Your account's sender reputation is an important indicator of deliverability health and highlights areas you can work on to improve deliverability.
Sender reputation displayed in your Dotdigital account is to provide you with insights into reputation, but doesn’t reflect your sender reputation with individual mailbox providers.
We calculate sender reputation from the quality of data you upload and engagement metrics from campaigns within your account. This means we can show you areas that are performing well, or areas that might benefit from improvement to help you with getting your emails to the inbox.
Find your sender reputation
Expand the User menu and select Settings.
Go to General > Sender reputation.
Your sender reputation is displayed here, along with your reputation indicators.
You see reputation indicators including Bad, Neutral, Good and Very good. You may see sometimes see Evaluation. This means that we don't currently have the information needed for this reputation indicator. The indicator is updated once we do.
Calculating sender reputation
There are a number of reputation indicators used to calculate your sender reputation, and these are based upon all of the campaigns you've ever sent. These are your open rates, click rates, complaint levels, bounce levels, and your Data Watchdog scores. We evaluate sender reputation scores every 30 days.
Good quality data and good engagement with your campaigns results in a better sender reputation score.
Improving sender reputation
Your reputation indicators highlight which areas to focus on to improve your sender reputation. The key to improving sender reputation is to use high quality data and send wanted emails that are aligned with your recipients’ expectations.
Below we provide some more detailed guidance about improving your reputation indicators.
Set expectations when collecting new subscribers
Setting expectations at the point of data collection is essential to making your email program successful. You can attract the right type of audience who are interested in receiving your emails, improve engagement as recipients know exactly what you plan on sending them and build trust and brand reputation by meeting expectations.
Only send emails to contacts who have opted in and want to receive them.
Use CAPTCHA to minimise the risk of bot sign ups and programmatic sign ups.
Consider using double opt-in to improve the quality of the data you collect, prevent sending to invalid email addresses and minimise the risk of sending to spam traps.
Include a link to your privacy policy and make sure it includes a clear outline of what emails will be sent, who they will be sent to, and how email addresses will be shared (or not shared).
Send a Welcome email to reiterate expectations and encourage subscribers to set their preferences in your preference centre.
Open rate
The open rate is the percentage of recipients who opened your campaign. An ‘open’ is recorded when an invisible pixel within an email is downloaded.
Areas you should focus on to improve open rates:
Manage expectations about content and frequency when you capture new data. Ensure you send emails that are aligned with the expectations you set.
Create targeted segments around preferences, behaviour, interests and purchase history to send more relevant and personalised emails.
Use compelling and interesting subject lines that are relevant to the content of the email.
Avoid deceptive subject lines. Deceptive subject lines can frustrate recipients, damage their trust in your brand and lead to increased spam complaints.
Give subscribers control over the emails they want to receive by creating a preference centre.
Maintain good list hygiene and regularly remove contacts who haven’t engaged with your emails for some time. Sending to recipients who aren’t engaged with your emails will result in lower open rates.
Click rate
Click rate is the percentage of recipients that have clicked a link within your email.
Click rate might be referred to as click-through rate (CTR) which is the percentage of recipients who click your email, taken against the number of emails delivered.
Alternatively, click rate might be referred to as click-to-open rate which is the percentage of recipients who click your email compared to the number of recipients who opened your email.
Measures you can put in place to increase click rate include:
Ensure email design is responsive and optimised for mobile devices. Test your emails across multiple devices and mailboxes to ensure it renders as intended.
Send emails that are accessible to all recipients.
Including alt text allows screen readers to describe images to recipients who rely on a screen reader to access digital content. Alt text also provides necessary context when images aren’t downloaded by default.
Maintain good contrast between background and text colours and use a suitable font size.
Focus on benefits rather than features and how your products or services can solve your recipients’ problems.
Include a compelling call-to-action (CTA) that drives your recipients to take action.
Send more relevant emails by personalising content to your recipients’ behaviour, preferences, interests and purchase history.
A/B test copy, call-to-actions and email design to identify what your audience engages with most effectively.
Complaints
Complaints are user generated spam or abuse complaints and have the potential to cause damage to your sender reputation. Recipients report emails as spam when emails are unwanted or unexpected. Ensure you send emails that recipients want to receive and that are aligned with what they agreed to receive when they opted in.
Regular sending to unengaged contacts can further increase your risk of spam complaints.
High user generated spam complaints can lead to emails landing in the spam folder and result in emails being rejected.
Important notice
Dotdigital’s Terms of Service prohibit uploading or sending to purchased email addresses.
Here's some key advice to help you steer clear of complaints:
Avoid using purchased lists
It’s important to note that Dotdigital is consent based platform which means third party and purchased lists are against our terms of use.
Whilst it might be tempting to see purchasing a list as an easy way to grow your mailing list quickly, purchased lists can seriously harm your reputation as a sender. These are normally filled with old emails and spam traps and quickly inform mailbox providers that you break the rules by sending unsolicited emails.
Employ good practice
Add complaining subscribers to a suppression list as soon as you receive their complaint.
Check campaign replies for recipients asking to be unsubscribed and suppress them promptly.
Use your brand name in the 'friendly from name' field so it's easier for subscribers to recognise your email.
Send relevant emails based on preferences and purchase history.
Set expectations at the point of signup about what emails a subscriber will receive and when they'll receive them. Meet those expectations within the emails you send.
Send consistent volumes by establishing a regular sending cadence and avoid large-send volume spikes that may trigger a corresponding spike in complaints.
Avoid deceptive subject lines and those starting with 'Re:' or 'Fwd:' to suggest an ongoing communication with the sender.
Data Watchdog
When importing contacts in a file, it could be the case that the data is not as clean, reliable or as safe to send to as you have reason to believe. Our Data Watchdog provides a unique checkpoint which is constantly on the lookout for any such questionable or risky data.
Your contact imports either get cleared, flagged as 'at risk', or they're quarantined.
Therefore your Watchdog score is based upon your history of Data Watchdog results.
Learn more about the Data Watchdog.
Bounces
In general, a bounce is when an email can't be delivered to an email address. There are many different reasons why emails bounce. When it happens, a 'return to sender' message is sent from the recipient's mail server to explain why.
There are two types of bounces that you can receive - a soft bounce and a hard bounce.
A soft bounce means that the email address was valid and the email reached the recipient’s mail server. However, it bounced back because:
The recipient mailbox was full (the user is over their quota)
The recipient's server was down or experiencing issues
The message was too large for the recipient’s inbox
Learn more about adjusting soft bounce settings.
A hard bounce occurs when the message has been permanently rejected because:
The email address is invalid
The email address doesn’t exist
These hard bounced email addresses are added to your suppression list automatically. Continuing to try to send to a known bad email address will harm your reputation with the receiver, so we prevent it.
You can read more about suppression reasons, hard bounces and soft bounces in Understand email contact suppression reasons.
Soft bounces
There are many different types of soft bounces. The following categories will not apply to every bounce type out there. We take a simplified approach to bounce message interpretation based on industry best practices.
General bounce: This is treated as a soft bounce because we can't determine the exact reason for delivery failure. Typically, this bounce type is associated with a technical issue such as a connection timing out, but we'll also classify a bounce as 'general' if the response from the recipient server is open to more than one interpretation. It could be a non-standard error message, or too vague to be useful.
DNS failure: The recipient's email server is currently unable to deliver your email due to DNS issues on their end. This may or may not be a temporary problem. The error could be due to the mail server being down, or there was a typo when it was set up, or maybe the destination domain doesn't exist. All we know is that the DNS host is unreachable, therefore we treat this as a soft bounce to allow some time for the problem to be rectified.
Mailbox full: The email server can't deliver your email because the recipient's inbox is full. Most email applications have a set amount of storage an individual user can use for email. If this quota is exceeded the server won't let any more mail through, but it will also usually alert the mailbox owner so they can do something about it. So while it may be the case that your recipient hasn't put aside time to make some space, it could also be a sign of an abandoned mailbox. For example, this could happen when someone sets up a free webmail account just for shopping-related emails, then stops signing in when they start saving for a house. We treat these as a soft bounce in case it's temporary, but if the issue continues we'll convert it to a hard bounce for you.
Message too large: The size of your email - including all headers, text and images - is larger than the maximum size that the recipient's mailbox allows. The bounce message returned doesn't include information on what the size limit is, but the Dotdigital deliverability team will advise you not to send messages larger than 500KB.
Transient bounce: The recipient mail server can't deliver your email, but will keep trying for a limited period of time. We treat this as a soft bounce, as when the recipient mail server retries the message could be delivered.
Challenge/response: The recipient has installed software as an anti-spam measure, and it only accepts email from previously authorised senders. If the software doesn't know the sender, a challenge email is returned, requiring a specific action before the original email will be sent to the recipient. Since the requested response could be anything, we treat these as a soft bounce.
Bounce - but no email address returned: The recipient mail server bounced your email, but didn't indicate which address it was bouncing on behalf of. We have determined the recipient based on the content of the bounce.
If you need to know more about specific bounces for your campaigns, first check out your campaign reports for more information. If this isn't sufficient and you still have concerns about the delivery of your campaign and the bounces you're receiving, contact the deliverability team on deliverability@dotdigital.com.
Mail blocks
Mail block - relay denied: Your email has bounced due to a temporary error, which could be on the sending or receiving side. 'Relay' simply refers to the transmission of your email from our server to the receiving server, which has most likely been denied due to user error. This type of bounce usually occurs when the sender's message isn't authenticated, but it can also be due to a misconfigured server on the recipient side. Technically speaking this is a hard bounce, but we treat it as a soft bounce because it's often a result of user error, which can be resolved.
Mail block - general: The recipient's email server is blocking inbound mail from our server, which may be due to block listing. A mail block is recorded when the receiving server blocks an email completely; rejecting the message without any attempt to deliver it to the inbox. The most likely reasons for this block are:
Your reply-to address is block listed
One of our sending IPs is temporarily blocked
One of our sending domains is temporarily block-listed
The receiving server only accepts allow listed senders
Mail block - spam detected: The recipient's email server has blocked your email on the basis that the content resembles spam. This mail block is often triggered by something detected in your email content, but can also be because your reply-to address or brand name has a poor reputation. We treat this as a soft bounce due to the fact that some mail servers and email providers respond with false or incorrect error codes.