Being an email marketer is like being a movie star

While reading an excellent post published by Hubspot on Sender Score – it struck me that when it comes to email sender reputation management, being an email marketer is a lot like being a celebrity.

Email sender reputation is a score assigned to the IP address from which your emails are sent. Based on this score, your emails will either be blocked or allowed to go through to the inbox. Celebrities have millions of fans all over the world, watching their every move. When they release a new movie, give an interview or choose a designer for the red carpet, millions of eyes are observing, assessing and (thanks to social media) discussing their latest activities. When you distribute an email campaign, you have millions of eyes ‘watching’ in the form of the mail servers you want to deliver to and the email recipients. How these parties treat your email will impact your ability to deliver future campaigns.

Celebrities have to manage the level of attention they get. If they disappear out of the limelight for an extended period of time or their work is inconsistent, their career is negatively affected. Similarly, an email sender must send consistent volumes of email at a regular frequency in order to maintain their sender score.

Fans are always comparing celebrities to other celebrities. What are they wearing/doing, who are they dating . . . and most importantly are they ‘A-list’ or have they ‘slipped’? In the same way, your sender IP is being compared to other senders in terms of complaints, blacklists and whitelists.

A bad database can seriously impact your reputation in the same way a couple of bad movies can sink a movie star (did Nicolas Cage ever really recover from Ghost Rider?). For email marketers; sending to unknown users, falling foul of spam traps or including recipients who are likely to complain due to lack of relationship or relevance, will have a negative effect on your ability to deliver.

Manage your way out

Just like a movie star you can manage your way out of a bad reputation with consistently good behaviour and choices:

• Be consistent in both the frequency of your sends and the volume of emails you send out.
• Track your email failures and do something about them. Repeatedly sending to an unknown address contributes negatively in a number of ways, including the risk of getting nailed by spam traps. Aim to get your email failures down to less than 1% of your base.
• Have a process to monitor blacklisting sites and if you get listed, make it a learning experience.
• Sign up for Email Feedback Loops with the major ISPs. This will enable you to monitor the number of complaints and spam reports you get from those recipients.
• When you introduce a new sender IP address, ‘warm it up’ by gradually increasing volume and frequency of sends.

How good is your email sender reputation? Do you have red carpet access to inboxes or a big black hole en route?