Importance of Reputation for Reaching the Inbox

We primarily consider reputation before creating an interaction. When we need to choose which restaurant we should eat in or which landmarks we should visit, reviews play an important role in our choices. By the same token, mailbox providers evaluate the reputation of future senders to detect whether they will accept the messages in their mailboxes.

Why does reputation play such an important role?

The responsibility of a mailbox provider is to create a quality email experience and keep the users on their platforms by doing so. To do so, they deliver the correct messages and keep the unsuitable ones away. They use reputation calculations to determine whether they should put the messages into their inbox or evaluate them as spam.

What does influence the sender’s reputation?

There are many different aspects that need to be considered to evaluate reputation. Thus, this leads providers to create their own formulas, which are not shared publicly. Whereas the formulas differ a little, they all consider the same aspects, such as complaints, spam traps, or blacklists.

How does reputation affect deliverability?

We searched at the correlation between reputation and deliverability in our latest study, the 2022 Sender Score Benchmark. To do so, we used our own reputation calculating algorithm, Sender Score.

A Sender Score is a numerical score between 0 and 100, and it basically acts like a credit score. A higher score means a higher reputation. It uses similar criteria used by mailbox providers and informs the senders about their own reputation. The graph below displays the relation between Sender Score reputation and deliverability at AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft. The parallelism between reputation and deliverability is obvious.

How can you keep and enhance your reputation?

Spammy behavior will diminish the reputation you have and increase the chance of being classified as spam. In order not to undergo that, you need to:

• Watch your reputation

Your reputation constantly changes because of the messages you send. Because of that, it is ultimately important to spot and analyze the elements that cause the declines in your graph immediately. To do so, you need to check your reputation score for free at senderscore.org and analyze whether it will be successful or not before you start a new campaign.

• Maintain the cleanliness of your list

Spam traps, unknown users, and unengaged subscribers can affect your email program badly. To prevent that, you need to use a email list cleaning service to check whether the emails in your list belong to an active person or not. Alternatively, you can remove the users that are not interested in your email program by hand. This will help you to maintain your reputation.

• Sign up for feedback loops

Complaints can badly affect your reputation. By signing up for feedback loops, you can easily address the complaints—each mailbox provider service with its own feedback loop services. You can check which one is the most suitable for you with the help of the instructions we create in our post, What is a Feedback Loop.

• Identify the source of complaints

The process starts with reacting to the complaints, but it won’t be sufficient unless you discover the reasons behind them. By identifying the source of the issue, you can make the necessary adjustments to prevent subscriber dissatisfaction.

• Blacklist checking

Mailbox providers offer blacklisting options to their users, so you need to know if you are blacklisted or not. By doing this, you need to check your IP address on a blacklist lookup regularly.