3 Ways Sender Reputation Impacts Your Deliverability

Email deliverability is your ability, as a business, to deliver your messages to your subscribers’ inboxes. It is all the set of processes involved in making sure your emails are placed in a subscriber’s inbox and not in the spam folder.

One of the major factors that affect email deliverability is your sender reputation. You must therefore check your sender reputation. What’s a sender reputation?

Let’s examine this using three interrelated concepts:

• Email Reputation 
• IP Reputation
• Domain Reputation

Email Reputation 

Email reputation is the measurement of a business’s sending practices and the standards established by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) are adhered to.

A low sender score means poor email deliverability and it can be seriously detrimental to your overall email marketing strategy. ESPs (Email Service Providers) are responsible for delivering emails to recipients’ inboxes.

Providers like Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and others look out for metrics like email authentication, open rates, fake addresses, etc., as criteria that form the email (sender) reputation.

Email reputation is fundamentally determined by the sending IP address. This implies that you might want to check your IP reputation to check your email reputation. Your email or sender reputation is reflective of your IP reputation. 

IP Reputation

Many businesses send out emails over a shared IP, which means a single IP that is being used by several sites. The relevance of this IP to an individual sender is usually watered down significantly.

With shared IPs, Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) authentication shows that the DNS you’re using belongs to your IP. SPF and DKIM are email authentication started by Hotmail and Yahoo mail respectively. Gmail also uses DKIM.

However, domain reputation is increasingly becoming more important when considering email deliverability. Consequently, your sender reputation is usually determined by the domain from which you send your emails.

Domain Reputation 

Your domain reputation is considered wherever your domain is used. To determine your domain reputation, receivers keep track of everywhere your domain is used, including your messages, brand assets, and email authentication.

A “score” is awarded to your domain based on this data, and a level of trust is established using the score to scan future messages. For instance, you know that your domain reputation with Gmail will not be the same as Yahoo.

Each receiver employs a specific scoring process that can score a domain’s countless unique reputations. Which means you can have more than one reputation from just one receiver. However, you can determine the overall health of your domain. Some tools can help you check for this.

How to Check Domain Reputation 

Your sender reputation will be determined by the domain from which you send out emails. That is, wherever you send your emails using that domain, your sender reputation follows. Your email (sender) reputation, IP reputation, and domain reputation are somewhat intertwined.

Remember that a receiver can score your domain numerous reputations. Certain receivers share this data directly with you, as long as your volume is high enough.

Google Postmaster Tools is a top receiver for many senders. Google shares with you a reputation grade that directly affects email deliverables to Gmail recipients. You can easily trace shifts in deliverability to gmail.com recipients directly when there’s a shift in your Google Postmaster Tool domain reputation.

How do you check email reputation? Your domain reputation determines your IP reputation and consequently your email reputation. So, determine your domain reputation following the steps highlighted and correct all discovered issues.

A good reputation can give you the best deliverability, which is very critical in your marketing campaign.