The importance of email deliverability & domain reputation is not less known. Uplers believe that email deliverability & stellar sender reputation is that divine lilt, which if ignored, would lead towards failure to reach thousands of your customers. Sender score is a metrics that governs this reputation just like your report cards at school exams. Even if your emails are delivered, a poor Sender Score could imply that they aren’t reaching all your recipients’ inboxes. Uplers unveil the holiness of what this metrics means and how to get the best of it.
What Is a Sender Score?
Sender Score is an indication of the trustworthiness of an email source. Sender Score is compiled through a trusted cooperative reputation network and provides a simplified view into data that is aggregated from 60 million mailboxes at a variety of ISPs, spam filtering, and security companies to determine your reputation. This is the same type of data that mailbox providers use to determine whether to accept or reject email.
How Is a Sender Score Determined?
Return Path helps you determine your Sender Score with a detailed report aided from their registration page. Scores are calculated on a rolling, 30-day average and represent the rank of an IP address against other IP addresses, more like a percentile ranking. Sender score takes a number of parameters, as per Hubspot, as its basis of evaluation, as follows:
- Complaints: Comparing complaints of your IP address to all other IP addresses also known as the complaint rate.
- Volume: Proportion of number of complaints to the total number of messages sent. A higher score equates to larger volume which is monitored by the Sender Score Reputation Network.
- External Reputation: Comparing how your IP address is compared to all other IP addresses on a variety of external blacklists and whitelists.
- Unknown Users: The rank of the IP address’ unknown user rate compared to all other IP addresses.
- Rejected: how often emails are bounced compared to other IP addresses.
- Accepted: The number of email messages accepted for delivery: expressed as the number of messages seen minus the number of messages rejected.
- Accepted Rate: The ratio obtained by number of messages accepted for delivery, divided by the number of messages seen.
- Unknown User Rate: The ratio of unknown users, or invalid email addresses, compared to the amount of email seen.
What Is An Ideal Sender Score?
A sender score of 90 is said to be heavenly! If your score is between 50 and 80, something isn’t right and you need to look up for remedies to improve it. The closer your score is to 0, the worse it is. A sender score of less than 50 is not a good indicator and needs immediate overhaul through best practices that abide by email marketing ethics.
Why Would Your Sender Score Deplete?
There are many factors that can affect your sender reputation and could cause your Sender Score to drop. These include complaints against your email sending IP address, email list hygiene, mailing patterns, and a lot more.
What Should Be Done To Improve An Unsatisfactory Sender Score?
There are several aspects that Sender Score takes into serious account. The same can be improved by diligently taking care of the following:
- Inconsistent volume of email sends can drop your sender score, hence decide on a fixed volume of email sending over a time period and adhere by the same.
- Set the optimal interval between the frequencies and keep it consistent so that your subscribers know when to expect your emails.
- Streamline your process for opting-out of future email communications. If you ease the opt-out process, users are more likely to remove their emails the ethical way benefitting your sender score, if they so desire anytime.
- After emailing each email list segment, remove invalid email addresses that caused your email to bounce.
- Warm your sender score before reaching out to new leads by sending emails to your most loyal customers, who are almost guaranteed to open and read. This is more likely to help the sender score if you have just incorporated emails in your inbound marketing strategy.
- If you have been blacklisted already, understand why you were blacklisted in the first place and what you can do to improve your email marketing methods from the ESPs.
- If your email recipients think you’re a spammer your sender score is already suffering. Check your SPAM rate – 1 in every 1000 is an acceptable rate.
If learning about your sender score is a matter of great worry to you, Uplers would want to remind you that companies who commit to sending really great content and avoid over-emailing rarely have problems with their sender score! Score good – it’s the exam time.