Best practices for a positive email sender reputation
Picture this scenario: A company develops a new email marketing campaign. Everything about it seems compelling, and it’s certain that customers will respond. But when the emails are sent, nothing happens. Was it the subject line, the offer or some other factor?
When the dust settled, it turned out the company never realized that it had a poor sender reputation. That means the email campaign was doomed before the company ever hit “send.”
A positive email sender reputation is the ticket to hitting the customer’s inbox. But many businesses don’t realize that email sender reputation exists or that it can significantly contribute to successful delivery of their communications.
Email providers such as Gmail or Hotmail are extremely protective of their customers. And they have good reason. If you were to receive excessive spam in your inbox, who would get all the blame? The email provider. So it’s critical for any email provider to monitor all email senders and ensure that they are deploying commercial or administrative email and not spam.
To help you maintain positive sender reputation, here are four best practices that Jacobs & Clevenger strongly recommends.
Keep your list clean. Eliminate email addresses that hard bounce, have not been actively opening, or have not been clicking your emails. Also, only use lists that you had a hand in developing and maintaining, or you can authenticate.
Encourage engagement. Remember that email providers monitor engagement when evaluating a sender. Alluring subject lines and a clear, concise call to action will encourage engagement and help promote positive email reputation.
Don’t use “spam trigger” words. An email provider can recognize if your email is filtered or marked as spam. Don’t confuse your consumers or put your reputation at risk by using words that can trigger a spam filter. (Some common examples include dollar signs as a stand-alone word, the word “free” and excess punctuation.)
Monitor for blacklists. No company wants to be banned from sending email. The good news is you can be removed from a blacklist and rebuild your reputation. The key is to carefully monitor blacklists so you can immediately rectify an incident that caused you to be rejected by an email provider.
The bottom line is that you need to dedicate effort, time and budget to developing and sending emails. In order to protect your return on that investment, it is crucial to maintain a positive sender reputation with email providers.
At Jacobs & Clevenger, we send almost 10 million emails each year for our clients. That’s why we’re such strong advocates of quality control. Before we send any email campaign, it goes through a rigorous testing process. If you want to learn more about protecting your email sender reputation and avoiding the blacklist, please contact J&C.