Boosting your email reputation – one of the most important factors in making sure your messages make it to inboxes – is often side-stepped when trying to improve deliverability.
There are a few free scoring services to help you check up on your email reputation and running these checks is relatively simple to do.
The fact is boosting the reputation of your email can improve deliverability. But sadly, reputation is not the first place marketers usually look to make sure messages reach inboxes.
It is reported that nearly 25% of people surveyed for MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Email Marketing Benchmark Guide said they were using third-party accreditation and reputation services to improve deliverability.
Please know that a sender’s email reputation is one of the key ways ISPs and spam filters assess messages to decide whether to block them or let them pass through. The heartening news is that it is relatively easy to check up on one’s email reputation.
Your email service provider may provide a reputation-monitoring service. Alternately you can use a paid, third-party reputation monitoring service. Even if you don’t use either of these services, there are free online tools that can give you a snapshot of your reputation score – and indicate problem areas you can repair to improve your standing.
Checking additional scoring sites is a commendable practice. Every service measures reputation in its own way. Monitoring a range of sources could help you spot problems that your service might otherwise miss.
There are three free-scoring services that you might also try. Each reputation scoring service uses its own data sources, parameters and algorithms to determine reputation. But there are several common components that appear within these different scoring methodologies.
Message volume – it needs to be admitted – isn’t a major influence on reputation. But this reputation scoring services determine the number of spam reports or deliverability problems associated with your domain based on message volume. Upstart spikes in message volume may cause your message to be interpreted as a spam blast and needlessly hurt your reputation.
Message acceptance and bounce rates from your domain are compared to delivery statistics for other senders. Needless to say, lower acceptance rates can lower your reputation.
Remember that your emails can be filtered or even entirely blocked if your domain is included on third-party lists of suspected spammers. Naturally, appearing on several blacklists can hurt your reputation.
Monitoring services measure incidences of spam associated with your domain in multiple ways, such as consumer spam reports and spam-trap hits. The spam totals typically are assessed in relation to your overall message