5 Proven Strategies to Boost Your Email Reputation in 2024
Table of contents
Suppose you want to start your company newsletter. The way you’d typically do this is to purchase an email list from lead providers, sign up for an email marketing platform, and start sending weekly or monthly newsletters to your contacts.
But you are not ready for the twist.
Your emails end up in the spam folder of your contacts. Before you can ask, you’d be surprised to know that this can happen even if you have a reputed domain.
So then, why are your emails going to spam? It happens due to your poor email sender reputation, which is a factor that determines your email’s deliverability.
So, if your emails are landing repeatedly in the prospects’ spam folders, you basically need to up your email reputation. In this guide, we will discuss how email reputation works, why it matters, and tools to improve it.
Table of Contents
- What is email reputation?
- 5 Factors affecting email reputation score of an organization
- How to check your email reputation score?
- Paid services for in-depth analysis
- The future of email reputation and the role of AI in reputation scoring
- Conclusion
- Frequently Asked Questions
What is email reputation?
Your email sender reputation score is determined by combining your IP address, domain reputation, and email content. Inbox providers like Gmail or Outlook track this score every time you send an email, and this reputation score decides if your emails will reach a recipient’s primary inbox, promotional inbox, or spam folder.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) assign email reputation scores to organizations or individual email senders. Typically, this score is estimated on a scale of 0 to 100. The higher the score, the better your chances of not landing in the junk folder.
The average score range is as follows:
- 0 to 70: Poor score and you are likely to be blocked by inbox providers
- 70 to 80: Good email reputation score
- 80 or above: Best email reputation score range but difficult to achieve and maintain
Tools like Sender Score estimate email reputation scores. To get your email sender reputation score, go to the platform and add your domain or IP address.
Why does email reputation score matter for businesses?
A high email sender reputation score ensures smooth deliverability. Alternatively, a poor reputation score could mean landing in recipients’ spam folders. It could further mean inbox providers blacklisting your email ID for a temporary period or even suspending it permanently.
A declining email reputation score indicates credibility issues.
Suppose an online store is sending an email to a user with a code or OTP to complete a transaction, or an enterprise is sending a password reset link to a user who forgot their password. In both situations, if your reputation score is weak and the emails go straight to the junk folder again and again, it will not only affect user experience but also the credibility of your brand.
Here is an example of an email that reached our spam folder. Watch how Gmail points out that the email could be dangerous and alerts us that we don’t take any actions based on the instructions of this email:
Based on the content or sender history, Gmail flags this sender as ‘dangerous’.
Without a high reputation score, your business can be flagged by inbox providers
5 Factors affecting email reputation score of an organization
Before you try to improve your email reputation score, it is important to identify what affects it.
The five factors directly impacting email reputation score are as follows:
- IP reputation
- Domain reputation
- Content reputation
- Quality and hygiene of email list
- Spam complaint rate
Let’s understand each factor in detail:
IP reputation
An Internet Protocol (IP) address is a numerical address unique to each device. A bad IP reputation indicates that you have a record of sending malicious emails. Email inbox providers estimate your IP score to decide whether your email will be sent to the inbox or spam folder.
Maintaining a healthy IP reputation is non-negotiable for businesses sending bulk emails regularly. Use tools like Talos by Cisco to check your IP reputation score.
Simply enter your IP address in the search bar to get your IP reputation score. A score between 0 and 70 indicates a poor IP reputation.
Domain reputation
Your email domain appears in the ‘From’ section of an email.
Suppose the sender’s email ID is – [email protected]. Here ‘xyz.com’ is the sender’s domain.
Similar to IP address reputation, domain reputation is also directly responsible for email deliverability. A good IP reputation cannot prevent an email from reaching the junk folder if your domain reputation score is poor, and vice versa.
Email inbox providers estimate domain reputation scores before taking action on email delivery. Factors that impact your domain reputation include email sending history, authentication of the domain, and email content.
‘Talos by Cisco’ also helps you detect your domain reputation score. Make sure to track the score regularly and take the necessary actions to improve your domain hygiene.
Content reputation
The content of your email directly affects its reputation. If your brand is infamous for sending spam emails, using clickbait subject lines, and using salty words and phrases in the email body, inbox providers will consider your content reputation score to be weak.
Here are a few quick tips to maintain a decent content reputation score:
- Create short, catchy, descriptive subject lines
- Avoid using words or phrases like ‘Free’, ‘Cash’, ‘Donate’, ‘Discount’, ‘Cheer Up’ in your emails, be it the subject line or email body. If you have to use these words, limit their usage. Such words create ambiguity, and inbox providers might consider them spammy
- Avoid using too many symbols or punctuations in the emails, specifically in the subject lines. Symbols and punctuations like ‘%, $, !!!, ????, ……, !!??’ trigger spam filters and might get your emails deleted
- Not providing the ‘Unsubscribe’ option clearly within the email can also create confusion about your brand’s credibility
Quality and hygiene of email list
The quality and hygiene of your email list matter. Whether you purchased an email list from an online provider or built an email list from scratch, ensuring the quality of the list can be difficult.
What if there are emails with malicious domains in the list? It is also possible that some email addresses have become obsolete with time, and the users no longer use those IDs.
And if you continue to send emails to these disposable IDs, there will be higher bounce rates and lower email open rates. When your emails are not delivered or opened regularly, inbox providers tend to take predictive actions against your domain.
Spam complaint rate
Your email reputation can be directly affected by the number of spam complaints. While you maintain all the best practices for email reputation, some users may still find your email content threatening. And when that happens, they will mark your email as spam.
If this continues, it shows that something is significantly wrong with your email strategy, be it the content, domain, value mismatch, or any other factor that users are finding unsafe.
A high spam complaint rate negatively affects your email’s deliverability and reduces your credibility, resulting in a poor reputation score.
How to check your email reputation score?
There are both free and paid tools to check your email reputation score. Here are our top picks:
Free tools for reputation monitoring
Google Postmaster Tools
This email reputation tool is specifically designed for Gmail users. It provides email senders insights into domain and IP reputations, spam complaints against your email ID and other deliverability errors that can affect your reputation score. It offers overview into all email metrics within the Gmail ecosystem and enables you to become an authenticated email sender.
Price: Free
Cisco Talos Intelligence
Cisco Talos Intelligence helps you monitor your domain and IP reputation scores in real time. It categorizes reputation scores into different categories, such as Good, Poor, and Neutral. These insights help brands gain more control over email deliverability issues so they can take the correct actions to improve their reputation.
Price: Free
Paid services for in-depth analysis
Sendforensics
Sendforensics applies machine learning technology to analyze and identify potential spam issues in your emails. It analyzes domain and IP reputation scores, spam complaint rate, and bounce rate to assign a deliverability score to your emails accordingly.
This tool’s intuitive dashboard shows you the big picture of your email reputation, helping you visualize trends and performance issues directly affecting deliverability. Sendforensics’ 24/7 infrastructure monitoring ensures you receive deliverability alerts and reputation signals instantly.
Price: Starts from $39/month
InboxAlly
InboxAlly helps you send large volumes of emails without landing in spam folders. Compatible with all inbox providers, this tool focuses on improving your domain reputation to increase email open rates. It tracks your emails’ engagement in real time and offers spam recovery suggestions.
Price: Starts from $149/month
Lemwarm
Lemwarm helps you send bulk emails gradually to up to 10,000 subscribers to improve domain reputation and email open rates. The tool provides alerts about email deliverability scores and detects spam risks in advance. It analyzes your sending history, domain, and email content to provide intelligent suggestions for increasing the deliverability rate. Lemwarm’s detailed deliverability report helps businesses send emails without getting backlisted.
Price: Starts from $24/month
The future of email reputation and the role of AI in reputation scoring
HubSpot’s State of Marketing Survey 2024 shows that 49% of marketers use AI to generate email content. But the question is, how will email deliverability and reputation be affected due to the increased use of AI?
Here are a few observations and thoughts we have about the role of AI in email reputation management:
AI tools will be heavily used for email list management
A clean email list can directly impact your email deliverability. While it is impossible for email marketers to nitpick email addresses and validate them, AI can do it in seconds. In 2025 and beyond, more AI-powered tools that help email users identify and remove inactive email addresses will enter the market. They’ll help perform regular health checks of email IDs which in turn contributes to a high email reputation.
AI tools will dominate email spam detection and content optimization
AI technology is already a top choice for marketers when creating email content. Soon, AI will also optimize email content and detect spam scores. You can easily feed GenAI tools with set guidelines and checklists to write authentic emails and run your email content through it to improve an email’s content reputation.
AI tools will be an integral part of email performance monitoring
AI tools will soon be used heavily to identify the real-time performance of your emails. By performance, we don’t mean email metrics like open rate, bounce rate, etc. AI will delve deeper to identify how these metrics are affected by your poor domain and IP reputation scores with real-time suggestions to fix it.
Conclusion
While using email reputation trackers is a good idea, these tools might not always be enough to improve your reputation score. Improving your email reputation score is a gradual process that takes a lot of effort, but a small mistake can take you back to square one.
We have a resource suggestion for you to learn more about email reputation:
Watch this video: How to recover the reputation of your email account
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is email reputation?
Email reputation is a score between 0 and 100 assigned by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) based on your IP address, domain, and email content quality. It determines whether your emails reach the recipients’ primary inbox or spam folder.
2. How do I check my email reputation?
You can check your email reputation using free tools like Google Postmaster Tools and Cisco Talos Intelligence or paid services that provide detailed analysis, such as Sendforensics, InboxAlly, and Lemwarm.
3. What is a good email reputation score?
A score of 70-80 is considered good, while 80+ is excellent. Anything below 70 is poor, which means that inbox providers will likely mark your emails as spam.
