An email sender reputation is a score that is assigned by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to an organization sending an email. There are a number of factors that impact your sender score, but in essence, the higher the score, the more likely the ISP will deliver your email to your recipients.
Email data degrades at an estimated rate of around 22% per year as people switch jobs, change addresses or retire. If you haven’t cleaned your data in over a year, not only are you potentially damaging your deliverability rates, but you are also paying to send emails to accounts that are no longer active.
A hard bounce is an email message that has been 'returned to sender' because of an invalidity.
The four hard bounces reported are:
1. Invalid Domain: domain sent to is invalid (e.g. hotmial.com)
2. Invalid User: local part of address doesn't exist
3. Other Bounce: undetermined bounce (can be SPAM related)
4. Over Quota: mailbox full
Soft bounces are direct responses to your campaign, which could be automated.
These fall under six categories:
1. Inbox: a response directly to the email
2. Flame: a response which contains profanity
3. Blocked: receiving mail server flagged the email as spam
4. Out of Office: automatic Out of Office reply
5. Address Change: response notifying of address change
6. Temporary Notice: general temporary notice reply
An address is categorized as a known bounce when three or more hard bounces occur over 16 consecutive days, with no soft bounces or successful deliveries in between.
Should a contact bounce multiple times with no successful deliveries, they will be added to an automatic suppression list. This will help to improve your deliverability rates by preventing further bounces.
Spam traps are a spam prevention method created by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and blacklist providers to lure in spammers and block them.
Spam traps don't belong to an individual and have no value in outbound communication. Since spam trap addresses never opt-in to receive emails, any inbound messages would flag the sender as a spammer.
IP warming is the process of gradually increasing the volume of email sent from one send domain or IP address. This helps to establish a reputation with the ISP before sending full email volume.
HighRoad Solutions' clients may participate in an IP Warming plan if they send very high email volume as a part of our standard onboarding process to help build sender reputation.
Security or identification protocols need to be configured by your IT team to prove to the server that you’re a legitimate sender, which lowers the odds of being flagged as spam or being spoofed.
Three types of identification protocols are:
Sender Policy Framework (SPF)
Domain-Based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC)
DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM).
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