A good marketing campaign must follow the standard rules to avoid wasting money and ensure high conversion rate. If your strategies include email marketing, you need to make sure that you maintain a good sender score reputation. Normally, when you start email marketing, the sender reputation of your domain is neutral. However, if you do not act carefully and repeatedly violate rules, your email messages will be marked as spam and your sender reputation will suffer. This can have a negative impact on your marketing campaign and your brand too.
Given the importance of email marketing in your entire campaign, your goal is to improve the sender reputation of your domain.
Here are 7 best practices to help you improve your sender reputation:
1. Start with a good database
Every email marketing starts with a good database of email addresses and this starts with how you collect these email ads. To ensure that your email list consists of engaged users, you can use an optimized opt-in process. If you are just randomly sending email to people who are unaware or haven’t agreed to receive emails from you, chances are they will mark your emails as spam. As a result, the ISPs will flag your domain as sending spam to everyone on your database, including those who are expecting your message.
For a more engaged email list, you may use double opt-in, which requires a two-step verification process before a user gets included in your database. This guarantees that everyone on your list welcomes your emails.
2. Follow a consistent email schedule
Be consistent with the frequency and amount of emails you send out. For instance, if you are scheduled to send out 3,000 emails every day, make sure that you follow this pattern constantly. Sending out 4,000 emails today, then 10,000 the following day, and then a long break will definitely negatively impact your sender reputation.
3. Make your IP ready
A common pitfall of email marketing is to send out thousands of emails right after creating an email account. This activity appears suspicious and could hurt your sender reputation immediately. To avoid this problem, start sending emails slowly. First, to a small group of subscribers, especially to those who you are certain won’t mark your emails as spam or unsubscribe, and then gradually to those on your email list. This should warm up your IP and improve your sender score.
4. Regularly clean up your E-mail List
A sensible tip from an email address validation solutions company says that having more email addresses in your database doesn’t necessarily translate to better email marketing. In fact, it can even hurt your sender score and deliverability rates if you don’t clean up your list regularly. The longer you keep unengaged and inactive users on your email list, the more damaging it can be to your sender reputation.
To keep your email list clean, make sure that users have a simple and clear method of unsubscribing. You should also actively validate your email database on a regular basis.
5. Get off blacklists as soon as possible
If you have a terrible sender score, you might have been blacklisted. Check if you have been blacklisted. If you’ve indeed been blacklisted by a server, contact them to know how to get off the blacklist. The earlier you get off these lists, the better for your sender reputation.
6. Don’t fall into spam traps
Spam traps occur when you send a message to an in existent email address. This results in a hard bounce, which can significantly affect your sender score. It is very important that you maintain a clean email list. If you’ve had a hard bounce, make sure to remove the email address immediately to avoid it from occurring again.
By implementing these six best practices in email marketing, you’re on your way to improving your sender reputation and email delieverability. However, your email marketing campaign shouldn’t stop with having a good sender score. This is just one metrics to help you measure how well you’re implementing your email marketing. It should also help you improve the quality and conversion rate of your emails. Hopefully, this will be a good start towards a better marketing campaign for your brand.