Email Reputation: What it Is and How to Check and Improve It

What is an email reputation?

Your email reputation is a score that determines how you are perceived by an email service provider. ESPs give email reputation scores to senders because they want to reduce the number of spam complaints from their customers. Most of all, ESPs want their customers to receive clean emails that they subscribed to, rather than spam.

Your email sender reputation is something that will be built over time. There are various factors that can have a negative impact on your sender score that you may not even be aware of.

Your sender reputation is directly linked to your email domain and is a record of how well or how poorly the emails that have been sent from your domain have performed. The good news is that it is possible to repair a bad email sender reputation, although it is not easy.

To keep your sender reputation high or recover it from a knock, you should focus on creating email marketing campaigns that include relevant content with the right message, sent at the right time, to the right audience. PS. This applies to transactional emails too.

Why you should check email address reputation

Maybe you have been sending marketing emails, but are you getting results? Marketers will often spend a lot of time looking for different ways to optimize emails to improve open rates and click rates but overlook their email marketing sender reputation.

Your sender reputation or sender score refers to how much you are trusted by recipients. It is not always easy for marketers to build trust with their audience in general, but it can be impossible when lots of emails that you send are not even going to inboxes.

Or even worse, your emails could be reaching the inboxes of spam traps. As their name suggests, spam traps are a part of an email program designed to catch spammers. Email providers and businesses add spam traps for businesses that scrape entire websites. 

If you want to keep your spam complaint rate low and protect your email sender reputation, using email validation is crucial. This is the only way to keep spam traps away from your email lists.

What to look for when you check email reputation online

It can sometimes be tricky to identify the factors that are causing your email sender reputation to drop. Some of the main factors to look out for that might influence your score include email list quality, email consistency, open rates, engagement, sending history, and the quality of the content.

Content mapping can help you improve your sender score as the prospect’s intent might be different based on the stage of the customer cycle that they are actively in. You can map the most relevant content to each buying cycle stage.

This allows you to speak more directly to each lead’s individual requirements or needs, which helps you make sure that you are having the right conversation with the right people, and at the right time. It helps you personalize your subject lines, email content and much more.

And as a result, you’ll get improved email performance, in the form of higher conversions, lower unsubscribe rates, and more. In general, you can expect your email marketing efforts to pick up.

Email address reputation checker – what affects your sender score?

Email List Quality

The first thing to make sure of 7when it comes to improving your sender reputation is that the contacts you are sending email messages have the most accurate and up-to-date email addresses.

If you are sending emails that are bouncing back because the email address is not spelled correctly or is no longer in use, this can have a negative impact on your sender’s reputation. Invalid email addresses can lead to a bad reputation in no time.

This is why it is so important to take the time to clean up your email list on a regular basis and remove any unengaged contacts and old, out-of-date data. This will ensure that you are only sending quality content to quality contacts, which will improve your sender reputation, delivery rates and email marketing performance in general.

Sending history

Your IP address can play a major role in boosting the email reputation score and legitimacy of your emails. When your IP address has an established history, this can improve your email marketing sender score since it indicates that your sender, content, and recipients are legitimate. This is also known as IP reputation – the sender reputation score related to your IP address.

This can be helpful to your credibility since spammers often change their IP addresses, making it almost impossible to obtain a reputable sending history with IPs. As long as you keep the same IP address and make sure you send legitimate emails, your email challenges will be decreased significantly.

Content Quality

Another major factor that can have an impact on your email marketing sender reputation is the quality of your content. If you are sending low-quality content, this can have a negative impact on your sender score. Email recipients want high quality content that ideally, they opted in to themselves.

Low-quality content could be an email that is filled with broken links, formatted poorly, overly promotional, or filled with spam trigger words. If this sounds like your content, then you’re almost guaranteed to be headed for spam folders and landing a bad domain reputation.

Even if your emails do manage to make it through the spam filter, there’s a high chance that your prospects are going to mark the message as spam which will seriously damage your sender score.

Email consistency

The volume of emails that you send and how consistently you are sending them is another factor that will have an impact on your email marketing sender reputation. Internet Service Providers and Mailbox providers will conduct an analysis of sending patterns on a regular basis to determine if senders are following best practices or using spammy practices.

How does this work? One of the best email practices is to avoid sending negative signals is to email your recipients regularly. For example, having a consistent weekly email schedule, rather than sending emails once every three months.

Sending emails consistently makes sure those emails land in the inbox every time and that your email outreach efforts are rewarded, rather than resulting in a poor reputation.

Engagement and open rates

Recently, mailbox providers have also been monitoring the way that subscribers are interacting with emails.

If it comes up that an email sent to a certain subscriber has low or no open or click-through rates, then they are going to begin filtering out these emails based on the user’s preferences. This can also have a negative impact on your email marketer’s sender score.

How to check email domain reputation

There are various third-party spam filtering and inbox delivery tools available that you can use to measure your email marketing sender reputation and email reputation score.

It’s important to consider deliverability when evaluating your sender score, which is your ability to successfully send emails that are delivered to inboxes rather than the spam folder. These third-party tools can be used to analyze your deliverability and give you an overall sender score, as well as useful deliverability insights.

They will review you as a sender, your content, and your domain to provide a breakdown of the percentage of your emails that are being delivered to inboxes versus spam emails. You’ll also get email bounce codes that specify why the email client is causing the bounces.

Many of these tools also offer handy features and advice that you can take advantage of to improve your email content to make it sound less spammy and more interesting and relevant to your readers. This is especially useful when sending out cold emails.

How to improve your email domain reputation check

Ideally, open rates should be no lower than 18%. If your open rate is consistently below 10%, this is a sign that it is time to further explore different ways to improve engagement with your audience and improve your online visibility from outgoing emails.

It is also important to bear in mind that the average open rates may be different based on your industry, so it’s a good idea to become familiar with the email marketing benchmarks for your sector before saying that your campaign emails are ineffective.

Check Email Reputation – How to Protect Your Sender Score

Since email marketing reputation is a factor that many will often overlook, being aware of the different factors that can influence your sender score already puts you ahead. To protect your sender score and increase your chance of sending emails that land in inboxes rather than spam boxes every time, keep these best practices in mind:

• Never send to purchased email lists, and make sure that you are only ever sending emails to subscribers who have given permission and opted into hearing from you. This will increase your email deliverability rate and reduce bounce rates. Sending out unsolicited emails is going to get you in trouble with most major providers.
• Clean your email list data on a regular basis and remove any email addresses that are out-of-date or misspelled from your list. It’s also a good idea to remove emails for any subscribers who are inactive or have not engaged with your content for a long time. For example, sending to a fake email address or to outdated email IDs is going to hurt your successful email deliverability.
• Avoid appearing to spam your audience by controlling your sending frequency. You should create a send schedule and stick to it to reduce the chance of your emails being marked as spam. You can easily automate email cadences with your favorite email marketing software, so there is no excuse for irregular email delivery.
• Segment your audience so that you can offer more relevant and targeted information to your subscribers. You are unlikely to get the best results from your email marketing campaigns and your sender reputation may suffer if the content you are sending is too vague. If you have a large volume of emails sent, it may result in poor sender reputation. Focus on a smaller number of segmented, relevant email addresses.

Tools you can use to check email sending reputation

If you want to find out more about what is affecting your email sender and content reputation, where you currently stand with your sender score, and what you can do to improve it, there are several tools that you can use. Some of the best options to choose from include:

• SenderScore by ReturnPath
• TaloIntelligence by Cisco
• TrustedSource by McAfee
• Barracuda Networks Central Reputation System (also known as Barracuda Reputation System)
• ReputationAuthority by WatchGuard

Each domain reputation tool has its pros and cons and will give you different respective sender scores. 

Dealing with blacklists

When you check your sender reputation, you can also find out if your IP or domain has been added to a blacklist because of constant unexpected emails.

In this case, you will need to go to the list in question and request to be delisted from the blacklist. If you are a legitimate sender and not a spammer, you will usually be removed in most cases and your email messages can start reaching subscriber inboxes again.

Sometimes, you may get information on what you need to improve in order to ensure that your email or domain is not blacklisted again in the future. In these cases, it can benefit you when the email bounces as the email reputation service will tell you what the issue is and you can improve your email strategy.

There are many popular blacklists online and you can simply go to one and enter your domain. For example, Spamhaus is an accurate blacklist checker where you can see your current blacklist reputation and whether you see your domain on industry blacklists.

When sending marketing emails, it’s important to understand what your sender reputation is, what affects it, and how to maintain it.

Wrapping up

Email reputation is a key factor in the performance of your email marketing campaigns. With reputation issues (or just a poor IP reputation), you’re going to have a hard time delivering any ROI from email. Staying on top of your scores and ensuring you’re a reputable sender is just a starting point.

The best way to make sure your future messages stay off spam lists? Invest in validating your email lists. Run your list of emails through Bouncer and your domain email reputation will be spotless. Our email verification tool removes all invalid, fake, outdated, misspelled addresses, spam traps, and everything else that can hurt your email strategy.

Sign up today and validate your first 100 emails for free and power up your email strategy!

Frequently asked questions

Are there any tools that will let me do an email reputation check?

Yes, there are plenty of tools that let you check if you have a bad reputation and provide valuable insights around your reputation. Examples include Sendgrid, EasyDmarc, PostMark and many others to ensure the health of your email servers. 

What is a good email reputation score?

It depends on the type of tool you use to determine it. However, a strong email reputation comes from a score that is higher than 80 in most reputation checkers.

How do I check email reputation with Gmail?

You can use a free tool that Google made, called Google Postmaster Tools. While Gmail is not the ideal tool if you deal with a large email volume, some marketers still use it. This tool will give you real-time insights about the reputation of your address that might result in deliverability issues.