Know your sender score

Joe Fernandez’s special report on email marketing (“Personal touch sends out the right messages”, MW 25 June) was a timely and informative introduction to email deliverability, showing how personalised messages are more likely to be delivered successfully and read.

But it needs to be clarified that any data collected must be used to improve the relevance of marketing messages. There is no problem with collecting subscriber data, as long as information is obtained legitimately, whether for personalisation, geo-targeting or offering relevant vouchers.

While personalising messages is one example of best practise, marketers must be focused on one goal – getting emails into the inbox, read and acted upon. The first step for any marketer looking to improve email deliverability must be to check their Sender Score at www.senderscore.org. Like a credit score, a Sender Score is an indication of the trustworthiness of an email sender and shows, on a scale of 1 to 100, how your emails are likely to be evaluated by receivers.

Until marketers fully understand their email reputation, it is difficult to know what they can do to improve email delivery rates. A poor Sender Score could be down to a number of factors – which might well include a failure to personalise messages. But marketers must know that there is a whole host of other variables affecting deliverability, such as mailing frequency, poor email infrastructure, hard bounce rates and list hygiene. Knowing your Sender Score lets you see exactly what you need to change to improve your email reputation and subsequent email delivery rates.

Guy Shelton
Vice-president, sales and client services
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