Sender Reputation
Email marketers must establish and maintain a good reputation with Internet Service Providers, Email Service Providers, telecommunications companies, and other infrastructure providers. If these companies decide that you're not complying with email regulations, or you're not honoring recipients' unsubscribe requests, or customers are complaining about your messages, they may decide to block or filter your messages.
In addition, the CAN-SPAM regulations in the United States allow infrastructure providers to pursue legal action against email senders. The infrastructure providers bear much of the cost of transmitting and delivering email messages, so they can sue email senders for the financial loss incurred by sending spam or other fraudulent email messages.
Historically, a marketer's sender reputation is managed at the level of the IP address (in the coming years, the sender domain will likely become increasingly important as well). When delivering an email message, the infrastructure provider will check the sender's IP address to try to find out more about the sender. For example, your sending domain should have a text record for each valid IP address used by the domain. The provider will look at this record (called the Sender Policy Framework or "SPF") to see if you really are who you say you are. Therefore, it's important that your IP address be configured correctly, with the necessary infrastructure pieces in place. The Cheetah Digital implementation team will perform much of this initial configuration.
When you start sending email messages from a new IP address, you essentially have no reputation. The providers don't know anything about you, so they may impose some initial restrictions. Therefore, new email marketers must go through a process known as "IP Warming," where you prove to the providers that you're a valid, legitimate marketer who intends to comply with federal regulations.
As an analogy, think of IP Warming like buying car insurance. When you first get your driver's license, the insurance company doesn't know what kind of driver you are, because you have no driving record. Insurance companies will typically charge new drivers a higher premium. Over time, if you prove that you're a good driver, with no accidents or violations, they'll lower your premiums. Conversely, if you have accidents, or get tickets, then your premiums will go higher.
Similarly, with Internet providers, they may initially limit how much email they accept at first. If you show that you're complying with email regulations, they'll start accepting more email from you. Fortunately this happens quickly over just a period of days. Conversely, if don't comply with regulations, or if you generate a lot of spam complaints, then the providers will penalize you quickly; you'll have to work harder, over a longer period of time to overcome that initial negative reputation.
The following guidelines should be followed during the IP Warming phase:
Focus your Campaigns on your best, known customers (ideally those that have clicked or opened an email from you in the past thirty days) in order to keep down numbers of bounces or spam complaints. Monitor your Campaign activity closely to check that you're seeing a good number of "open" and "click" activity. This tells the providers that your recipients actually want to receive messages from you.
Keep initial volumes low. Huge volumes of emails from unknown IP addresses will raise a red flag with infrastructure providers, until they learn more about you. You can increase the sending volume with each subsequent Campaign. Sending daily messages, and slowing increasing the volumes, is the best approach.
Make sure that your IP address is configured correctly, with the necessary infrastructure pieces in place. Messaging will manage this for you.
Don't keep resending messages to inactive email addresses. Messages that bounce (especially hard bounces) will be flagged in Messaging, and will automatically be suppressed from future Campaigns.
Honor opt-out requests from your recipients. Opt-out requests don't negatively impact your reputation. However, If you continue to contact recipients after they opt-out, they may get annoyed, and report your email as spam, which definitely will reflect poorly on your sender reputation. Opt-out requests will be flagged in Messaging, and will automatically be suppressed from future Campaigns.
Make sure your HTML code is valid and correct.
Make sure any links in your message content point to actual websites, and not to IP addresses. Links to IP addresses are considered a red flag by providers, as this is a technique used by fraudulent senders, looking to trick recipients into clicking on a link.
Your Cheetah Digital team will help you put together an effective IP Warming strategy. If you have any questions, please speak to your Client Services Representative.
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