6 Common Email Marketing Mistakes that Affect Email Sender Reputation

Email sender reputation is a huge factor impacting what gets to the inbox, what to junk, what gets deleted and what gets rejected. Email inbox providers determines the reputation of the IP address based on several factors that are the quality of information or content shared through email, level of engagement received from earlier email communications sent via that IP address, quality of email contacts whom email messages are being sent, trends and sequence of email sending volume, and many other factors. 

Major email inbox providers including Gmail or Apple check for email senders’ score or IP score or IP reputation or email sender reputation in order to verify if the email from your sender IP address should be delivered to the inbox. Email marketers need to ensure that their emails don’t get redirected to their subscribers’ spam folders and prevent denting the reputation of your sending IP address. Hence, email marketers need to guard against all probable email marketing mistakes to keep this reputation intact and avert the risk of getting their well-designed emails landing up in their subscribers’ spam folders. That’s why we have collated all common email marketing mistakes and how you can dodge those to save your potential resources to be wasted in reworks, lessening opportunities of revenue and yes, protecting your email sender reputation from being marked as spam. 

1. Storing misspelled email addresses

Marketers often mistakenly collect invalid email contact details which result from typo errors while recording contact details. Such typos can damage an email sender reputation or score significantly. How? Email hard bounces contribute to one of the most common causes of hurting an email sender score. If a collected email address is not valid, email delivery will fail to deliver and email service providers will reject the brand sending emails via their server since email hard bounce rates affect their sender IP reputation too. To avoid misspelled or email address type errors, marketers can use a tool to verify email addresses in real-time before adding the addresses to the CRM or the marketing funnel. Users also get notified on spotting an error in the email address helping them to correct the mistakes before sending even after accidental typos were added to the contact data. 

2. No periodic data cleansing practices in place 

Is your email list database containing the old data on your email list? The old data which is no longer valid and outdated cost companies more money by keeping uninterested contacts there. Email marketers should consider periodically to clear unengaged subscribers from the email list. Subscribers who are resisting your communications, not opening or engaging in your emails or content may mark senders as spam and can dent email sender reputation. 

Regular cleansing and maintaining a clean database frequently or on a quarterly basis is imperative to ensure email marketing campaigns are based on subscribers who are actually interested in making a purchase in the future. Marketers who are not willing to remove part of data from the email list, they need to segment their subscribers so that they can separate subscribers who are not interested in receiving specific type of products, offers or content. Additionally, a quarterly database cleanup is important to identify email addresses which might have been inactive so that marketers can create a reactivation program or campaigns to encourage them to start engaging with the brand again.  

3. Refrain from working with data suppliers 

Many organizations often resort to data suppliers to append new leads and customers. However, no matter how easy this method of collecting customer data may seem since it is faster, but collecting data in this process does not result from engaging with people and will not enhance your engagement rate that the organic process of growing an email list would. The organic process of building an email list improves engagement with prospects, open rates and click rates. 

If businesses are sending emails to contacts collected through a data supplier, they are not building leads based on communication, familiarity and without knowing what those people want from their products, thus they are collecting names without having any idea on how they can engage with those leads. That’s why contacts in the email lists bought from data brokers are most likely to mark email communications as SPAM as they have never shown interest in the products, services or the brand. Spam complaints play a crucial role diminishing the email sender score as every complaint raised on sending a message is passed to ISPs directly that their subscribers do not want those emails. 

4. Poor quality of the content

Businesses that compromise on the quality of content of email communications for bulk quantity of email messages – one of the biggest mistakes and must be avoided at any cost! Sending audiences poorly researched and crafted email copies will repel people and continued practices of sending poor content will drive people raise spam alert which result in denting email sender reputation. As part of the practices of avoiding sending emails with poor content, businesses should consider these following dos and don’ts:

• Make sure the email template is responsive and mobile-ready
• Make sure that the tone of the content should be useful, do not use aggressive sales pitch
• Do not use spam words in email copy
• Do make sure A/B testing all the links in emails and they are hyperlinked to the intended landing pages or web pages.
• Do resist the temptation of incorporating click-bait in the email copy and witch email subject line.
• Do make sure that the email copy is well-formatted, easy to read and capture main information 

5. Inconsistent email frequency

This is one of the most overlooked and common mistakes committed by email marketers that hurt their email sender reputation significantly! The email frequency is one of the most crucial aspects to plan and schedule carefully when it comes to ensure your emails are not going to diminish your email sender score. Marketers need to consider a balanced approach to plan their email content calendar and calculate the right email sending frequency. If emails are being sent too frequently, within short intervals, chances are that emails are going to frustrate and even enrage subscribers that they will start placing complaints to their ISPs. On the other hand, if you are sending emails with longer intervals, your subscribers may switch to your competitors who are more regular with their product updates, sales offer and industry updates and you will be missing out on potential sales opportunities.

At the end of the day, you need to make sure that you are practicing a consistent and balanced email sending schedule to prevent users from losing interest in your email campaigns or reporting your emails as spam. Also, marketers need to allow subscribers to choose how often they wish to receive your email communications and adhering to that schedule so they would not feel annoyed. 

6. Spam traps in email list

Spam traps in email lists are another danger to look out for to avert the risk of low email sender reputation. The trouble with email list traps can be as dangerous as being blacklisted. The major two types of traps; one is scraped email list trap and the other is recycled spam trap. The harvested or scraped email list includes email addresses that are created by blacklist organizers or ESPs that share spam email addresses. Your data collectors might not scrape those email addresses, but the data suppliers or data brokers you use may have scraped or harvested those email addresses from the web. The recycled email spam trap includes email addresses that were earlier genuine, but might be discarded by users later when they stopped using those addresses. The marketing systems you use should disable these types of email addresses to avoid the occurrences of hard bounces and the risk of being blacklisted if you continue sending emails to those addresses.