Black Friday’s Coming: FreshAddress Helps Retailers Evaluate Their Sender Reputation

It’s October, and retailers are already sending emails that advise customers to shop early. But out-of-stocks and supply chain woes might not be the biggest worries during the busiest email season of the year.

Sender reputation can determine whether emails go to the inbox or the spam folder – or get blocked outright. ISPs are looking to see that companies are a reputable sender whose recipients want their emails or are they a potential threat?

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There are tools to help scan lists quickly for problem addresses, like FreshAddress’s Free List Check service. FLC will reveal whether a list has issues with invalid addresses, suspected spam traps and forced sign-ups.

This early season gives companies more opportunities to improve their sender reputation. They even have time to flag, correct and validate addresses on their full list, as well as check all of their acquisition sources to find/close off the ones that deliver lower-quality addresses.

If they rely on only the open rates to measure customer engagement, their job just got harder. A new feature in Apple’s iOS 15 operating system now automatically fetches email content, so detecting whether a subscriber actually opened and read an email will be even less reliable. Learn more about Apple’s changes and get tactics that can be used to prepare data with this FreshAddress/DMi Partners video, Preparing for the Holiday Season Under iOS 15 Privacy Rules.

Signals ISPs Use To Evaluate Sending Practices:

• • Quality of contacts to whom that IP address is sending messages
  • How much engagement their users have for emails sent from that IP address
  • Sending volume trends – consistent, sporadic or spikes
  • Content quality in the emails from that IP address

7 Quick Tips To Avoid Problems Sending Email This Holiday Season

No one can fix their sender reputation or solve deliverability problems overnight.  These seven tips will help get started:

1. Track down and fix or remove problem acquisition sources. Learn how in this blog post: 5 Tips to Maximize Paid Acquisition for Email Marketing. Or watch this webinar: From Acquisition to Attribution – How the Biggest Email Trends Were Shaped by 2020
2. Clean ANY list every time something is sent. Remove obvious unwanted addresses such as bounces, spam-complaint generators and unsubscribes.
3. Move unengaged contacts to a separate segment. Test different sending patterns or a win-back campaign and check for clicks.
4. Use an email verification tool at opt-in. This will give potential subscribers a chance to correct typos and malformed addresses and also block problematic addresses like disposables and frequent spam complainers
5. Check all authentication protocols like DKIM and SPF. ISPs will detect whether they are set up correctly, and those that fail can be blocked in filters.
6. Never buy email addresses. We advocate for permission emails with every service we offer at FreshAddress.
7. Keep all opt-in promises. Subscribers will rebel when companies promise occasional messages and then bombard their list(s), especially with messages that don’t reflect what was promised at opt-in.

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