Summary
A sudden drop in your sender score can be alarming, especially if you haven't noticed any immediate deliverability problems. Your sender score, often provided by services like Sender Score, is a crucial metric that reflects your email sending reputation. It’s an indicator that mailbox providers use to decide whether to accept your emails, place them in the inbox, or route them to the spam folder. While a score below 70 is generally considered poor, a dip from, say, 90 to 72, merits investigation. This drop often signals underlying issues, such as increased bounces, spam complaints, or a presence on various blacklists (or blocklists), that could escalate into more significant deliverability challenges if left unaddressed. Understanding the factors that influence your score and taking proactive steps is key to maintaining a healthy email program.
Key findings
- Blocklistings: A low sender score is frequently linked to your IP address appearing on multiple blacklists or blocklists. Even if you're not seeing immediate deliverability problems, this is a strong indicator of reputation issues.
- Shared IP impact: If you're sending from a shared IP address, your sender score is influenced by the sending practices of all other users on that IP. Other senders' poor behavior, such as high spam complaints or sending to spam traps, can negatively impact your reputation, even if your own practices are good. Learn more about how sender score works.
- Bounces and rejections: A sudden spike in hard bounces or sender rejections reported by mailbox providers can directly cause a drop in your sender score. These metrics are key data points for the Sender Score algorithm.
- Volume changes: Significant, unexplained increases in email volume can sometimes correlate with a reputation drop, particularly on shared IPs, as this can signal abnormal sending patterns to ISPs.
- Subjectivity of score: While useful, Sender Score is a generalized metric and not an absolute filter used by any specific ISP. Therefore, a drop in score doesn't always immediately translate to a complete deliverability breakdown, but it's a warning sign.
Key considerations
- Monitor your IP: Regularly check your sending IP address (or addresses) against major blacklists and blocklists, such as those found on tools like MultiRBL, to identify any listings that could be impacting your reputation.
- Audit sending practices: If you're on a shared IP, review your internal sending practices. Focus on maintaining a clean list, managing engagement, and avoiding sudden volume spikes. This can help troubleshoot and address a dropping email sender score.
- Engage with your ESP: If you suspect you're on a sub-optimal shared IP block, demonstrate improved sending practices to your Email Service Provider (ESP) and inquire about options for moving to a more reputable IP block. Showing consistent, positive engagement can be persuasive.
- Assess actual deliverability: While sender score provides valuable feedback, prioritize monitoring your actual inbox placement rates, open rates, and spam complaint rates directly from your email analytics. These metrics indicate real-world deliverability challenges.
- Address list hygiene: Regularly clean your email lists to remove inactive or invalid addresses, which can lead to bounces and spam traps, both detrimental to your sender score. Review subscription sources to ensure they are legitimate and opt-in based.
What email marketers say
Email marketers often find themselves grappling with fluctuating sender scores, particularly when they rely on shared IP addresses or manage large, dynamic mailing lists. Their experiences highlight the practical challenges and common misconceptions surrounding sender reputation metrics. Many focus on immediate campaign performance, such as open rates and click-through rates, while viewing external scores as secondary indicators.
Key opinions
- Score as an indicator, not a definitive problem: Many marketers view a dropped sender score as a warning sign to investigate, rather than an immediate deliverability crisis, especially if their actual email performance remains unaffected. It suggests something may be off, but it's not always the end-all-be-all.
- Shared IP limitations: On shared IPs, marketers acknowledge they have limited control over the collective sending behavior impacting their score. This means sometimes you take the good, you take the bad from other senders.
- Focus on root causes: Marketers emphasize looking at the reasons behind a score drop, such as increased spam complaints, high bounce rates, or poor list quality, which are often tied to list acquisition practices. These factors are critical to protecting your sender score.
- List hygiene importance: There's a strong consensus that regularly cleaning email lists and ensuring legitimate subscription sources are paramount to preventing reputation damage and subsequent score drops.
- Proactive monitoring: While some marketers prioritize active deliverability monitoring over a single score, others find the score useful for obtaining a general idea of their standing on the inbox food chain.
Key considerations
- Investigate list growth: If your score drops, immediately investigate any recent increases in subscriptions, checking for compromised forms or new, low-quality list sources.
- Focus on user engagement: Implement strategies to boost engagement and reduce complaints. This includes sending relevant content, segmenting audiences, and making it easy to unsubscribe, all of which contribute to preventing a sudden drop in domain reputation.
- Regular list cleaning: Proactively remove inactive subscribers and unengaged addresses to reduce bounces and avoid spam traps. This is critical for recovering your email domain reputation.
- Monitor complaint rates: Keep a close eye on your spam complaint rates through Postmaster Tools and ESP dashboards. High complaint rates are a direct indicator of poor sender reputation.
- Don't panic about score alone: If your deliverability and engagement metrics are healthy, a temporary dip in sender score, especially on a shared IP, might not require immediate drastic action, but ongoing vigilance is advised.
Marketer view
An email marketer from Email Geeks reports a surprising drop in their Sender Score from consistently above 90 to 72, seeking clarification on potential underlying issues.
Marketer view
A marketer from MailMonitor emphasizes the importance of creating a checklist of best practices for email campaigns as a fundamental step towards improving sender score.
What the experts say
Email deliverability experts offer a more nuanced view of sender score drops, emphasizing the underlying technical and behavioral factors. They often look beyond the score itself to diagnose root causes and propose comprehensive solutions. Their insights frequently highlight the complexities of shared IP environments and the importance of accurate data interpretation.
Key opinions
- Blocklist correlation: Experts frequently link a dropped sender score to an IP address appearing on numerous blacklists (or blocklists), indicating a direct correlation between the two. This can often lead to your IP address being blacklisted.
- Shared IP challenges: On shared IPs, experts confirm that individual senders cannot control the aggregate sending behavior, meaning reputation can be impacted by others. A low score might signal that you are not on the best set of IPs available from your ESP.
- Sender score for diagnosis: While not the end all be all, Sender Score is useful for root cause analysis, especially for dedicated IPs, providing a starting point for deeper investigation.
- Bounces as primary driver: Experts highlight that a surge in 'Sender Rejected' incidents, such as blocks and bounces, directly feeds into the Sender Score algorithm, causing noticeable drops.
- Beyond the score: There's an emphasis on observing actual deliverability issues rather than solely focusing on the numerical score, as it's a disconnected metric not directly used by ISPs as a filter.
Key considerations
- Perform a deliverability audit: Conduct a thorough audit of your sending practices to identify areas for optimization, especially when operating on shared IP blocks that might not be performing optimally. This also includes understanding how email blacklists actually work.
- Test across IPs: If you send from multiple IP addresses, run similar reputation tests on each. This helps identify outliers or less performing IPs within your sending network that could be dragging down overall reputation.
- Lobby for better IPs: After optimizing your sending behavior, present data to your ESP to advocate for placement on a higher-reputation IP block. Demonstrating improvement can be leverage.
- Understand the full picture: While a low sender score can be a canary in a coal mine, it's crucial to cross-reference it with direct deliverability metrics, like spam folder placement and engagement rates, to get a holistic view.
- Address bounce spikes: If a spike in blocks or bounces is identified as the cause, swiftly implement measures to reduce these, such as refining list acquisition, improving validation, and regularly removing hard bounces. For example, a spike in bounces can affect your sender reputation.
Expert view
An expert from Email Geeks notes that the reported IP address currently has numerous blocklistings, suggesting a potential correlation with the observed drop in Sender Score.
Expert view
An expert from Email Geeks observes that the IP in question appears to be a Klaviyo shared IP, where recent increases in sending volume or the quality of that volume might have negatively impacted its reputation, although the Sender Score itself shows signs of recovery.
What the documentation says
Official documentation and research often provide the foundational understanding of how sender scores and email reputation systems operate. These sources detail the algorithms, metrics, and best practices that contribute to or detract from a sender's standing. They emphasize the importance of adhering to industry standards and understanding the complex interplay of various factors that mailbox providers consider.
Key findings
- Algorithmic factors: Sender Score algorithms integrate multiple data points, including spam complaints, bounce rates, spam trap hits, and third-party blocklist appearances, to generate a comprehensive reputation score.
- Reputation components: Both general email reputation and specific scores (like Sender Score) are measures of email sending practices. Understanding what is a DNSBL and how it affects deliverability is important here.
- Deliverability impact: A poor sender score directly impedes email deliverability, making it challenging for messages to reach the inbox and often leading to junk folder placement. This can affect why your emails are going to spam.
- Corrective steps: Documentation often outlines specific, actionable steps for repairing sender reputation, including technical configurations and list management practices.
- List hygiene criticality: Maintaining good list hygiene (regular cleaning, valid subscription methods) is consistently highlighted as a primary method to boost sender score and improve deliverability.
Key considerations
- Implement authentication: Ensure your email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) is correctly configured. A robust DMARC policy is critical for proving legitimacy and preventing spoofing. For example, understanding DMARC, SPF, and DKIM is foundational.
- Regular reputation assessment: Regularly calculate your current reputation score using reliable tools to assess your email program and identify areas needing improvement.
- Follow best practices: Adhere to industry best practices for email campaigns, including proper opt-in processes, managing expectations for content, and providing clear unsubscribe options. A good checklist can help repair your sender reputation.
- Monitor deliverability metrics: Pay close attention to crucial metrics like bounce rates, spam complaint rates, and inbox placement across major ISPs to gauge the true impact of your sender score on deliverability.
- Address spam traps: Implement strategies to avoid hitting spam traps, as these significantly damage your sender score and reputation. This is often achieved through rigorous list validation and removal of dormant addresses.
Technical article
Sender Score documentation states that the tool helps senders evaluate their email program's standing, identify areas for improvement, and continuously monitor their sending reputation.
Technical article
Klaviyo's documentation provides a guide on actionable steps senders can take to restore their sender reputation following a decline in email performance or deliverability issues.
Related resources
15 resources
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