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

Arithmetic: Let’s Start with the Basics

What Is an Online Reputation, and What Factors Build It?

Reputation can be defined as the general opinion of a community toward an entity. In regard to email, reputation is the general opinion of the ISPs, the anti-spam community, and subscribers toward a sender’s IP address, sending domain, or both. The “opinion” is a reputation score created by an ISP (or third-party reputation provider). If the sender’s “score” falls within the ISP’s thresholds, a sender’s messages will be delivered to the inbox; if not, the sender’s emails may arrive in the bulk folder, be quarantined, or get bounced back to the sender.

The main factors in this equation include:

+	Legal compliance and unsubscribe request management
+	ISP whitelisting and feedback loops
+	Low spam complaints
+	Avoidance of spamtrap hits
+	Sender authentication
+	Technical components
+	Reputation aggregators’ data
+	Accreditation services

While each ISP and third-party reputation provider calculates a sender’s reputation score by giving different weights to these factors, according to Michelle Eichner, vice president of client services at Pivotal Veracity, “All the major ISPs are using reputation at this point.” Therefore, it’s more important than ever to ensure that your email marketing efforts are within the guidelines of reputation of best practices. Before going any further into this equation, it’s important to know exactly why reputation is becoming the most trusted method of email filtering.