Everything Marketers Need to Know About Sender Scores

电子邮件营销seems like an easy win for your inbound marketing strategy. Write an awesome email, put in some snazzy images, fire it off to your opt-in list, and watch the customers roll in.

Even if it all was that easy, though, the step marketers often overlook is just how difficult it can be to actually get your email into a recipient's inbox in the first place. Seems basic, but there are tons of moving parts involved in email deliverability, and a huge one is the reputation of the email sender.

Luckily, there's a service called Return Path that has a metric called Sender Score, which gives you insight into your reputation as an email sender.

Have you checked your Sender Score? If youdo知道您的发件人分数，您知道您的声誉意味着什么email marketer？如果您对作为电子邮件发送者的声誉感兴趣，请继续阅读以了解有关发件人分数所需的所有信息。

To collect your Sender Score,Return Pathgathers data from over 60 million mailboxes at big ISPs like BellSouth and Comcast. They record if people frequently unsubscribe or report spam from certain email senders, and then assign you a Sender Score based on that monitoring.

这是一个至关重要的数字，因为邮件服务器通常会在决定如何处理电子邮件之前检查您的发件人分数。发件人的分数越低，您将进入某人收件箱的困难。有很多事情会影响deliverability of your email, but Return Path reports that83% of the time an email is not delivered to an inbox, it is due to a poor sender reputation.

Even if an email network or ISP doesn't query your Sender Score to determine whether they will deliver your email, the factors used in determining your Sender Score are similar to those used by email networks and ISPs to determine your sender reputation. As such, the score is a great, free email sender reputation tool to ensure you are aware of and have the opportunity to fix any deliverability problems.

Domain reputation and IP reputation are just a few of the considerations that are used to determine your overall Sender Score. Other characteristics include spam complaints, industry blacklists, and more.

Now that we know a little more about how your Sender Score is determined, let's learn how to check your score.

检查发件人分数实际上是一个简单的过程。使用以下步骤开始。

1. Go toSenderScore.org.

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2. Click "Get Your Score."

Then, click the "Get Your Score" button in the middle of the page.

3.输入您的IP地址和联系信息。

接下来，填写页面上的表格。

由于发件人得分是从返回路径上获得的免费电子邮件信誉评估服务，因此您可以立即访问详细的声誉报告和其他免费工具。

Sender Score provides an indication of the trustworthiness of an email sender’s IP address. Mailbox providers evaluate the reputation of senders to determine whether to deliver messages into the inbox.

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4. Submit.

Lastly, click "Submit" and find out your Sender Score.

Once you know what your score is, you might be wondering, "我该如何处理这些信息？”下面，让我们深入研究如何解释您的分数。

How Do I Interpret My Score?

To check your Sender Score, visit Return Path's注册页, and you'll soon have a report that looks something like this (but with different data, of course!)

Scores are calculated on a rolling, 30-day average and represent the rank of an IP address against other IP addresses, much like a percentile ranking.

越接近你的分数是0,更糟糕的是,一个d if you're close to 100 like Return Path is in this sample report, well you're in pretty great shape! Now let's break down what each of the items you're being scored on in this report mean:

• Complaints:How complaints about that IP address compare to all other IP addresses. Complaint rates are calculated as complaints divided by accepted mail, and complaint scores are a rank based on your complaint rates.
• Volume:While not an indication of a good or bad sender reputation alone, it is an important part of the overall reputation algorithm. For example, an IP address which sends 100 messages and receives 99 complaints is problematic, while an IP address which sends 100,000 messages and receives 99 complaints is probably okay. A higher score equates to larger volume monitored by the Sender Score Reputation Network.
• 外部声誉：How the IP address compares to all other IP addresses on a variety of external blacklists and whitelists.
• Unknown Users:The rank of the IP address' unknown user rate compared to all other IP addresses. Unknown user rates are taken directly from incoming SMTP logs of participating ISPs, tracking how often an IP address attempts to send a message to an address which does not exist.
• Rejected:这表示与其他IP地址相比，消息弹跳的频率。
• Accepted:The number of email messages accepted for delivery, this number is expressed as the number of messages seen minus the number of messages rejected.
• 接受的费率：与尝试的电子邮件相比，接受的电子邮件的比率与尝试的电子邮件相比。这是接受交付的消息的数量，除以看到的消息数。
• Unknown User Rate:The ratio of unknown users, or invalid email addresses, compared to the amount of email seen.

所以,好成绩是什么?如果你的得分超过80,congratulations! That's a very good Sender Score. If your score is between 70 and 80, something isn't right -- move on to the next section of this blog post to see what you could be doing wrong that's impacting your email deliverability. If your score is less than 70, well ... you need to repair your sender reputation.

What Do I Do If I Have a Bad Sender Score?

第一步是知道，在检查得分方面做得很好。确定低发件人的分数可能需要数周或几个月的时间，因此您越早意识到问题就越好。您有几个方面email marketing您需要检查并可能更改以提高发件人的分数和电子邮件交付率 - 以下是发件人分数认真帐户：

• 电子邮件量不一致发送：See the graph in the top right corner of the Sender Score report? Their email send volume goes up at a pretty steady rate, and as a result, their score maintains a pretty even number. However, if you were to send 5,000 emails on Monday, 200 on Friday, nothing for a week, and then suddenly another 15,000, you would likely get dinged for sending inconsistent volumes of emails.
• Frequency of Sends:正如发送量应该保持一致的一样，您的电子邮件收件人的频率也应该是一致的。每天，每隔一天，每周都会发送电子邮件 - 无论您的需求如何。只需确保您不会跳上email marketingbandwagon, abandon it after a month, then hop back on and expect no deliverability penalties. As you perfect your email marketing machine, you'll be able totest the optimal email sending frequencyfor your recipients.
• Cold IP Address:如果您是电子邮件营销的新手，则可能已经忽略了您的IP地址。在新的IP地址上开始使用电子邮件营销，并在您的电子邮件列表中与一小部分最好的人一起开始电子邮件营销 - 您知道，那些爱您并且不会将您标记为垃圾邮件或取消订阅的通信的人。逐步增加您电子邮件的人的数量，以使您的IP热身并证明您是安全的发件人。
• 被黑名单：大约有50个已知的黑名单表示IPS是垃圾邮件发送者。返回路径有一项服务，让您看看您是否在黑名单上. Assuming you're a legitimate email marketer who just didn't know some of the rules for good email deliverability, visit the sites of those who have blacklisted you to consult their information for being removed from their blacklist. If you contact them for removal, they will help you understand why you were blacklisted in the first place and what you can do to improve your email marketing methods.
• Getting Caught in a Spam Trap:A spam trap is an email address that was once valid, but no longer is, and will thus garner a hard bounce notice when you email them. However, when a mail server sees consistent traffic going to the dead email, they can turn the email into a spam trap that will stop returning a hard bounce for the known bad address, and instead accept the message and report the sender as a spammer. The moral of the story here is, if you're not monitoring your hard bounces and removing them from your active email list, you could be perceived as a spammer.
• SPAM reports:Finally, if your email recipients think you're a spammer and identify you as such via a SPAM report, your sender reputation is going to suffer. Check the rate at which your emails are marked as SPAM -- an acceptable rate is 1 in every 1000.

There are several other factors to getting your email into a recipient's inbox -- the content of your email, email infrastructure, recipients' personal filtering preferences -- more of which you can learn about in thisemail post about email deliverability.

此外，如果您想在正确的食物上开始电子邮件营销，请考虑参加HubSpot的课程”Understanding Email Deliverability."

To be successful with your email marketing, you need to build trust with the people receiving your emails. To build trust, you need to provide value. And to provide value, you need to know how your emails are performing to a healthy email deliverability strategy.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in February 2012 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.