Your reputation precedes you, even if you’re an email.

In the digital marketing world, IP reputation measures how trustworthy or authentic an email is, based on a variety of factors. For example, a low reputation may be the result of multiple users marking your emails as spam. Similarly, targeting inactive or indirect leads can also contribute to a low reputation since they’re less likely to open your emails in the first place. 

A bad reputation is, indeed, a bad thing. It can further exacerbate deliverability issues, leading your emails to be blocked or sent to the spam folder. Here are a few tips to help improve and maintain your IP reputation.

Step 1: Understand where you stand.
If you suspect your IP reputation might not be great, the best first step is to more fully understand where the problem lies. 

• Use Postmaster Tools: Recently, we were asked to help improve a new client’s IP reputation. When we examined the distribution list, we noticed that the majority of recipients were using the Gmail domain. Therefore, we used Google Postmaster Tools to understand how Google was perceiving emails. If your majority domain is Yahoo, then use Yahoo Postmaster Tools, and so on, to best understand your current IP reputation.
  
  
• Understand the Engagement: If you have multiple IP addresses, and others have a positive IP, use metrics like Opens, Clicks, Unsubscribes, Complaints, and Bounces from Email Service Providers (ESPs) to understand your benchmarks. This will give you a better sense of what to work on and measure against.

Step 2: Collaborate with an integrated team. 
At GALE, one of our core values is “no silos” and we believe that IP reputation issues are best solved when you collaborate and work cross-functionally. In the example we mentioned above, here’s how multiple teams helped fix the issue:

• Strategy Team: Helped us address complaints. We strategized that we could reduce recipient complaints (e.g., marking the email as spam) if we drove the likely complainers to the unsubscribe button instead. We experimented with the unsubscribe font and placement, moving it up to the top of the email. While you might think encouraging unsubscribes would hurt IP reputation, it’s actually healthy from a deliverability perspective – any migration of a complaint to an unsubscribe is a good thing.
  
  
• Creative Team: Helped us rethink the content. Due to historically low engagement, we hypothesized that including large images in our emails might make them more likely to be marked as promotional by ESPs. Therefore, we tested a non-image-based approach, focused instead on compelling, personalized copy. In this instance, it worked great, leading to a significant uptick in open rates.
  
  
• Data Team: Helped us to scrub our data. Instead of targeting all users in our records, our data team created new audience buckets: Engaged or Unengaged. Engaged users were defined by their open and click status over the past six months – anyone who did not meet the baseline metric was marked as Unengaged. Once filtered, all Unengaged users went through a validation process, checking for the record’s existence without having to send an email. All invalid or bad records were excluded from future campaign sends.
  
  
• MarTech Team: Performed a crucial IP re-warming exercise, using the best practices of email throttling. Many clients ignore the re-warming exercise, assuming that a one-time IP warming exercise is good enough for lifetime. This is wrong. You need to re-warm the IP whenever the reputation drops to bad/low. In this case, we started with our Engaged audience only, then slowly introduced the Unengaged (but valid) records into our campaign.
  
  
• Project Management & Client Partner Teams: Tracked and coordinated all the details and translated the tech jargon into client-friendly language to ensure a successful execution.
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Step 3: Test, Analyze, Learn, Re-Implement

As with any good email campaign, you’ll want to make sure you’ve got a learning agenda for each of your ideas. If you’re testing the placement of your ‘unsubscribe’ button, for example, make sure you’re tracking for a decrease in complaints and an increase in unsubscribes. Analyze user engagement fluctuations by leveraging a reporting dashboard and don’t be afraid to scrap ideas that are performing poorly. Using the available Postmaster Tools, continue tracking your IP performance as it moves up from low to high. 

The process of improving an IP reputation can take a couple of months, but following the steps and strategies above will help you achieve success. If you’re having trouble with your reputation or other deliverability issues, GALE is here to help.