Opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and spam reports are important ways to measure how your emails are being received. Engagement doesn’t stop here. User actions as simple as read vs. delete without reading or moving to a folder can also be tracked and marked ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
All these play a part in your sender reputation. We like to call this your street cred – or rather – web cred. Building a strong sender reputation is a long term effort, akin to building a brand. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have been known to track the number of times
- Recipients delete messages without reading them.
- You aren’t giving the reader an easy way to unsubscribe. Not only is it a good practice to include a clear, easy-to-access unsubscribe button on your marketing emails, but failing to do so is actually illegal in the U.S. and many other countries. That’s why we have included a step of validation in our marketing engine that reminds you to add the unsubscribe link to your template, if you forget to do so while creating an email campaign.
- Your recipients forward messages from you.
- Recipients add a contact to their address book.
- A recipient moves a sender around between folders.
So the ideal scenario for emails is when every email you send arrives in the inbox of your recipient the way you planned it. The not-so-ideal scenario is when an ISP blocks your message or sends it to your recipient’s trash/promotions/spam folder. To increase email open rates, click rates and engagement is not an easy task. Making sure your emails go directly into inboxes a majority of the time requires some time and consistent effort.
In short: You want your emails to reach the recipient’s ‘Inbox’ folder – nowhere else. Unless there is a ‘Priority’ folder of course.
Here’s a great article on the topic that you must read: Emails Reaching Recipients’ Spam Folder? Here’s How To Avoid It
An email inbox provider keeps tabs on ‘blacklists’ to decide whose emails to block or filter. Your IP may be blacklisted if an email provider detects
- A large number of spam trap hits
- Recipients clicking ‘report as spam’
- A combination of the two