Achieving Email Deliverability Excellence part 2: Understanding Email Send Score

In the world of email marketing, one of the key factors that determine the success of your campaigns is your email reputation score. This score, ranging from one to a hundred, plays a crucial role in determining whether your emails end up in customers' inboxes or get filtered as spam. While the content of your emails is important, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) primarily evaluate your reputation score when deciding the fate of your messages.

 In this post, we will delve into the concept of email reputation score and explore the major factors that influence it.

What is Email Send Score?

An email reputation score is a numerical value assigned to an IP address, indicating its credibility and trustworthiness as a sender. A higher score increases the likelihood of your emails reaching recipients' inboxes. To assess your reputation score, you can visit senderscore.org, a free email reputation evaluation tool provided by ReturnPath.

Factors Influencing Email Reputation:

Bounce Rates: 

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of undeliverable emails out of the total emails sent, encompassing both soft and hard bounces. Keeping your bounce rate below 10% is crucial for maintaining a positive reputation. Find detailed salesforce documentation can here.

Customer Behavior: 

Not only does customer behavior affect deliverability, but it also determines where your emails land in recipients' email folders. Positive behaviors, such as moving emails out of the spam folder, opening and replying to emails, contribute to a better reputation score. Conversely, negative behaviors, including spam complaints, deleting without opening, and lack of engagement, can harm your reputation.

Spam Traps: 

ISPs employ spam traps, which are email addresses explicitly set up to identify and trace spam senders. It is crucial to exercise caution when sending emails to avoid triggering these traps. There are two types of spam traps: recycled traps, which were once active email addresses but are no longer in use, and pristine traps, specifically designed to catch spammers.

Have you noted that I have not mentioned unsubscribes here? yes, unsubscribes don't have much say in your email reputation score.

Best Practices for Email Deliverability Optimization:

1. To improve your email deliverability and enhance your reputation score, consider implementing the following best practices:
2. Permission-Based Lists: Only email subscribers who have explicitly opted in to receive your communications. Implementing a double opt-in mechanism adds an extra layer of consent and is considered best practice.
3. Set Expectations: Clearly communicate the frequency of your emails to subscribers (e.g., weekly or monthly) and deliver content accordingly. Honoring the promised frequency fosters trust and reduces the likelihood of spam complaints.
4. Easy Unsubscribe Process: Provide a simple and straightforward mechanism for recipients to unsubscribe from their emails. This is not only good practice but also a legal requirement under the CAN-SPAM Act.
5. Email Authentication: Implement authentication protocols such as SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) to validate your emails and improve deliverability.
6. List Hygiene: Regularly clean your email lists by removing hard bounces and inactive email addresses. This practice helps maintain list quality and prevents sending emails to invalid or unengaged recipients.
7. Brand Recognition: Ensure that your emails are easily recognizable by using consistent branding elements such as your logo, colors, and formatting. This helps recipients establish trust and authenticity.
8. Personalization and Dynamic Content: Tailor your emails to individual recipients by leveraging personalization techniques and dynamic content. Providing relevant and customized experiences can enhance engagement and positively impact reputation.
9. Engagement Analysis: Monitor and analyze recipient behaviors to gain insights into why people may be complaining or not engaging with your emails. Use this data to segment your audience further and refine your email targeting

Find Salesforce help documentation for email deliverability best practices here

This is the second post in the series Achieving Email Deliverability Excellence. The first post was about things that help you in setting up the marketing cloud for email deliverability optimization.