Once the reputation of your email senders suffers, the deliverability and overall success of your email marketing can be severely affected.

In this blog, we explore the different ways you can control sender reputation and the actions you should prioritize to drive the success of future email marketing campaigns, including checking account performance, cleaning up lists, and implementing email verification.

How to Improve Your Bad Sender’s Reputation
As Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Mailbox Providers (MBPs) use intelligent algorithms to filter inbound email and secure inboxes, the amount of data used to assess sender reputation is growing.

This can be overwhelming for marketers when it comes to repairing the reputation of a damaged email sender. However, there are a number of actions you can take to start rebuilding your reputation and improve performance for future campaigns:

• Check your email performance over time
• Identify your problem metrics
• Check the content of the email you sent
• Clean up your email list and identify priority contacts
• Submit an event for reapproval
• Enable two-way confirmation and reCAPTCHA
• Implement verification
• Learn more about each step below.

1. Inspect your email performance over time
A sender’s reputation is built over time and it takes into account all the positive and negative aspects of your past email activities. As a marketer, it can be easy to focus on current or past campaign results. However, if you get a more complete picture of how your account is performing over time, you can see where your emails and metrics are starting to drop. You can then use this information to find ways to improve.

2. Identify your problem metrics
A successful email marketing campaign goes to the right people with the right content at the right time. Assessing the extent to which your past activities have achieved these goals can help you determine which areas you should prioritize for review.

If your email bounce rate increases, it could be a sign of low-quality contacts in your email list. Alternatively, if you notice consistently low engagement rates or an increase in spam reports or unsubscribes, this could indicate a lack of relevance in the content or timing.

3. Check your content
A lack of relevance and effective targeting can seriously impact the performance of your campaigns, which in turn can lead to a deterioration in your reputation. Aspects to check include:

Subject line – using words like free, offer, discount, and guarantee can trigger spam filters
URLs and Links – Assess the quality of all links in email copy and whether they are secure
Shortened URLs – these should be avoided as they look suspicious
Targeting – Are you effectively targeting your customers with your content? Using dynamic content can help make your campaign more relevant.

4. Clean up your list and identify priority contacts
Over time, your valuable contact list can become one of your biggest deliverability issues. If you don’t maintain and clean your lists on a regular basis, you run the risk of sending mail to inactive and unengaged subscribers, throwaway or spam addresses, and spam traps. Using a bulk email checker to remove those questionable addresses, removing completely inactive subscribers, and filtering out contacts who don’t have permission to receive your emails are just some of the ways you can improve your email list to clean it up.

Once your list is verified, you can identify your most engaged contacts. These recipients regularly open and read your emails and should be your priority contacts as you rebuild your reputation. By putting together a list of recipients, you can more easily customize your communications, which will help improve your engagement metrics.

5. Submit the event for reapproval
Since you’re focused on sending to a license-based list, it’s a good idea to start your requalification campaign. By sending this to contacts who occasionally or rarely engage in your activities but do not meet the criteria for complete removal, you are giving them new opportunities to update permissions or opt-out.

You can use this campaign to re-emphasize the value of communication and increase engagement. It will also serve as a way to further clean up your email list and prevent you from contacting irrelevant contacts in the future.

6. Enable two-way confirmation and reCAPTCHA
Adding two-way confirmation and reCAPTCHA to your registration process helps ensure you build a list of contacts that may be more active in the future. These processes also prevent spam addresses and bots from filling out your registration forms and adding questionable addresses to your list.

7. Implement email verification
Email verification tools check email addresses in real-time and tell you if they are valid, can receive incoming emails, and are likely to belong to a real person.

Most email verification products allow you to import a list of email addresses to verify, or connect them directly to your business system and register forms to verify emails as you capture them. Whichever method you choose, it pays to make it a regular part of your email marketing strategy so you can identify and address potential risks before your sender’s reputation is affected. This will also prevent you from inadvertently contacting:

• Known Spam Trap
• Disposable email address
• Spam or fraudulent addresses

These addresses are extremely difficult to detect and may be an unknown cause of email sender problems. To learn more about email verification and its benefits for email marketers,