In email marketing, there are a bunch of crucial elements that you should make sure to pay enough attention to. By doing so, you make sure that your email marketing campaign will be a step closer to reaching success. These elements include things such as good copywriting, personalization, reliability, et cetera. Among these elements, there is one that is more important than all the others: IP reputation. IP reputation is the first and most impactful element that will determine whether your email campaign will be successful or not. But what is IP reputation and why is it so important for email marketing?
What Does IP Reputation Mean?
IP reputation is basically a concept that refers to the level of reliability of the IP of the sender of an email. The reason for the concept of IP reputation to be this important is because ISPs (Internet Service Providers) are trying to protect their users from scams, trollers, spammers, and exploiters.
The way ISPs do that is by keeping a record of IPs that send emails to their users. If a specific IP has been spamming disturbing emails or trying to scam their users, they take that IP into a blacklist or spam list. This way, if the user of that IP tries to continue scamming or disturbing people, the ISP doesn’t allow their email to go to the inbox. Rather, it is sent to the spam box of the user. Not only does this prevent the user from being disturbed by scammers or spammers, but it only alerts the user if they decide to trust the email anyways.
In addition to the system analyzing emails in order to keep their users safe (while respecting the privacy of users), it also greatly depends on feedback and complaints. For example, if a user is upset about a sender that abuses their inbox, they can mark that sender as spam, which alerts the algorithm to inspect the sender and their IP in further detail.
However, due to the way the algorithms related to IP reputation system works, sometimes, your emails might go into your subscribers’ spam box due to misuse of your email campaign tools or simply poor application.
Why Is IP Reputation So Important?
There is a very simple and straightforward answer to the question “Why is IP reputation so important for my email campaign?”. IP reputation simply determines whether or not your email campaign will be successful. If you have a bad IP reputation, your subscribers will not be notified when you send them emails, and most of them will not even ever know that you are sending them emails. So, in order to protect and maintain the success of your email campaign, you sure would want to avoid your IP to have bad reputation. But. how do you do it?
How Do You Maintain A Strong IP Reputation?
There are actually a list of actions you can take in order to ensure a strong IP reputation for your email campaign. Below, we will mention some of the most important ones that will be enough to maintain the reliability of your IP.
Make Unsubscribing Easy And Quick
One of the greatest mistakes email campaign runners do is to make it hard for the subscribers to unsubscribe from their campaign. However bad it is to lose a potential customer/user, making it hard for your subscribers to unsubscribe is the last thing you would want to do.
Sometimes, people might not even remember subscribing to your campaign, hence, they can report you or mark you as spam if they can’t unsubscribe from your campaign easily, which will greatly harm your IP reputation. In order to ensure a strong IP reputation, you should minimize the complaints as much as possible.
The easiest and most efficient way to do so is by putting an unsubscribe button or link in every email you send to your subscribers. This not only will minimize complaints, but will also make your image stronger and more confident in the eyes of your subscribers. They will know that you don’t fear them unsubscribing from your campaign, since you know that you are more qualified than enough to keep and satisfy your subscribers.
Avoid Over-sending Emails To Your Subscribers
While one of the most important keystones of email campaigns is sending emails to your subscribers on a regular basis, sending too many emails at total or sending emails too frequently per subscriber might harm your IP reputation greatly. The important thing to pay attention to here is to know how many emails you should send per day. If you are not a multi-billion company with hundreds of verified IPs, you might want to keep a track of how many emails you send per day.
For example, if you have 10,000 subscribers in your campaign, and you want to send an email to all of them, you might want to divide these subscribers into groups, and send the email to only one group per day. While this is not a very big determinant in damaging your IP reputation for algorithms, it is still important, and unless you are a widely-known company, there is always the risk of getting into blacklists of ISPs if you overuse your IP to send emails.
Another and more important aspect to this is limiting the email count per user. For example, if you send 5 different emails to the same user in a day, it is quite possible that they will either get disturbed and mark you as spammer or simply the algorithm will automatically mark you as spammer due to oversending emails.
Use A Dedicated IP Address For Your Email Campaign
If you want to maintain maximum reliability on your IP, you should definitely avoid using a shared IP to send emails to your subscribers. The IP you use to run your email campaign should be a dedicated IP that is only used for only that email campaign.
Track Common Blacklists
Checking if your IP is on any common blacklists helps you make sure that your IP reputation remains strong. Periodically checking these blacklists and making sure that your IP is not on any of these blacklists is a crucial precaution to avoid falling into spam boxes.
If you detect your IP in one of these blacklists, you should definitely start working on de-listing your IP as soon as possible. While de-listing your IP from one of these blacklists might sometimes be very hard, you should not forget that the success of your email marketing campaign depends on it.
