If your email deliverability has been off for a while, you might find that your sender reputation is a little worse for wear. 

It’s a simple formula. Good reputation=good deliverability=happy mailing lists. 

Lots of email deliverability issues can be fixed pretty quickly with basic troubleshooting methods. However, if your email reputation is damaged, it’ll take a little bit more than that. 

⚡How do I check my sender reputation?  #

You can (and should!) keep an eye on your sender reputation, by using tools such as SenderScore, Google, and Klaviyo.

On Klaviyo, click to the Deliverability Hub, and have a look at your score. 

If you check this regularly, you should be able to avoid any serious damage to your sender reputation. 

But, if your deliverability does drop, and you think your reputation might be to blame, don’t panic! We discussed this concept in our domain credibility article. Improving your sender reputation involves warming up your domain.

This can be done in several ways. 

1. Focus on more engaged customers⚡ #

Sender reputation is impacted by poor deliverability, poor engagement, and high complaint rates.

This means that, while you repair, you need to focus on those recipients who are most likely to engage positively with your marketing. 

For the next 2-4 weeks, move winback and re-engagement flows to drafts. You can return to them when your email domain is feeling better.

Meanwhile, segment your audience into new groups. Focus on those who have engaged positively in, say, the last three months. 

If, after those initial weeks, your reputation is struggling, bring it down to those customers who have engaged positively in the last month alone. 

Now, this doesn’t mean bombarding your loyal customers with emails. Remain consistent with your schedule. If you suddenly start sending them loads, they’ll move over to the list of unsubscribers, too.

It’s all about being content with sending out fewer emails, just for a short period. 

2. Improve your opt-in and opt-out procedures⚡ #

Your sender reputation might have been damaged by people’s complaints, or by automatic spam filters getting the wrong idea. This issue tends to be related to the ease of your opt-out procedures, and the clarity of your consent collection. 

To improve your sender reputation, it’s a good idea to go back to these. We recommend that you:

• Implement a double opt-in procedure – This means that those who sign up to your mailing list then get sent an email asking them to consent to receiving email marketing. In this way, you can be sure that people definitely WANT to be on your mailing list. You’re therefore less likely to get spam complaints in the future. 

• Make opting-out clear and easy – You should include an obvious option so that people can opt-out as soon as they wish. 

3. Clear out your list⚡ #

Go through your mailing list and move those addresses which are no longer serving your business to suppression. 

CLARITY CORNER:

A suppression list is the list of those who have opted out, who should not be sent any emails. 

This might include: 

• Addresses which bounce 
• Those who have opted-out
• Subscribers who are now inactive
• Those who have complained that your emails are spam
• Invalid email addresses

4. Go back to your segments⚡ #

Once you’ve cleared out these addresses, you can think about segmenting your mailing list, to be certain of your campaigns’ relevance.

This comes down to whether your subscribers are feeling overwhelmed by the number of messages they receive from you. Overwhelmed customers are likely to unsubscribe or complain, and those things lead to negative sender reputation. 

Make sure that you are completing regular market research. It’s important to know who your audience is, and how you can best segment them, so that you find that balance between over-doing it, and under-selling your business. 

5. Authenticate your domain⚡ #

Have you got all the correct SPF, DMARC, and DKIM software in place on your domain?

If this sounds like a foreign language or something a robot would say, that’s totally fair enough. This is quite an in-depth topic. We have a whole series covering the how-to’s and the why’s which will help. 

6. Slow and steady⚡ #

Our final bit of advice is, ‘slowly but surely’. The process of improving your sender reputation will take at least a few weeks. 

Once you’ve established it again, and warmed up that domain, it can be tempting to try to make up for lost time. But we’re here to tell you: that time isn’t lost! Time you spent perfecting your brand is time well spent, even if emails were a little fewer and further between than usual. 

Besides, launching back in with a hefty campaign and sending lots of emails all at once won’t help you. It will just get you flagged as a bot. 

The best thing to do once you’re back on your feet is to create a schedule for yourself, using those new segments. Stick to this schedule, and you’ll be good to go.

⚡Zap that reputation back into shape! #

If you’ve looked over all this and are still finding that your emails just don’t end up where you want them, you’re not alone! 

Luckily, our team is here to help. If you want support and collaboration from a bunch of people who really know their stuff, send Zap a message today. We’ll get things moving again in no time.