Email marketing stands as one of the important marketing channels as it helps get on board target specific customers and focuses only on your business goal. It has proved to generate the highest conversion rates as compared to other communication platforms. Moreover, being the oldest and the most authentic online communication platform, email is used by a vast population section and has a global reach. Email marketing helps build and foster a business relationship with your clients, but your campaign’s success depends on your email delivery rate.
Though your emails’ deliverability rate depends on a lot of things, that key factor in gaining high delivery is to have a good IP address reputation and score. Your organization’s IP score plays a fundamental role in executing a successful email campaign. It helps service providers in assessing whether or not your email makes it past the spam filter. Poor IP address reputation can decrease your email deliverability rate, placing all your emails in the receiver’s spam folder. If your emails end up in the spam folder regularly, it can create a negative image of the organization, which could have a long-term impact on your brand.
Since your IP score keeps changing depending on various factors, such as receiver complaints and how often you send out emails, it is crucial to regularly monitor your IP score. If it goes down, you must work towards improving it at the earliest. A strong IP score portrays you as a trustworthy email sender, enabling your emails to reach your intended recipients’ inbox for an effective email marketing campaign.
Does Your Business Need a Dedicated IP Address or a Shared one?
The reputation that builds due to the kind of IP address you use is directly responsible for your email delivery rate. Shared IP reputation is suitable for small email senders as they get an opportunity to sign up for an account with a trustworthy email service provider. This will mix your emails with other reputable senders to ensure your email is delivered correctly. But make sure that you don’t tie-up with a less-reputable service that allows spammers to send emails on the same IP Address.
If you are a large email sender, you need to have a dedicated IP Address to maintain your reputation. You can build your sender reputation with a dedicated IP address by sending specific Internet Service Providers a particular volume of your most engaged subscribers for a while to prove your reputation. Simultaneously, sending a large volume of emails on a new IP Address with no reputation may get your emails blocked if anyone reports the email as SPAM. So be careful when selecting your email service providers.
Build a Strong IP Reputation
Do not target inactive customers
Marketers often mistake targeting inactive subscribers who did not engage with your email messages for the last six months. This can cause high bounce rates and create email spam traps. As the receivers do not open your emails for a long time, it lowers your email open and clicks rates while increasing unsubscribe rate. Thus, your emails automatically get marked as spam, leading to email deliverability issues and damages the sender’s reputation score. While re-engaging with your old customer is a great way to maintain customer relations, you should not push it too much. Removing email addresses that bounce from your mailing list helps your IP address stay away from customer complaints.
Avoid causing inbox noise
Many organizations target customers and prospects with weekly sales newsletters, that they often increase up to 3 newsletters per week or, even worse, daily to achieve their sales target. This makes the subscribers face “inbox noise,” leading them to unsubscribe from your email list or marking emails as spam, which will prevent your future emails from reaching their inboxes.
Do not increase email sent volume suddenly
If you had been sending emails niche, small and targeted list of active subscribers, and suddenly decide to send emails to every contact in your email list, the ISPs of recipients will assume this rampant increase in email volume to be a suspicious activity and start marking emails as spam. Targeting a large volume of contacts overnight without following any planned and gradual targeting strategies negatively impacts the email sender’s reputation.
Give opt-in option
You must ensure every receiver of your email list is selected through opt-in not to get neglected in their inbox and turn into spam through ISP report, to hamper your email sending reputation score eventually. Simultaneously, allowing customers to unsubscribe from your emails if they want to will reduce spam complaints about your emails.
There are many tools available in the market that help you check your IP reputation scores, such as SenderScore, BarracudaCentral, TrustedSource, Google Postmaster Tools, Microsoft SNDS, Cisco Senderbase, and more. Keep your IP address score on track to let your emails get delivered to the targeted customer’s inbox. Having a good IP address score allows you to make the most of email marketing and generate higher revenue from your campaigns.
