So how is this sender score generated?
Email service providers from all over the world take part in the sender score project, they are constantly reporting back information to Sender Score regarding your recent activities. So if your recipients are making your email as spam, or just deleting without reading – this information is constantly getting pumped back to sender score and will carry a negative weighting.
Country to this, if your subscribers are loving your newsletter, reading it, clicking on links. This also gets automatically fed back to sender score and carries a positive weighting.
So how can I check my sender score?
Actually it is pretty easy, head over to senderscore.org. Enter your sending server IP address – you may need to ask your email service provider for this. And you will be presented with your sender score and a mini report of your recent activity.
So what is a good sender score? and what is a bad sender score?
Well, as mentioned your sender score is a percentage out of 100. with 100 being good and 0 being bad.
A sender score above 80%
You are considered to have a great sender reputation, your recipients are responding well to your newsletter.
A sender score between 70% and 80%
This means that your sending server is ‘ok’, there is room for improvement and it is worth listening to the feedback in their mini report i.e. your unknown users might be a little high.
A sender score below 70%
if you are below this threshold, you really need to do some work to improve your sending server reputation.
So, how important is your sender score.
Can you just ignore it and email whoever you like? Or does this percentage score require your attention.
in a nutshell, very. As mentioned many of your recipients – or their email service providers, will be using sender score to monitor your server activity.
If you are trying to deliver an email to one of your subscribers and have a really bad sender score. Chances are the recipient email server, they may just bat your email away without it ever going near your subscribers inbox.
So it is really important to pay attention to this.
At the same time, if you have a really good sender score. You have demonstrated that you can be trusted, and your email subscribers email service provider will probably accept your email and give it a nice spot right in that email inbox.
So, what makes up my sender score, and how can i improve it?
There are 6 factors which make up your sender score. Let’s understand these, as they are all worth paying attention to. For a good sender score, you really want to make sure that you are ticking all these boxes:
Spam complaints
You don’t want your subscribers reading your email and marking it as spam. This has a negative impact. As a rule of thumb, never send unsolicited emails aka spam, as that is spam and your subscribers will mark you as such. And always avoid a purchased list,s these always generate lots of complaints. Build your own quality list of people who have asked to receive emails from your company.
Blacklists
There are plenty of blacklists out there. hundreds of them. These are organisations who keep databases of people who have previously sent spam. So the best way to stay off a blacklist is to never send an unsalted mail aka spam. Only mail users who have asked to join your newsletter.
Unknown users
Recipient Email servers don’t like it if you are trying to deliver emails to address which simply don’t exist. You are using up their server resources turning away these non existent emails. So always keep your email database up to date, people change email addresses and move jobs. Always stay in touch with your subscribers to ensure that you have their correct and valid email address.
Whitelists
The opposite to a Blacklist. A whitelist is a list of users who are known to be trusted and send legitimate communications. There are a few whitelists out there who you can apply to. Though in order to be accepted onto a whitelist, you need to be able to demonstrate that you never send unsolicited email and if you start sending what is classed as spam you will loose your whitelisting.
Subscriber Engagement
If your subscribers are not reading your email, they are just deleting it without opening. This has a negative impact. Ensure that your subscribers are interested in your newsletter and the content of your newsletter is relevant. For example, every month a company sends me their email advertising industrial warehouse racking. I work for a software company, how am i supposed to put software on a 90ft warehouse rack?
Spam Traps
We made two videos on this a few weeks back, a whole science in itself. We will put a link to these in the description. But if your database is old, or scraped together from the internet or purchased. There is a fair chance it will have a spam trap, these can kill your marketing stone dead.
If you’d like to try email blaster, please open a free account and take it for a spin
