2 Ways to Improve Email Sender Reputation
Email marketing activities are only as good as their email lists. Every time you neglect cleaning your contact lists, you are placing your email sender reputation at risk. If your team is like most, there is room for improvement in your ability to gain better open rates and convert prospects with these email marketing best practices. In this article, we discuss two ways to maintain your email sending reputation which will help boost your email marketing strategy.
1. Dump your bad addresses
Majority of the email marketers rely on purchased lists or email extractors for running email campaigns. These email lists are a great way to reach larger targeted audience. However, they are not clean. These lists when used directly without any validations produce high bounce rates and spoils email sender reputation. This is another reason why Email Service Providers (ESP) such as MailChimp, HubSpot and SendInBlue suspend accounts if they see a high bounce rate on email campaigns.
Run your email addresses through a list validation tool (e.g., NeverBounce) to identify bad addresses. It won't prevent every type of email bounce, but it's a great place to start repairing and protecting your email sender reputation.
If you notice a lot of hard bounces or If you are emailing them after a long time say 1 Year, we recommend you to validate your list before running an email campaign.
2. Avoid sending emails to unengaged contacts
Even your highest performing email campaigns do not see a 100% Open Rates. The reason is that many of the contacts are busy and do not have time to over all the emails they receive. You may have consent to communicate with them over mail. However, you need to keep an active eye on the engagement rates to maintain a good email sending reputation.
Identify contacts that have not engaged with your emails over the last six months and run a re-engagement campaign to re-confirm their consent. Continuing to run email campaigns to them will result in spam traps and send clear negative signals to Mail Box Providers (MBPs). Marketing Platforms such as HubSpot care about email sending reputation and offers features to exclude unengaged contacts and run re-engagement campaigns.
In our experience, we have seen several of our clients facing challenges with reaching the target audiences. Their email campaigns have open rates ranging from 3%-7% (Industry benchmark is 22%) and bounce rates from 18% - 24% (Industry benchmark is 0.4%). dJolt, with our realm of experience in email marketing, offered them advice and executed a plan of action for repairing their email sender reputation. We have cleaned their email lists and warmed up their IPs instead of blasting out. Over time, the engagement rates improved and their bounce rates dropped down to 0.35%.
Bonus Tip:
Landing your email in the primary tab of recipients is important for email marketers to increase open rates and generate leads. Generally, Mail Box Providers (MBPs) analyze the email engagement and feedback reports before sending emails to the spam folder. When emails go to spam, it becomes difficult for marketers to gain engagement. With the latest technologies such as lemwarm, companies can warmup their email sending domains and avoid deliverability issues.
As an email marketing service provider, we have seen several of our customers facing deliverability issues with their email marketing campaigns. We have helped them with the right warmup strategy and gave their email deliverability a huge boost by using warmup tools and by sending personalized emails in chunks to real people. The end result was an increase in open rates by 4 times.
