Overview

A major principle in achieving stellar deliverability is, building, maintaining, and sometimes repairing sender reputation.

A sender’s reputation is exactly as it sounds. It’s how one is perceived by the receiving community (i.e. mailbox providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, filtering solutions, such as Proofpoint, Mimecast, Symantec,  and hosting companies, such as Rackspace, GoDaddy and the like, as well as other receiving entities). It is important to note, both mailing IPs and domains are factored into the overall reputation equation.

As mentioned above, recipient engagement, or positive recipient interaction, is a key player in the overall reputation picture. In short, a client's deliverability success is highly dependent on that positive interaction. There are many different components of reputation but very heavily weighted is that recipient behavior / engagement metric.

The bottom line is (and this is not at all a new concept): Deliver “wanted” and relevant content. ISPs, mailbox providers, and others on the receiving end (or points in-between) are listening to their customers — customer is king.

What happens if my reputation goes south?

First, try to determine the root cause (did my content change, was there an import of a new list, was there a failure to capture adequate permissions or set expectations, or was there simply audience fatigue?). There are a number of conditions that could lead to a reputation hit, and most often times it is a combination of things.  Because of this band-aid solutions are not effective in addressing deliverability - trying to treat the symptoms of poor deliverability and a hurting reputation is ineffective.

Secondly, in addition to taking a look at the data coming in, scaling back engagement windows and sending to more highly active audiences will eventually build trust with the receiving entity over time. Shifts usually don’t happen overnight.  It probably took a while for the reputation to get to where it is now and it will take some time for the trend to be reversed assuming you are committed and measured in the approach.

Curious about your sending reputation? Want more information about how your deliverability is? Reach out to your Client Success Manager to set up a call with Cordial’s Deliverability Team for a more personalized conversation.