There are so many reasons why you should consider email marketing as part of your marketing plan. Emailing is one of the easiest and most-effective way to communicate with a lot of people (from a few hundred to a thousand or more). What’s more, email marketing lets you connect with existing and potential customers in a more targeted manner.
But not every email marketing campaign succeeds. There are many factors that you should consider in order to achieve your desired results.
One of them is the Sender Score.
The Sender Score is a number between 0 and 100 that speaks of the sender reputation. It shows how your mailbox providers view your IP address.
Mailbox providers, such as Google, take a lot of things into consideration when determining your Sender Score. These include spam complaints, emails to unknown users, unsubscribing, industry blacklists, and more.
In what ways does your Sender Score affect your email marketing?
Verified email addresses increase Sender’s Score.
Ensuring that your campaigns get to their destination is crucial in the success of email marketing. Even if the email addresses on your list were obtained in organic ways and you followed the standards for email marketing, your campaigns still run the odds of getting marked as ‘spam’. When an email is sent to a verified and active account, your Sender Score increases. How do you validate email addresses? There are email validation tools, which make use of different metrics like basic syntax checks and mail server-level tests.
The higher the Sender Score, the higher ‘open rate’ will sender have in the result.
An email open rate is the percentage of all subscribers who opened your message. There are many things that affect the open rate for a particular email campaign. One is its relevance to the readers. It’s not enough that you have a lot of subscribers. You should also make sure that these people are interested in the products, services, or information you provide. Another thing is the Sender Score. Since a higher Sender Score ensures that your campaigns are sent straight to your subscribers’ inbox, the chance of your emails being opened is significantly higher.
A low Sender Score results in high bounce rates and campaigns marked as ‘spam’.
A lower Sender Score can mean that your messages are rejected either because some email addresses are invalid or due to a temporary delivery failure. The Sender Score is derived from proprietary Return Path algorithm and represents the overall performance of your IP address. It may also represent how messages are rejected, like for instance, bounced due to some policy reason (spam filtering or blacklisting) compared to other IP addresses.
A lower open rate could lead to poor sales and lower revenues.
Needless to say, fewer emails are opened, fewer sales are realized. For most email marketers, the Sender Score represents the overall health of their email programs and are calculated on a rolling 30-day average. This is a fairly good thing because it gives a chance to improve your score each month.
How do you improve your Sender Score?
First of all, be consistent. The number of emails you send and the number of subscribers that you send these emails to should be consistent. If you just started with email marketing, warm up your IP by sending to a small group of people and eventually increase it to avoid getting marked as ‘spam’. Beware of spam traps as well. These are false data records meant to catch brands sending to non-subscribers as these can hurt your sender reputation.
Email marketing is a highly effective channel for promoting your brand. It remains to be the most popular way for marketers to distribute contents and for businesses to build lasting relationships with customers. Nevertheless, it requires a lot of work too. One is making sure that you maintain a good Sender Score. Well, this is just one aspect. There are many other things that predict the success of your email campaigns. They include the delivery rate, bounce, and open rate, click-to-conversion rate, eCPM rate, and Lifetime Value per Email. Good thing, there are software and tools available for making your daily job easier, such as an all-in-one marketing platform.
Mailbox providers take a lot of metrics into account when determining your Sender Score. Like a credit score, your Sender Score it speaks of your reputation. By taking proper measures to maintain a good score, you are more likely to get amazing results from your email marketing efforts.
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