Managing Email Sender Reputation

Guidelines for maintaining a healthy sender reputation.

Maintaining a good sender reputation is very important in order to avoid spam boxes and blacklists. This means that you need to maintain a low email bounce rate, or it might impact your deliverability.

This article will explain the best practices of email distribution.  

Maintain List Hygiene

Follow the below steps to maintain a healthy contacts list for all campaigns:

• Remove any addresses that have hard bounced immediately (e.g. invalid address). 
• Remove emails that repeatedly soft bounce (e.g. inbox full). 
• Remove email addresses that are inactive; no opens, or clicks. Mailbox providers take interaction, such as open or clicks, as a positive sign that improves reputation. 

It's recommended that after each sent out campaign, you review your list of hard and soft bounces and take action accordingly.

How to check if a email address is invalid

Monitor Sender Score

• Monitor sender score with handy tools such as Senderscore.org and make sure the email server is not blacklisted using MX Toolbox.

Best Practices

• Use an unsubscribe link in every email sent. This is required by law, and sending an email to an address that has previously unsubscribed is a violation of the law.
• Make sure all recipients of your campaign have opted in to receive emails. If you have purchased contacts from a third party, always make sure the third party ensures consent of the recipients.
• Keep images to a minimum to avoid triggering spam filters, and to reduce the load time of the email. Avoid using large file-size images. 
• Make your emails interesting and clickable: how people interact with your messages has an impact on your sending reputation.
• Too many images and links in your email may trigger spam flags. Keep an eye on your text-to-image ratio.
• Don't use URL shorteners in your email; these are frequently used by spammers.
• Subject lines should not be in ALL CAPS. 
• Make sure your emails are not too large. Keep in mind that many email servers will reject emails larger than 20 MB. This includes attachments.