What Is Reputation Monitoring?

Definition

Reputation monitoring is the process of keeping track of how people and systems perceive your email sender reputation. In email marketing, having a good reputation helps ensure that your emails are delivered to inboxes instead of spam folders or being blocked by email services or internet service providers (ISPs).

Businesses monitor their email reputation by checking factors such as:

• Bounce rates. The percentage of undelivered emails, or emails that don’t reach recipients, versus all sent emails.
• Spam complaint rates. Spam complaints can affect your sender reputation. As a result, your emails may be blocked by ISPs. Ideally, complaint rates should be close to zero or less than 0.1%.
• Recipient engagement. How do recipients engage with your emails? Do they open your emails or click on the emails’ CTAs or hyperlinks? Or do they delete your emails without opening them?
• Blocklists. If you are included in a blocklist, this can damage your reputation as a sender.

Example

Imagine you are a small online business that regularly sends promotional emails to customers. You notice that your emails are landing in spam folders instead of inboxes. So you use an email reputation monitoring tool to check your sender score and email deliverability. It reveals that your bounce rates are too high and that some customers have marked your emails as spam.

By monitoring your reputation, you realize that you need to clean your list and adjust email frequency to avoid being flagged as spam. After making these changes, your emails are reaching inboxes again.

The importance of reputation monitoring

Maintaining a good sender reputation is crucial because it’s tied to your email marketing strategy. Poor sender reputation can:

• Lead to a blacklisted domain
• Affect email deliverability
• Reduce message visibility and effectiveness
• Adversely impact credibility and customer trust

Reputation monitoring best practices

These tips can help you strengthen your reputation monitoring strategy:

• Follow email best practices. Segmentation, drip campaigns, and compliance with legislation like CAN-SPAM help protect your sender reputation.
• Monitor essential metrics. Check your open rates and engagement rates. A decline in these metrics can indicate poor sender reputation, which you need to address by improving audience engagement efforts, for example.
• Focus on permissions. Only send emails to users who agreed to receive them through methods like double opt-ins.
• Offer value. Send valuable and relevant emails that are timed right to keep your audience engaged. Don’t send too many emails too frequently.

Related terms

• Sender Score
• Email Blacklist
• Feedback Loop

Related articles

• How To Check Email Sender Reputation
• Email Deliverability: 101 Guide
• How To Improve Email Deliverability