We often emphasize the benefit of a strong sending reputation. It is important to verify your email sending reputation frequently, and we’ll explain why.
By concentrating on your engagement metrics, such as opens and clicks, and reputation stats, such as spam complaints and spam traps, you’ll arrive at a better understanding of how your email messages are being received by your list members.
If you’re looking for an online tool to verify your email sending reputation, we’ll give you a handful of resources you can check out right now.
Before we discuss the 5 sites that will help you check and verify your email sending reputation, let’s look at the distinction between domain reputation and IP reputation.
Domain reputation
Ok, let’s begin with the basics, many of which you may be already familiar with. The domain you choose for sending your email messages, like doneforyou.com in name@doneforyou.com, has its track record. The reputation depends on a lot of aspects.
It’s important how old is the domain. For the initial 5 days or so after a domain is registered, it is by default marked as suspicious. Online reputation is a thing you can only earn over time. It’s better to warm up all the emails on such a fresh domain by sending just a few emails per day during the first 4 weeks after the registration.
Another crucial determinant of domain reputation is in which industry it belongs to. Is it business, finance, education, government, gambling or dating?
See the full list of Cisco Web Usage Control Filtering Categories
If you’re looking to minimize the risk of being marked as a spammer, you’d want to register a separate domain for outgoing campaigns to have a better control over your domain’s reputation. You have to keep in mind, however, that a brand-new domain needs about 1-2 months to earn a good reputation. That’s why you should warm up all the email addresses on the new domain before you start sending email marketing campaigns on a regular basis.
How to warm up an email address on a new domain?
To warm up an email within a new domain, you send just a few email messages a day. You should also receive some emails, so it’s good to respond to some of the emails you send.
Start sending very slow. Send around 10, then ten more, and then 30 emails a day. Ideally, send them manually. Avoid email blasts before you’re done warming up your new email. Start sending the actual email blasts no sooner than after a full week.
Then make sure you don’t go from 20 or 30 emails a day straight to 1,000 messages a day. Such a behavior will alert your email service provider. Email providers use a filtering system that allows them to automatically track and analyze the volume of email going out from every mailbox. An extreme increase in the sending volume is something that alarms their anti-spam filters.
Your campaigns shouldn’t include thousands of recipients. Keep your email blasts but more precise and small by segmenting your list and personalizing your emails. Remember that your follow-ups are also sent from the same email address. That’s why up the smaller the number of emails you send a day the smoother your outreach campaigns will run.
Server IP reputation
Except for the domain reputation, there’s also the reputation of your email server IP. That relies significantly on your email solution provider.
You will be assigned an IP from Google if you send your messages using an email supplied by Google. If you use a mailbox created on your host server (you don’t use Google, but have an SMTP and IMAP set up on your server) you will get some IPs from the server host (e.g. GoDaddy).
In some cases, the IPs you get from your email provider or from your service provider have already some reputation– poor or good. That’s why it’s crucial to look at your email server IP prior to you start sending.
Verify your email sending reputation with these 5 tools
Now, here are the 5 tools you can use to check your sender reputation.
1. ReputationAuthority.org
WatchGuard’s ReputationAuthority enables business and government organizations to protect their inboxes from unsolicited email and web website traffic that contain junk mail, malware, spyware, malicious code, and phishing attacks. You can look up your IP address or domain name, receive a reputation score from 0-100, and get the proportion of emails that were bad versus good.
2. TalosIntelligence.com (former Senderbase.org)
Talos Intelligence is a service that allows you to search by IP, domain, or network owner for real-time threat data. It provides you with the solutions to check your reputation by rating you as Good, Neutral, or Poor. Good implies there is little or no threat activity. Neutral means your IP address or domain is within reasonable levels, but may still be filtered or shut out. Poor suggests there is a problematic degree of spam activity and you are likely to be filtered or blocked.
3. SenderScore.org
Similar to a credit score, a sender score is a measure of your reputation. Results are calculated from 0 to 100. The higher your score, the better your online reputation and the higher your deliverability rates. Reputation is calculated on a rolling 30-day average and shows where your IP address ranks against other IP addresses. This professional service is offered by Return Path.
4. BarracudaCentral
Barracuda Central has records of IP addresses for both known spammers as well as senders with good email practices. Barracuda Networks offers both an IP and domain reputation search via their Barracuda Reputation System; a real-time database of IP addresses with “poor” or “good” reputations.
5. TrustedSource
McAfee TrustedSource is a site similar to Talos Intelligence but owned by McAfee. It offers an online tool that enables you to check if a domain is categorized within various versions of different spammer databases. It provides details on both your domain’s email and website reputations as well as partnerships, domain name system (DNS), and mail server info. It also provides information on the history, activation, and affiliations of your domain.
Sending reputation wrap-up
Your email reputation is generally in your control. You can verify your email sending reputation by using any or all of the tools found in this article. It is important that you’re being proactive about your email deliverability.
While these reputation monitoring methods and tools are of great help, when you want to verify your email sending reputation, they are not the dominant metric by which you should determine the health of your entire email marketing plan.
They are best if you take them as one source of information and analyze them along with additional metrics of your email campaigns. You can often see email senders with sender scores around 98-99 that are still having a difficulty to reach the inbox. It’s important to know this fact; Jjust because you get a high score on one of these sites, where you verify your email sending reputation, it doesn’t signify you won’t be getting throttled, sent to the spam folder, or blocked straight up.
If you’d like a more comprehensive look at why you’re marketing email isn’t getting to where it should be, make sure to schedule an Action Plan call with us!
