Improve email deliverability with an email reputation check
When mailing a physical letter, sender reputation doesn’t matter much. Someone who pens personalized love poems and someone who churns out junky chain letters are just as likely to make it through to the recipient’s mailbox. But when it comes to email delivery, sender reputation matters – big time. In fact, if you don’t have a good IP reputation and good domain reputation, your email campaign is far more likely to land in a spam folder than the recipient’s inbox.
Why email reputation matters
Mailbox providers want to keep users’ email addresses free from the deluge of spammy email messages that unknown users try to flood them with. To do this, Internet service providers and mailbox providers depend on reputation scores, including IP reputation and domain reputation, and other factors to decide whether to filter or block certain email messages.
One common analogy is to think of your email reputation like your credit score: Just like a strong credit score is a signal that you’ve maintained good habits in the past, a strong email reputation is a signal to mailbox providers that you’re following acceptable parameters to send email marketing rather than using poor means to blast out spam.
How is your reputation determined?
Email reputation is built through a combination of set-up (is your email deliverability infrastructure optimized properly?) and habits (is email delivery happening in a way that’s helping rather than hurting your reputation score?). Before you even send that first email campaign, Mailgun sets up your email marketing delivery in a way that’s going to polish your sender reputation: testing IP reputation and domain reputation and adjusting its dynamic end algorithms to comply with limits set by major service providers.
With the right habits, your good reputation will continue to rise. That means using proactive email validation to ensure email messages aren’t bouncing, crafting valuable email marketing messages that recipients open and engage with, and minimizing spam complaints. While a problematic level of spam complaints might trigger service providers to throttle your traffic delivery, for instance, a strong sender reputation encourages them to let you send greater volume of emails through at one time. And Mailgun’s algorithms adjust dynamically, so you can take advantage of those greater send limits without constantly playing watchguard to your web reputation.
Knowing your reputation score
In the physical world, it's hard to know exactly what others think of you. With email marketing, though, that info is objective and available. You can use Mailgun Optimize to get deep insight into data that Internet Service Providers and mailbox providers use when deciding whether to deliver or reject your email messages.
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Take your email reputation to the next level
A third-party email service provider can take it a step further. At Mailgun, for instance, our Managed Service proactively monitors your sender reputation and conducts blocklist checks. And our team of experts tailors suggestions to your email program, whether that means tweaking subject lines so they avoid spam traps or bolstering your IP reputation by adding DMARC. Because our experts know that even the best email marketing doesn’t mean much if your email reputation isn’t strong enough to get you into the inbox.
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Explore beyond email reputation
Mailgun has a variety of features for companies with email reputation problems.
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