Sender Reputation: The Road to Inbox Placement

Getting into your audience’s inbox all starts with sender reputation. It’s the most important factor when it comes to deliverability, and the domain you're using to send your emails is what holds the majority of that reputation.

Just because you end up in a spam folder doesn’t always mean you’re doing something wrong. And if you are, there are methods and strategies you can use to fix those issues.

In this episode, we talk about sender reputation by mailbox provider, ways to test your deliverability, why your reputation is always being evaluated, and more!

Main Takeaways

Each mailbox provider (e.g. Gmail, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.) has different ways of calculating sender reputation. Your sender reputation ends up being like a credit score except there's nowhere for you to find an exact number and exact reputation, and it isn't universally used by everyone in the same way.
One way to know if you're having a deliverability problem at a specific mailbox provider is to see if there's been an open-rate drop over time. If your open rate is dropping and you're still doing everything the same, then there's a good chance that they’re starting to send more of your messages to the spam folder.
Find ways to get your subscribers engaging with your emails. Ask them questions, get them involved in some way. The more they engage with your emails, the better your reputation will get. When subscribers aren’t engaging, scrub them from your main sending list.
Always strive to provide value for your subscribers. Think about the questions you’re regularly being asked, or the information people signed up to learn about. Use those as starting points for your content.

“At the end of the day, mailbox providers don't care that much about the people sending messages. They care about their subscribers (the recipients) because those are their customers. They want more people to use them as a mailbox provider and in order to do that they need to be good at filtering.” ~ @alyssa_dulin

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