With the holidays approaching, we can start to anticipate the volume of emails that will soon invade our inboxes. We can also anticipate a high amount of email deliverability issues. That is why it is important to be proactive about managing your member lists before the holidays to ensure successful campaign delivery.
Understanding Sender Reputation & Blacklisting
This is not the group you want to be in.
When sending out an increased volume of emails during the holidays (or in general), not only do you take the chance of sending out to the inactive contacts, unsubscribes and outdated emails in your database, you also put your sender reputation at risk and affect the ability to effectively communicate with customers and prospects in the future.
Sender reputation is based on a sender score ranging from 0 to 100 that is decided by an ISP (Internet service provider) to determine the trustworthiness of an email being delivered. The score is determined by the following factors: email list quality, volume of emails sent, number of spam complaints received, email content and sender authentication.
- Sender Score
- 0-10
- 11-20
- 21-30
- 31-40
- 41-50
- 51-60
- 61-70
- 71-80
- 81-90
- 91-100
- Delivered Rate
- 2%
- 6%
- 10%
- 11%
- 13%
- 20%
- 35%
- 56%
- 79%
- 91%
If an ISP deems that you are sending spam, your reputation score is lowered, which over time can lead to your IP address being blacklisted by an ISP. This means that your IP address and the domains that are sending out spam will be put on a list that anyone can query and block. Blacklisting lasts anywhere from one day to two weeks.
Cleaning Up Your Member List Before The Holidays
If you haven’t managed your member list in a while, here are some quick improvements that you can make prior to sending out your holiday campaigns.
Opt-Out Requests
The good thing about most email service providers is that they automatically remove subscribers after they have opted-out from your emails. Prior to the holidays, it is always good to double-check and make sure that their request has been granted and that they are not on the subscriber list to receive your holiday emails.
Bad Emails
Any emails in your database that are considered hard bounces (emails that don’t exist or the domain doesn’t exist) should be removed from your subscriber list if you haven’t already done so.
Inactive Subscribers
If you have subscribers who have been inactive in your database, but have not unsubscribed, be sure not to remove them. Many times with inactive subscribers, they are overlooked when there still is a good opportunity to re-engage with them. Best practice would be to send a re-engagement campaign before the holidays to re-establish a relationship with these subscribers.
The Takeaway
Successful delivery is crucial to everyone’s email marketing efforts. So before you send out your holiday campaigns, take the extra time to manage your member list and ensure the accuracy of your subscriber emails. You will be happy you did!
