Sender Reputation & Email Deliverability

Understanding Sender Reputation

Sender reputation and its effect on email deliverability can sometimes feel like unknowable black magic. But with a little knowledge, it’s not as mysterious as it might seem, and email senders who follow best practices should have little trouble developing a great sender reputation. SparkPost’s team of email pros has put together this guide to help you with what you need to know.

Key rules for sender reputation

The fundamental factors that shape sender reputation include:

• Opt-ins are most important
• If people do not want your mail, your reputation suffers
• Receivers and metrics are judge and jury when it comes to getting delivered to the inbox
• You can not transfer your reputation from your previously used IP address
• Domain reputation can follow you, however. ISPs like Gmail use the reputation of the domain coupled with the reputation of the IP address. A careful warm-up process is critical.
• Reputation is empirical. ISPs trust metrics from their users and what they observe—no brand, big or small, will get special treatment over any other.
• B2B senders must follow the same warm-up process as B2C senders, especially because an increasing number of business domains are now hosted by mailbox providers like Yahoo, Outlook, Gmail, AOL, etc.