Improve your email marketing success with these six essential tools to check your email reputation. Find out how to check your reputation in our post.
Maintaining a positive email reputation is paramount to achieving success in email marketing.
The reputation of the sender’s email can be the deciding factor for the success or failure of your email campaign.
A strong sender reputation ensures higher deliverability rates and increased recipient engagement. Whereas a negative sender reputation can result in your emails being flagged as spam and held in a spam folder instead of reaching the recipient’s inbox. If your emails are continuously flagged, this may result in you being blacklisted by email service providers (ESP) for sending unsolicited emails.
We don’t want this to happen! So, we will delve into how to perform an email reputation check, list some valuable tools that can help determine your email reputation score, and best practices to improve your email deliverability.
What is email reputation?
Email reputation check or email sender reputation refers to information that indicates to email inbox providers whether you are classified as a spammer. It is based on metrics that include the IP address of the sending server, domain, frequency of emails being sent, deliverability rate, bounce rate, and amount of spam complaints by recipients.
An email reputation check plays a vital role in ensuring successful email deliverability. An Internet Service Provider (ISP) assigns an email reputation score to a company based on their email-sending activities. A higher score increases the likelihood of ISPs delivering emails to recipients’ inboxes within their network.
Mailbox providers such as Gmail rely on your reputation to determine whether your email should land in the inbox or end up in spam folders.
To ensure your emails reach your contacts’ inboxes, it’s crucial to avoid common mistakes that could harm your reputation.
Many factors can impact your email reputation:
- Spam complaints – If your marketing emails are frequently marked as spam, your email spam reputation worsens.
- Bounce rates – If your email lists have many inactive contacts, it’s very likely your bounce rates will be higher. If your bounce rate is higher, your email spam reputation will suffer.
- Engagement rates – This metric focuses on how users engage with your emails sent from a particular IP address or domain. If your marketing emails have low open rates, click rates, and unsubscribe rates, then users aren’t interested in receiving your emails, resulting in poor email reputation.
- Blacklisting – Blacklists, or blocklists, are public databases containing IP addresses and domain names reported as sending unsolicited emails.
- Authentication – Authentication refers to verifying an email sender’s identity and reputation. It includes adding authentication signatures such as SPF, DMARC, DKIM, and Sender ID to your emails. It allows mailbox providers to determine whether or not an email was sent from a legitimate source.
Let’s look into IP reputation and domain reputation individually.
1. IP reputation
Every email service provider (ESP) offers a range of IP addresses (IPs) for sending emails. Many of these IPs are shared among thousands of accounts. This means some companies will send emails from a shared IP. There is an option to purchase dedicated IPs, but dedicated IPs are expensive, so most senders rely on shared IPs.
Each IP address has an online reputation that mail servers use to determine whether to trust emails from that source. This is important as IP addresses with a poor reputation will result in failed email deliveries.
Remember that the IP reputation isn’t permanent and can be reset by changing the domain’s IP address.
2. Domain reputation
Domain reputation refers to the online reputation of the sender’s domain. It is the domain the sender uses for emails, such as Gmail.com. Mailbox providers and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) look into the reputation of your domain, which influences their decision on whether your emails should be delivered to recipients’ inboxes or spam folders.
Unlike IP reputation, domain reputation is linked to the domain name and is not easily reset.
Regarding IP reputation, remember that having an excellent email-sending history associated with your domain does not guarantee good results if your IP address has a negative reputation. This especially applies to free and commonly used accounts such as Gmail or Outlook, which are often used for spamming.
How do I check my email reputation?
There are various online tools available for email reputation checks. We have compiled a list of 6 essential tools for monitoring and improving your email reputation score:
1. SenderScore
SenderScore is a free email reputation checker by Return Path that allows users to check the email reputation of the IP addresses they’re sending emails from. It is a real-time indicator of an IP’s sender reputation and offers updated scores ranging from 0 to 100 daily.
The higher your score, the more reputable you are to mailbox providers and ISPs, resulting in better email deliverability. The calculations are based on a rotating 30-day average and show where your IP address stands compared to other IP addresses.
Typically, a score of 80 or above is considered good. SenderScore also offers tips in its "Learn" section for improving your email reputation.
2. Barracuda
Another reliable email reputation checker is the Barracuda Reputation System. This tool is used to check both IP and email domain reputations. Barracuda maintains a comprehensive log of IP addresses belonging to spammers and reputable email senders. By inputting your IP or domain address, the tool cross-references it with its extensive database to determine your domain’s score.
The Barracuda Reputation System empowers the Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall to decide which emails to block or allow based on the sender’s IP address. In addition to IP reputation, Barracuda Central monitors URL reputation, enabling the firewall to block emails containing poorly rated URLs.
Barracuda Networks effortlessly discerns between legitimate emails and spam by combining IP and reputation data.
Recently, Barracuda Networks introduced the Barracuda Reputation Block List (BRBL), which is a free DNSBL that targets IP addresses involved in sending spam. The BRBL can effectively stop the proliferation of spam, and users can also find out if any IPs have been blacklisted.
3. Talos Intelligence
Talos Intelligence is another free email reputation checker well-known for its comprehensive capabilities in monitoring sender score, domain, and IP reputation. The tool provides insights into how other email service providers perceive your domain or IP, indicating whether it is rated as Good, Neutral, or Poor.
Its IP and Domain Data Center tool is regarded as the most extensive, real-time network for detecting threats globally. To utilize this tool, input your IP, domain, or network owner information to access real-time threat data. The tool will then analyze the provided information against its database and generate a detailed report on your domain’s performance.
4. IPVoid
IPVoid is a free powerful email reputation checker that evaluates your domain reputation and compares your IP address against various blacklisting engines. The Domain Reputation Check helps users check their domain name against popular domain blacklists like ThreatLog, OpenPhish, and PhishTank. This is highly effective in determining if a domain is potentially malicious or associated with phishing activities. If you’re searching for a tool to analyze and assess a domain’s trustworthiness and online reputation, IPVoid is an excellent option.
5. Cyren IP Reputation
Cyren IP Reputation Checker is an IP reputation checker that allows you to assess how mailbox providers perceive your IP address. We know marketers send emails from unique IP addresses, and Cyren helps users identify, track, and rank each IP address based on their reputation. It is an effective tool to check if a particular IP address has been blacklisted or flagged for sending spam or malicious content.
6. Google Postmaster Tools
Google’s Google Postmaster Tools (GPT) is a free tool that helps evaluate the reputation of your domain and IP address. Google Postmaster Tools also provides insights about critical metrics for email deliverability, such as authentication, sender score, spam reports, delivery errors, and email encryption. Google Postmaster Tools focuses on monitoring your domain’s reputation with Gmail users. If most of your subscribers use Gmail and other GSuite applications, GPT is your go-to tool to assess your email delivery performance.
Email reputation check ensures email deliverability, which is crucial for a successful email campaign.
If you want to improve your email deliverability — Simplelists can help you manage and monitor your email reputation and optimize your email marketing campaigns.
Try one month for free and start improving your email deliverability today!
How do I improve my email reputation?
There are numerous ways to improve your email reputation. Here are a few tips you should consider:
1. Email authentication
Proper email authentication protocols ensure that the IP addresses, domains, and email addresses are legitimate and are verified by mailbox providers and ISPs. By authenticating your emails, users can be assured the email sender’s identity is authentic. Standard email authentication protocols include SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.
SPF (Sender Policy Framework) aids in authenticating emails at the IP level. DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) authenticates emails at the domain level. DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) establishes a framework for verifying SPF and DKIM. It also instructs email providers on how to handle emails that fail authentication.
If you’re having trouble delivering emails to the inboxes due to poor email reputation, taking care of authentication should be your first step.
2. Maintain healthy email lists
If you’re experiencing email deliverability issues, your email list likely has many inactive addresses. If you find email addresses that didn’t engage with your emails in over three months, remove them from your list.
An updated and accurate email list may be smaller and may not sound enticing, but your engagement rates will be higher because you’re sending emails to customers who genuinely want to receive your emails. Furthermore, inactive email addresses result in higher bounce rates and spam complaints, negatively affecting your sender’s reputation.
3. Consider removing inactive subscribers
Maintaining good email hygiene is important to maintain a good email reputation. Consider removing inactive subscribers from your email list who have not clicked or read your emails. Inactive subscribers negatively affect your email reputation.
If you don’t want to remove them, you can send re-engagement emails to subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails in the last six months. This way, you can determine whether subscribers are interested in receiving your emails.
4. Maintain a consistent sending schedule and volume
Too much or too little can cause you to face email deliverability issues; monitoring your email sending frequency is key to maintaining a good sender reputation. If you send emails too frequently, you should pause them for a while until you see improvement in your domain reputation. Yet, if you’re sending emails sporadically, this may need to be ramped up a little.
Frequent, random, or irregular email sending may trigger mailbox providers to consider your emails spam, negatively affecting your email deliverability. Sending emails to many people can be counterproductive; focusing on highly engaged customers will help with your open and click-through rates will increase your email reputation.
5. Deliver high-quality email content
Send only relevant emails that contain valuable content for your subscribers. Avoid words that trigger spam filters and use engaging templates, styles, and formats for subject lines in your emails. Include a call-to-action in every email, and this helps increase engagement rates.
Personalizing your emails and segmenting email lists yields higher open and click-through rates than traditional bulk emails. All these improve email reputation and increase the chances of emails reaching the inbox.
Email deliverability is made easy with Simplelists
Simplelists can enhance your email marketing efforts and boost your email deliverability. Simplelists offers built-in features that automatically remove bounced contacts, which helps improve your email reputation.
Additionally, Simplelists helps marketers segment their email lists to guarantee that only highly active and engaged subscribers receive the emails. Simplelists also supports email authentication protocols like DKIM and SPF, further enhancing your email reputation and domain reputation.
By ensuring its systems are not abused, Simplelists’ sending IP addresses have a very high reputation.
So what are you waiting for?
Take advantage of Simplelists’ 1-month free trial and elevate your email marketing campaigns to new heights.