Email Marketing by the Numbers: How to Use the World’s Greatest Marketing Tool to Take Any Organization to the Next Level

Email + Online Reputation = Maximized Deliverability: Deciphering the Reputation Equation

By Chip HouseFormer Vice President of Privacy and DeliverabilityBy R.J. TalyorDeliverability Specialist

Your company has likely spent endless hours and dollars on creating and maintaining a solid reputation. Just as you watch and protect your company’s branding, marketing collateral, and advertising reputation, all marketers sending email must also monitor their email reputation. So as a first step, are you monitoring?

Many marketers have unknowingly tarnished their standing with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) with years of mass-blast email campaigns, abuse of opt-in, and disregard of technical and creative factors. While the neighborhood postman rarely refuses to deliver a direct marketing piece to a physical mailbox, email marketers face a different delivery challenge: the cyber-postmen—or the ISPs—who check online reputation. Without a sufficient amount of “postage,” or reputation, your email won’t get delivered.

ISPs use a complex algorithm to calculate a score that equates to your company’s deliverability reputation. And this reputation score determines whether your email will be delivered to the inbox, the bulk folder—or not delivered at all. In several ways, you could consider your online email reputation a simple mathematical equation. Our goal is to define each of the factors that add up to this reputation equation, and to expose the “formulas” for doing so. The answer to the ...