If you notice your email deliverability is low despite your email being interesting and you follow the best practices, it could be because your sender reputation has been damaged. You need to repair your sender reputation to get your deliverability back on track so that you can engage effectively with your audience.


Reasons your sender reputation could go down

If your reputation has gone down, it could be because of several factors:

  • Your recipients have marked your email as spam due to the email content being irrelevant to them 

  • They could also mark you spam because you have sent emails to unengaged audiences or have sent unsolicited emails to people who didn’t opt-in to hear from you

  • Your emails have a high hard bounce rate which could be due to invalid or deactivated email addresses

  • Your email lands in a spam trap due to acquiring databases with poor hygiene and not cleaning lists regularly


When should you repair your sender reputation?

If you notice email deliverability issues, it is a sign that your reputation has gone down. It is best to act quickly and fix your reputation immediately.


As email deliverability is directly proportional to sender reputation, take the following measures to boost your reputation.


Disable campaigns to disengaged users

If you are running any journeys or campaigns to your disengaged users to nurture them, it is suggested to disable them. Since these campaigns typically exhibit lower engagement rates, pause until your reputation goes up.


Set up a re-warm up schedule

While you re-warm your domain, it is important you are sending emails to the right set of engaged audiences. Monitor open rates, clicks, and click through rates to identify the segment of audience who engaged with you. Learn more about warming up schedule here.


Clean up your contact lists

Frequency of cleaning up your contact lists depends on the frequency you get new subscribers. Ideally, you should run a quick quality check on your email lists once every quarter. However, if you see any changes in your deliverability or engagement rates, it is suggested to check your lists for any anomalies.

  • Start with the most active lists when you start cleaning. 
  • Use email verification tools to check for invalid emails, spam traps, typos, and duplicate contacts. 
  • Enable double opt-in while signing up to prevent invalid emails or errors in your lists.


Beware of spam traps

A spam trap is an email address used by ISPs as bait to catch spamming activity. Spam traps analyze the email content, identify, and block spamming email ids. There are several types of spam traps. Pure spam traps are email ids specifically created by ISPs and are never associated with any person. Recycled spam traps are emails which were once legitimate but later have been repurposed to become spam traps, like an ex-employee’s email id. Typo spam traps aim to look legitimate, so they have subtle typos, such as xyz@gmial.com or abc@yaho0.com


Avoid spam traps by

  • Try to avoid purchasing or scraping to build email lists
  • Using email validation in forms to avoid errors and typos
  • Enabling double opt-ins to let subscribers verify email addresses after signing up
  • Keeping your contact list up to date by removing bounced and unsubscribed email ids and periodically validating your email lists using email validation tools
  • Practicing ethical, permission-based email marketing

Set up dedicated sending infrastructure

Dedicated domain setup 

A dedicated domain lets you send emails which look like they have been sent through your brand and gives you complete control over your sender reputation. You can verify your domain on the web application by going to Admin settings > Domain verification.


If you set up your dedicated domain, you need to warm up your domain again to build your reputation before you send emails in higher volumes.

Dedicated IP setup

If you have lower sending volumes, a shared IP should be sufficient to send your emails and maintain your reputation. However,if you use a dedicated IP, you will have complete control over your sender reputation and it won’t be affected by the reputation of others using the same IP. This would be beneficial, if you plan to send large volumes of emails. Having a dedicated IP also makes it easier to find the root cause of deliverability issues, if you face any. 


Measure performance

As you warm up your account, continue tracking your email metrics and regularly clean your email lists to ensure a good sending reputation. 


These simple steps can help you engage with your potential customers and drive business impact using email as a channel.