Reputation, it's all about patience and respect

The other day, one of our customers asked me where we bought our reputation.
Although the answer to that question was quite obvious it got me thinking about reputation and how this “term” is interpreted by non-technical people.

Reputation, when it comes down to email marketing, is basically how receiving servers are seeing you. They will, simply put, determine if you are a good or a bad sender. Inevitably resulting in either accepting your mail and putting in the recipients inbox , accepting your mail but threat it as junk or just plainly refuse your mail message.

“So you say if we have a good reputation we’ll get to the inbox ?”

Yes and no. There’s a whole other bunch of stuff that will determine inbox placement, amongst others IP reputation and Domain reputation (the latter of which is gaining its fair share in the reputation determination process lately).

Next question you’ll be most likely to receive from non-techie guys is how they can get (or even buy) a good reputation. Well dear marketer, it’s all about patience and respect!
It’s about building a subscriber base that’s engaged with you and one that really wants to receive what you have to tell. If your subscribers are happy, and they are a highly engaged audience your reputation will automatically improve.
Sure, ESP’s will throttle delivery (not to overload ISP servers), they will put all sorts of technical authentication keys in your mails , they will even resolve technical issues for your reputation together with the ISP relation team. But it’s not all about the ESP, they don’t have the “magic key” to high reputation. It’s about content, engagement, brand recognition and so much more.

But like I said, it’s also about patience. ISP do not tend to put high value on your reputation after you've sent 2 successful campaigns. It takes time … But rest assured, sending high impact email campaigns to an audience that is engaged with you and your brand will most definitely result in good reputation.

The roundup: No you can’t just buy a great reputation and neither can you expect it to become great over night. Yes technical procedures are there (at the ESP side) to help conform to strict ISP guidelines. But in the long run it’s up to you, marketeers, to create campaigns that are effective. Do some testing with different approaches (A/B testing), interact with your subscribers, let them know what they can expect from you at the signup process, invest time in list hygiene , and most of all be patient, concise and respect your subscribers.