Cleaning Up a Bad Reputation

Having a bad sender reputation can wreak havoc on your deliverability. Your emails are likely to be delivered to the spam folders if they aren’t blocked altogether. This is damaging to both your brand and your delivery rates. While it is much better to get off to a good start to begin with, there are things that can be done to clean up a bad reputation. It isn’t an easy process, and, depending on how bad that reputation is, it can be a bit painful in the short term. The long term effects will pay off in the long term.

Use feedback loops

Many feedback loops provide not only the complainer’s email address, but also the mailing that is being complained about. From this information you can determine if specific types of mailings or certain cross sections of your list are causing the complaints. It could be that the opt in language needs to be updated for certain acquisition sources to alert subscribers what types of email they will be receiving. The branding on certain emails may not be obvious to alert the subscriber as to why they are receiving the emails. A simple creative revision, like adding personalized text saying “As a subscriber to Publication X, you are being sent this special offer,” may alert readers that their information hasn’t been sold or given away to a third party. Consistent branding in your from name can not only help decrease complaints but also lift open rates as found in an unreleased study conducted by Silverpop. Any patterns that can be found in your complaints are a good place to start finding problem areas with your emails. Read more about this topic here.

Revise bounce processing rules

High unknown user rates can be another source of bad reputation. While high rates of bounces will cause blocking in and of themselves, it is important to remember that after an email address has been abandoned for a few months it can be converted into a spam trap. Hotmail offers a program called Smart Network Data Systems (SNDS) that allows you to see how many of their traps you are hitting. Other services like Return Path’s Sender Score and Habeas’ SafeList also help monitor spam trap hits. These spam traps are used for a variety of things. Some are used to gather and fingerprint content to be used by content filters and others are considered de facto spam and enough hits to these traps will result in blocking or even blacklisting.

Reconfirm your list

This is a tough pill for all senders to swallow, but if spam trap hits, unknown user rates and complaint rates are high enough, it may be necessary. There are certainly things that can be done to make it have a minimal impact on your list size. If you have researched your complaint sources and trap hits you can determine which portions of your list are causing most of your problems. This subset of your list could then be sent a series of confirmation mails reminding readers of why they signed up for your list. One major B2B magazine publisher has had great success with a similar strategy. It is also possible that contacting your subscribers through other means (via mail or phone for instance) could yield updated email addresses and the need to reconfirm via email may be lessened.

The most important factor to keep in mind is to send relevant and useful emails. If you send emails that your subscribers want to read and they look forward to, your deliverability woes will start to clear up on their own. Give your subscribers a reason and means in every email that you send to update their email addresses if they are changing. It is also a good idea to offer options in which type and frequency your subscribers want to receive emails.

Hallmark Data Systems can provide you with reports on spam complaints, acquisition source information, SNDS data, bounce information, and much more. We can also assist with confirmation efforts and intermediary work with ISPs, other domains and blacklists. Talk to your account managers for more details. With a little effort and time it is not only possible to clean up a bad reputation, it will be more effective in the long term than abandoning that reputation and ruining the reputation of another domain.