Online reputation is a crucial aspect of ensuring your emails land in your clients’ inboxes rather than ending up in the dreaded spam folder. Major email providers like Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo!, and ProtonMail have sophisticated systems to evaluate the reputation of senders. These systems rely on various factors, including email delivery history, bounce rates, and spam complaints. If your reputation is high, your emails are deemed trustworthy and have a better chance of reaching the inbox. Conversely, if your reputation is poor, even legitimate messages may be diverted to the spam folder. This happens because spam filters assess various criteria to identify potential unwanted messages, and a poor reputation can work against you by mistakenly labeling your emails as spam.
Maintaining a good online reputation is essential to ensuring a high delivery rate, as a good delivery rate means more of your emails will reach recipients’ inboxes, thus increasing the visibility and effectiveness of your email campaigns. Conversely, a low rate can negatively impact your campaign results, reducing engagement with your messages and affecting return on investment. At FROGED, we use Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) as our primary provider for sending emails. Amazon SES is known for its robustness and reliability, but also for its strict policies to maintain service quality. It constantly monitors sending metrics to ensure senders meet delivery standards.
To better understand how this reputation is managed and what factors influence it, we explain the key concepts used to analyze and ensure the quality of FROGED’s emails.
a. Email bounce rate
The bounce rate is the percentage of emails that cannot be delivered due to issues with email addresses or mail servers. Bounces can occur for various reasons, such as invalid email addresses, full inboxes, or temporary server issues.
There are two types of warnings:
Initial warning: The provider issues a warning if the bounce rate reaches 5% (bounces / delivered > 0.05).
Serious warning: The provider may threaten to block the service if the bounce rate reaches 10% (bounces / delivered > 0.1).
b. Complaint rate
The complaint rate measures the percentage of recipients who mark your emails as spam. This happens when recipients find your messages unwanted or irrelevant, which may result from practices like excessive emailing, unsolicited content, or lack of clear opt-out options. Email providers take these complaints seriously, as they indicate that users find the emails intrusive.
Again, there are two types of warnings:
Initial Warning: The provider issues a warning if the complaint rate reaches 0.2% (complaints / delivered > 0.002).
Blocking Threat: The provider may threaten to block the service if the complaint rate reaches 0.5% (complaints / delivered > 0.005).
c. Suppressions
In each workspace on the platform, when an email is bounced or marked as spam, the email address is added to a specific list that you can easily access from FROGED. This suppression list aims to prevent future sends to those problematic addresses.
By keeping this list updated, we help avoid sending more emails to addresses that have already caused issues, such as bounces or spam complaints. This not only improves the effectiveness of your campaigns but also protects and enhances your reputation as a sender over the long term.
Additionally, in terms of deliverability, FROGED uses an internal formula to assess the overall performance of email sending, integrating key factors to ensure a high success rate in delivery.
Tips for avoiding spam
To ensure that your emails get through to your customers’ inboxes and out of their spam folders, follow these important tips:
– Use an email address with your own domain: Using an email address associated with your custom domain helps build a stronger reputation and enhances the credibility and authenticity of your messages.
– Maintain control over your IP reputation: The IP address from which you send emails significantly influences deliverability. Ensure your IP has a good reputation and consider obtaining a dedicated IP if your sending volume is high.
– Use high-quality contact lists: Work with clean and updated email lists. Avoid purchasing lists, as they often contain inactive addresses that can increase bounce and complaint rates, and focus on keeping your contact lists current by removing inactive or invalid addresses.
– Avoid shortening URLs and overusing images: Excessive use of images and shortened links can trigger spam filters and distrust from your clients. Maintain a proper balance between text and images and use full links instead of shorteners.
– Use clear and descriptive subject lines. Avoid misleading words.: Phrases like “free,” “offer,” or “urgent” can trigger spam filters. Opt for clear and honest subject lines that reflect the actual content of the message.
– Use spam checkers before sending: Before sending your emails, use spam detection tools like Mail Tester or isNotSpam to identify potential issues and improve deliverability.
In the end, the key is simple: treat your emails with the same care and consideration you would give a conversation with an important client. Every message you send is an opportunity to communicate effectively, build relationships, and enhance your reputation. Make sure every detail, from the quality of your contact lists to the content of your messages, is taken care of. Every message counts!
