Digital White Papers

38 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER MARKETING AND BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Got a Bad Rep? Email Reputation and How To Improve It a lile from measurement service to measurement service. And your score will go up and down over time. Send a large mailing out to a bad list and it will go down; send a large mailing to a clean, current list and it will go up again. When your reputation score is higher, more of your email messages get delivered. Understanding the Impact of Your Email Reputation Why pay aention to email reputation now? While the concept of email reputation has been around for several years, it is now a "front marketing office" concern. In the past, it was treated as a backroom, technical issue. However, because marketers in effect build their own reputation, and because that reputation affects deliverability, you need to pay aention. The profile of email reputation is also rising because the internet is groaning under the weight of huge slabs of spam. According to TrendMicro's tracking, one billion email messages are sent every day, the majority of which are junk. The keepers of the web are trying to tackle this issue, and email reputation is one route, and your email reputation score is what the internet uses to judge whether you are trustworthy as an emailer. As a rule of thumb, scores in the 90 to 100 range mean your email messages will go through virtually all the time. Once the score goes under 80, your deliverability rates decline. Score under 60, and your email messages will struggle and risk being blacklisted. What you do influences the score, but the score itself is produced by third parties. The only way to change your score is by changing your actions. How To Improve Your Email Reputation What should you do about your reputation? The first task is to find out the scores of the domain names for which you're responsible by contacting one of the services listed above. Whether your score is good, bad or in between, you then need to put procedures in place to monitor your email reputation score going forward so you can keep an eye on how it's performing. Marketers should also do what they can to increase their score, including: » Avoid purchased mailing lists » Use only opted-in lists » Avoid old mailing lists » Put systems in place to avoid resending messages to recipients that produce a bounce back until the recipient is validated (technology exists that will do the validation for you) One billion email messages are sent every day, the majority of which are junk.

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