Excerpt

What Is a Sender Reputation?

We went over this very briefly in Essentials, but a sender reputation is something all email providers assign to anyone who sends messages. (Email providers, again, are companies like Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Juno, etc. Did I just age myself there? Yes, I did. And yes, Juno is still a thing! Color me just as shocked as you are.)

In simple terms, your sender reputation is an invisible score that tells email providers how much they should trust you. Unfortunately, no one tells you what the number is. You basically have to infer it based on how well your emails are delivered.

A bad sender reputation means your emails may never show up at all, or they'll land in spam or trash folders where no one sees them. A good sender reputation, on the other hand, means your emails are far more likely to end up where subscribers can actually find them. While the occasional message may still land in a spam folder here and there, a healthy sender reputation almost always guarantees your emails are delivered consistently.

The important thing to understand is that sender reputation isn't about a single email—it's about patterns over time. Email providers watch how people interact with what you send. When subscribers open your emails, read them, click links, and don't mark them as spam, that builds trust. When they delete without reading, ignore you entirely, or flag messages as unwanted, that erodes trust. This all happens in the background, whether you're thinking about it or not.

We'll talk about metrics closer toward the end of the playbook, but if you feel like your numbers should be better, any of these negative things might be happening behind the scenes. In that case, your subject lines are a good place to start looking.

Other things email providers pay attention to include:

•How long people spend reading your emails

oThe longer someone spends in your email, the better. This doesn't mean sending really long emails, but if subscribers consistently delete your emails immediately after opening, that increases the likelihood of future messages landing in spam or trash folders

•Whether people open but never click links

oThis signals to email providers that your content might not be relevant or compelling. Don't panic about this, though. As I said, we'll go over what's "good" and "bad" later

•How long your emails take to load

oToo many images can slow things down and hurt both engagement and deliverability. More on images later

Another thing you should pay attention to is whether subscribers remember who you are. Don't assume people remember just because they signed up. If you're emailing infrequently—even monthly—there's a good chance some subscribers have forgotten you and why they joined. They may mark you as spam as a result.

Last, if your content is turning people off, it will (obviously) cause problems. This is one of the hardest issues to correct. It can take months or even years to resolve your newsletter if you've been sending content that isn't a good fit or that breaks trust. In this case, it would probably be better to start over from scratch.

Honestly, though, the vast majority of business owners are overly cautious with their newsletters, so I rarely run into this problem.

Takeaway: You don't need to manage your sender reputation directly, but you do need to make decisions with it in mind. Everything from how often you email to how people engage with your content affects it over time.