One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. At least that’s what they say. But when it comes to email, one person’s spam is another person’s deliverability issue.
When sending emails to a list, your ability to reach your subscribers is directly affected by your sender reputation. A bad sender reputation may lead your ISP to sanction your domain, limiting the emails you can send. Run awry of the robust anti-spamming laws, and you can add hefty fines to your list of woes.
This isn’t an abstract concern. According to Experian Data Quality, “In the last 12 months, 61 percent of organizations have experienced events that could damage their sender reputation, including 35 percent experiencing spam trap hits.”
A significant percentage of companies that experience email deliverability issues find they cannot communicate with customers or provide quality customer support.
Fighting the Dark Side of Email Deliverability
Remember to track the top issues affecting sender reputation, including:
- Volume
- Complaints and hard bounce rates
- Spam traps and blacklist hits
- Content
- Consumer engagement (inactive subscribers)
A great place to start is to maintain a quality subscriber list. Not only can it help maintain a higher sender reputation, but the more active your subscribers are, the more deeply they’ll engage with the content you send them. While companies vary on when they consider a subscriber inactive, the industry standard defines an inactive subscriber as someone who has not opened your emails in over six months.
Caitlin Marco, Marketing Automation Manager at cleverbridge, has a helpful tip for keeping consumer engagement high, “Segmenting your subscriber list by engagement can help improve your sender reputation. The least engaged segment is the hardest to revive. By sending them highly targeted content that communicates a sense of urgency, you will reactivate some contacts that have gone dark. Then you can remove the contacts that remain inactive with confidence. Make this type of campaign a habit at least every six months to ensure you don’t have spam traps hiding in your database.”
While maintaining your sender reputation takes strategic thinking, dedicated work and extra investment, the massive ROI per dollar spent on email justifies the expense.
Check out the infographic below for Experian’s top three tips for improving sender reputation.
Learn about effective customer engagement in our complimentary e-book Retaining Subscribers and Optimizing the Renewal Process
