” to make filtering decisions.  If you have a poor “sender reputation” your email will get flagged as spam and will not be delivered to the recipient.

• 77% of all deliverability is a function of “sender reputation” and it takes a fair amount of time to build your reputation as a legitimate “sender.”

Here are six things that affect your reputation:

1. Complaints — opt-outs, flagged as spam, filed as “junk” — the results are known by ISPs and email providers and will affect your reputation as a sender
2. List hygiene — are you removing “hard bounces” from your mailing lists, are you emailing “spam traps, are you buying email lists, are you mailing frequently enough — all of these can affect you reputation positively or negatively
3. Infrastructure — are you using a legitimate email platform that follows CANSPAM practices versus mass mailing from Outlook?
4. IP Permanence — how long have you been mailing from your IP address, 97% of dynamic IPs are sending spam, there are more than 100,000 dynamic IP addresses
5. Message quality — do you have legitimate links and content in your email?
6. Subscriber engagement — how do subscribers interact with your emails, ISPs and email providers are working to help the recipients

Monitor your reputation at http://www.senderscore.org.  The higher your sender score, the higher your IPR (inbox placement rate).  A sender score of 91 to 100 will result in an IPR of 88%.

What’s your sender score?