The Art of Deliverability #4: An Insight into Email Reputation

An Insight into Email Reputation

In a nutshell, reputation — or more specifically, domain reputation — can simply be defined as what various Mailbox Providers (MBPs) and their users think about you. Not you as a person of course, but as a sender, and to a lesser extent, what they think about us as your Email Service Provider (ESP).

What various MBPs determine isn't personal and isn't some kind of moral judgement, however. You could be a non-profit doing some incredibly good work in the world, but ultimately, if your email practices have been risky or misjudged in the past, you may have damaged your domain's sending reputation over time. This can translate into your emails being treated with more suspicion and caution by receiving servers, regardless of your organisation's aims and goals, meaning your campaigns could be filtered to the spam folder, or in more severe cases, blocked altogether.

The Evolution of Email Reputation

Over a decade ago, when Downton Abbey was still on our TVs and the PlayStation 4 had launched, it was all about IP reputation and campaign content. IPs were prized and becoming more scarce, and you needed to avoid using new-fangled terms like "Crypto" (pah, that'll never take off), or phrases like "Earn extra cash!", "Act now!", "Satisfaction guaranteed!".

While I doubt any of you would use those phrases (spoiler: you shouldn't), things have changed a lot since then. Spammers and phishers now have endless IPs to use, burn, and move on from, plus subject lines and keywords now play a much, much smaller role in whether an email gets junked or not.

For ‘fun’, I did try sending a campaign to a small number of my own addresses (those that I admittedly regularly use for testing, so have an existing engagement history with) giving it a subject of: "Act now for 20% off your next prescription! Limited time offer! Bitcoin accepted!"

And it did indeed make it to one of my Gmail Inboxes (via the "Promotions" tab), so it just goes to show: my previous history and engagement with this sending domain was more important in determining whether I wanted such a classy email or not, and whether it should be allowed through. Your mileage may vary however, and that's actually a key point.

The Inconvenient Truth

As my grandma used to say, what's true for the goose isn't always true for the gander, and one very important element to bear in mind is that just because your campaign makes it through to one person’s inbox, doesn't mean it'll make it through to another, even at the same domain. Your Gmail recipient may receive it in their Inbox, but your Yahoo! subscriber's email may go to the spam folder. Even more confusing; one Gmail recipient's email may land in the Inbox, whereas another Gmail user’s email may be filtered. What gives?

We'll get to that later, but one very important thing to do if you get a report from a recipient of yours who has found your campaign in their spam folder is, don't panic. Don't also assume it’s true for everyone, or even everyone at a particular domain. It may not.

The inconvenient truth is that there are a myriad of factors which determine your domain reputation and inbox placement at each MBP. There can be literally hundreds of real-time decisions being made about your reputation and campaign when it arrives, including your:

• Sending domain
• Associated SPF, DKIM and DMARC records
• Content and keywords
• Campaign links
• HTML code
• Inclusion of PDFs
• Current and past spam complaint rates
• Spam trap hits
• And much, much more

The truth is, it's impossible to predict and understand all of those decisions each and every time you send a campaign, because funnily enough, MBPs want to keep that information to themselves. Spoilsports.

It’s even more granular than that however, as not only will they assess much of this on a general domain-wide reputation level, but they will also apply much of that logic to individual addresses in your list as well, hence why some subscribers may see it in their Inbox and some may not.

What You Can Control

What we do know and can confidently say however, is that there are a number of key factors which play very important roles in assessing your reputation, and if you get those right, you'll give yourself the best chance of making it through to (everyone's) Inbox:

A Trusted ESP With Good Standing in the Community

This isn't the sponsored portion of the article, honest, however your ESP's IP reputation and infrastructure are what will get you to the door. From there however, your domain reputation and authentication ultimately decide how much further you go.

Marigold is a Full Member of M3AAWG (The Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group) and we also have strict anti-spam policies in place to ensure we and our customers remain compliant, along with a dedicated Compliance team who work hard to enforce them.

Our Deliverability team also continually monitor our platform, identifying and flagging issues quickly and effectively to help maintain a 99% delivery rate, year-in, year-out, even through busy times and crucial holiday periods.