Over time, your email campaigns may trigger the spam filters at the receiving mail servers. And this cumulative effect of your campaigns has an impact on your sending reputation. Your sending reputation can be good or bad. The status of your sending reputation depends upon a lot of factors such as your IP reputation and domain reputation. But in this article, we are going to focus on how your IP reputation can affect your email delivery. Let's get into details.
Partly, your sending reputation is associated with the IP address you are using to send your emails. With a bad IP reputation, your email open rates will decline considerably. Email open rate refers to a percentage of marketing emails that the target user opened. Ideally, your email open rate should be 15 to 25%
How to find out if you have a poor IP reputation?
One way to find out about your IP reputation is to analyze your results with the passage of time. Ideally, you should perform the analysis based on a lot of emails you sent over a long period of time.
Basically, you may want to look for trends, patterns, and irregularities. Therefore, if your open rates are lower than 20% or they are irregular, chances are that your IP reputation is not good enough.
If your open rates are steadily declining, know that it is a clear indicator that your IP reputation is bad and you need to repair it. If the recipients don't engage with your emails, mail servers may route, bounce or block your emails. As a result, the engagement rate will further decline and damage your IP reputation further.
A bad IP reputation will manifest in the form of declining or poor open rates. Besides, it will also have an impact on the receiving servers and they may bounce your emails.
Causes of bad IP reputation
Often, a bad or poor IP reputation is a commutative effect of the outcomes of the emails you sent. In other words, if your emails have low open rates, a high rate of bounce, and a lot of spam complaints, you will have a poor IP reputation as a result.
On the other hand, if you have high open rates, low bounce rates, and fewer spam complaints, you will enjoy a better IP reputation.
If you send a lot of emails to run your email marketing campaigns, it is important that all of your emails end up in the inbox. Even if your emails are legitimate, committing even a small mistake can change the route of your emails.
For example, if your customers don't receive confirmation emails after a purchase, they may choose to mark your email as spam. For online stores, emails are of Paramount importance. Therefore, you may want to take the right steps to improve your email deliverability.
Tips to improve your IP reputation
If you are worried about your IP reputation and its effect on deliverability, we have some good news for you. Regardless of the number of emails you send and your existing email sending tendencies, you can improve your IP reputation. If you put in plenty of effort and follow the best practices, most of your emails will land in the inbox instead of the spam folder.
Given below are a few tips that can help you improve your bad IP reputation so you can enjoy better email deliverability.
- Always use your Double opt-in lists
Always use your double opt-in lists to make sure your emails are sent to only those people who are interested in your products or services. This will result in a higher rate of positive interactions, forwards, saves, open, and clicks.
If you are going to send a lot of emails to an email list that you have purchased, you will experience a sudden increase in negative reactions, blocks, and spam complaints. All of this will have a negative impact on your IP reputation. So don't follow this practice.
- Warm-up your IP address
If you have a designated IP address and you are going to send bulk emails for the first time, you should warm up your IP address for at least 30 days. In simple terms, you should send your emails gradually over a period of 30 days, instead of one or two days. You should increase the volume gradually.
Why is it so important? The reason is that mailbox providers tend to flag new IP dresses that send too many emails in a short period of time. In other words, the practice of sending bulk emails with a new IP address will negatively impact your IP reputation, deliverability, and sender score.
- Don't use the same IP address for your marketing and transactional mail
There is a difference between transactional and marketing emails. Therefore, they receive different feedback from recipients. Transactional emails may include order receipts and confirmations. Since these emails are important to customers, they get positive engagement.
By contrast, marketing emails may include promotional offers. Therefore, they are not that important to customers and don't get that type of engagement. Therefore, the practice of sending the transactional and marketing emails using the same IP address may result in poor performance of your email marketing campaigns. They may even negatively impact your transactional email performance.
As a whole, if your emails don't do well, your IP reputation will suffer and most of your emails will end up in the spam folder.
It is important to keep in mind that the success of your email marketing campaigns depends upon deliverability. If your emails are blocked, bounced or rooted to the spam folder, your marketing campaigns will fail and you will experience a poor return on your investment.
With Mailpro, you don’t need to worry about your IP Reputation, as we have a team of experts Manage the Reputation of the Dedicated IP Pool we use for your sendings.