5 Ways to Check Your Email Sending Reputation
An email sender reputation is assigned by an Internet Service Provider to an organization that sends emails to their prospective consumers. There is a multitude of factors that influence your email sender reputation, including how often your emails meet the spam filter; consumer engagement with the emails you send; whether customers are receiving your emails; whether you have used a bulk email list, and; the reputation score of your email server IP address.
If you have a good sending reputation, which is determined by the factors listed above (and a few more), you are significantly more likely to have a successful marketing email campaign, in which the majority of your emails arrive safely into the inbox of your target buyers. From the subject line to your CRM and sales hub, you want your email list optimized to expand your sales.
Whilst it may seem obvious that a good sending reputation leads to better deliverability, how you’re meant to find out your sending reputation and the reputation of your domain is less obvious.
To ensure that you are scoring well on all the factors which impact your overall deliverability, you require the aid of online tools. If you use a few of the tools below, most of which provide at least part of their service for free, and are quick and convenient to use, you are sure to acquire a more informed view of your sending reputation and the ways in which you can improve it:
1. Check Your Sender Score
You can check your sender score at www.senderscore.org via Return Path. This score is a number between 0 and 100; the bigger the better. The score takes into account the factors that your customers’ mailbox providers would, such as: whether you’ve used blacklists, how many spam complaints you’ve acquired, subscriber engagement (such as how many emails are opened), and more.
2. Check your IP Address Risk Level
Via www.cyren.com you can check the risk level of your IP address, from no risk to high risk. This tool is free, with no log-in required. It can also provide information as to whether your IP address is recognized as a sender of spam.
3. Check Your Domain and IP Address Reputation
You can check the reputation of your IP address, as well as your domain and sender reputation at www.borderware.com, using their tool Reputation Authority. This tool is free to use and uses a traffic light system to rate the reputation of your domain and IP: green is good, amber is suspicious, and red is bad/considered malicious. This tool comes up with a score for both your domain/IP address and the overall domain; this due to the fact that a domain can receive a reputation independent of the IP address from where it is sourced, and this reputation can also be different from the other domains using from the same email server IP address.
It is useful to know both of these scores as both the email server IP address and individual reputation of your site will be considered by the Internet Service Provider when it decides whether or not your company’s emails make it to the inbox, spam folder, or are blocked altogether.
4. Check Your Web Reputation
At www.talosintelligence.com, you can find out whether your web and weighted reputation are classed as good, neutral, or poor, as well as whether you are classed as a blacklisted sender. In short, a ‘good’ score means that you are highly likely to enter someone’s inbox; ‘neutral’ shows that the activity associated with your domain is within the parameters of what is deemed acceptable, but there is still a chance your IP may be blocked by prospective customers’ inboxes and; a ‘poor’ ranking means you are highly likely to be blocked or filtered into the spam folder.
5. Check your Domain Name System and Affiliations
Whilst TrustedSource, by McAfee, covers a few of the factors already listed, such as checking your domain, email, and web reputation check, it also provides insight into the reputation of your Domain Name System and the affiliations with the IP address you’re using.
Checking your email sending reputation with online tools, such as the ones listed above, will allow you to become more informed about your online reputation and where you can improve to achieve better email deliverability.