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Delivering messages into your clients inbox is one of the biggest challenges in email marketing, the technical solutions employed by service providers have grown at the same rate as the rising tide of spam in an effort to protect us all - gone are the days of simply navigating a spam filter!

The reputation of your mail server is one of the most critical factors in delivering your message so we have put together a “rough guide” to becoming a reputable sender.

Being in control of your own reputation
Have you got any idea which mail servers are used to send your email messages, any idea of the reputation associated with them? Many online solutions use a pool of shared servers which are used to distribute messages for all of their clients - this means someone elses poorly targeted campaign could be having an adverse effect on the deliverability of yours!

Having your own dedicated mail server puts YOU in control of your own reputation, the only mail that will ever be delivered from that mail server is yours and therefore the reputation of the server is related solely to the way in which you act as a responsible sender.

Start slowly
So you have you brand new shiny mail server that the world does not know about or trust! How do you start to build reputation correctly? - here’s a tip, don’t send thousands of messages to the ISP’s as fast as you can - they will likely view you as a spammer and you’ll be lucky to get even a few messages through to the inbox.

You need to “warm up” your mail server by throttling the rate at which it delivers the messages to the ISP until they start to view you as a reputable sender, when they trust you then bit-by-bit you can start to increase the rate at which you send.

Keeping your list clean
Ensure your lists are thoroughly cleansed by unsubscribing addresses that are no longer valid. Continually attempting to send emails to dead mailboxes needlessly uses resources on the ISP’s servers leading them to view you as a less reputable sender.

Our solution has rules you can set-up to automate cleansing based on mail server response meaning that with very little effort your database can be part-cleansed for you.

Sending responsibly
The big ISP players such as Yahoo!, AOL and Hotmail deal with an unfeasibly large amount of email each day and from time to time their resources are stretched. As a result, ISPs may start to request that the delivery of your emails are deferred so they can deal with them later. Responsible email senders will respect the wishes of the ISP and will continue to send messages at a much slower rate, failing to respond in this way may lead to you being viewed as a less reputable sender.

Targeting your mail
People don’t mind receiving targeted messages that are appropriate to their interests or buying patterns, simply sending your message in an old fashioned “broadcast” way can lead to much higher complaint rates from your recipients. The higher the complaint rate the lower your reputation becomes.

Ensure your email marketing solution has all of the features you require to segment your data properly by profiling users based on responses and interaction with your campaigns and websites.

Listening to feedback
Even though your lists are all legally opted-in, cleansed & you campaigns targeted, users can still hit “this is spam” buttons in their email client - it’s a fact of life, people may have forgotten they subscribed or they simply haven’t read the message and realised who it was from.

Hitting the spam button does not unsubscribe them from your lists!

Most of the major ISP’s provide feedback on spam reports which allow you to ensure the complainants are removed from your database. This process will allow you to reduce your complaint rates over time and therefore increase your reputation as a sender.

Am I a reputable sender?
Ask yourself a question - Can your email marketing solution provide all of these facilities?

If the answer is NO then your valuable message may not be getting to your intended recipients!

If your interested in having your own mail server to protect your reputation give us a call it costs less than you may think!