It is essential to ensure the good reputation of your emails and to get positive results combined with your brand using email marketing, achieve a satisfactory rate of deliverability and reach an above average ROI. To make it happen, you need to send emails only to contacts who are interested in your messages because only one person who feels uncomfortable is able to ruin a well elaborated strategy completely, and of course we do not want that to happen, right? To help you understand why and how a bad reputation may affect your emails, and what to do to avoid that, we have prepared a practical guide containing tips that will help you make good use of your Emailmanager platform.

The importance of a good reputation in email marketing

When sending email marketing, all factors involving such delivery are evaluated by servers that receive messages, such as the amount of returns,  number of interactions, number of opt-outs, amount of spam complaints etc. All thal affects the reputation of your email account. This reputation determines how the email server of your recipient sees your email marketing and makes deliveries.

The senders who are considered suspects are at risk of being marked as spam - which harms the open rate. But if you have a good email reputation, your results will be better, because there are more assurances that the delivery of emails in the inbox of your recipients will occur.

A good reputation is critical to the success of your email marketing strategies. It is the way to ensure that your message will be read by the recipient. Let's assume that email marketing is the source of direct communication with your customers. Thus, your contact base needs to be organized and ready to work for you. However, most companies commit the same mistake: put every email in one list, without making any kind of segmentation. And the worst: they use only the email, without any additional data, such as the contact name. Thus, they miss the chance to establish a more personal communication with their audience, and more, there’s no point having a list of contacts interested in your messages if you do not send the right message to the right person. Only a small part of the companies perform segmentation in their contact lists, and perhaps this occurs by the lack of awareness of the potential benefits of this practice.

List Segmentation: What it is and how to apply it

Segmenting is an art! It’s mandatory to realize the individualities behind every email because there's a person there. People are unique, each one has its own characteristics, thoughts, stories, opinions and preferences. Any business, online or offline, need to realize this need, because only then they will really know who their your audience is, and they will get the most out of these differences. Finally, it’s required to discover the characteristics and preferences of the audience and group these people according to the preferences in different sets. Take a look at this blogpost: Email Marketing Strategies: surefire tips to segment your contact lists,

You can still access the help guide Managing contacts and filters for lists segmentation in email marketing  in Emailmanager site. In this guide you will learn how to create, organize and manager your contact base.

Lists cleaning to improve the performance of your email marketing

In addition to lists segmentation, you need to perform periodic cleaning of your contacts to identify potential spam traps, bounces or unknown users, and avoid putting your email marketing campaigns at the risk of being directed to junk mail or even be blocked by the providers of recipients.

An unknown user is defined as an invalid address or nonexistent email in your contact base. They can join your contact list in different ways, but the most commons are through typing errors (e.g. email@htmail.com instead of email@hotmail.com) or people who informed false addresses purposely. One way to prevent this is through the double opt-in, since the reported addresses only join the database by a confirmation sent to the email in question. If the mechanism is simple, not requiring confirmation by email, these problems may exist, such as what happens through the form filling.

Remember: a high number of unknown users or errors on your list is a sign that you are not practicing proper data collection, and this can lead to deliverability problems. Most providers tolerate up to 10% of unknown users, but as it approaches or exceeds 10%, you may suffer declines in delivery performance. We observed that the best senders with high rates of deliverability keep unknown user rates below 2%.

How to clean your contact list

To start, ask subscribers to confirm their email address by sending them a confirmation email. In case you also collect emails in the offline world or in other ways, check all registered email addresses to confirm that they are in the right format (nome@domain.com).

Establish a routine to clean your contact lists separating the emails that have not interacted for more than 180 days or have just never interacted, since addresses like that might be spam traps, are no longer active or have been abandoned by the owners. Also, watch the so-called "disposable email", which are temporary email addresses created through specific services that allow users to receive email in an address that expires after a certain period of time.

In order to carry out the cleaning of your contact base, or even target your contacts to create distinct delivery groups, you can apply the filter segmentation available in Emailmanager platform.

Access the article How to segment your contacts with interaction filters and learn step by step how these filters work and how you should define the conditions to be used.

Feedback loops are allies of deliverability

Don’t you think it would be useful to know who is reporting your emails as spam? This is possible with the Feedback Loop, a resource created by Return Path, a company focused on 'intelligence email', which consists of an alert system via email, with the goal of knowing when a user marks a message as junk or spam. Spam complaints about your email marketing campaigns have a huge impact on your reputation as a sender.

The feature works as a tool for servers to monitor the abuse on their networks. They are also available for senders who would like to use the information to perform a cleaning on their contact lists and gain insights about what may be negatively affecting their email marketing strategy.

Access the article How Feedback Loops Analysis Enhance Deliverability in Email Marketing to get access to providers that use the functionality and learn how complaints can help your domain!

In short, there’s no point in having fancy ideas if your email marketing strategy is not well planned and does not count on a good delivery tool help. Having such care will help ensure that your brand has a good email reputation and the message reaches the recipient, increasing the ROI of your email marketing campaigns. And now that you know what it takes to have a good reputation in email marketing, just put your strategies in practice!

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