marcloudconsulting.com 10 Understanding reputation and deliverability Just because you’ve hit send on an email, doesn’t mean it will be delivered. This is mainly because there is a whole process the email will go through after you’ve sent it and before it arrives in the recipient’s email inbox. The likelihood of your email reaching the recipient is called deliverability. To help us ensure deliverability, we need to understand what’s called sender reputation. Reputation in this context refers to how respected your IP address is by a receiving email server. To maintain a good sender reputation intact, it’s important to monitor things such as: • Setting up email authentication • Following Pardot’s permission-based marketing policy • Avoiding spam complaints and keeping off blocklists • Keeping Lists up-to-date • Monitoring open rates and managing bounce rates Other factors that impact deliverability are: • Unclear or spam-flagging subject lines. This isn’t limited to the words that we choose, unnecessary punctuation such as !!! or even the addition of an ellipsis can flag spam filters. • HTML optimisation - copying templates from other ESPs can land us in the spam folder. • Size also matters, Gmail clips messages that weigh over 102kb so generally, keeping emails under 80KB where possible will reduce the risk of deliverability problems. • Image to text ratio - we should be aiming for 60% text / 40% images. • Suddenly sending to a larger than normal list size. • Using link shorteners, as spammers commonly use them to mask malicious websites.