Why Email Reputation Management for Transactional Emails is Essential

To ensure that emails actually end up in the recipient’s inbox, senders must meet a wide range of technical requirements. Read more here about why good email reputation is important for effective transactional emails and how companies can master the challenges of reputation management with Retarus.

What Are Transactional Emails?

Transactional emails are created during a business process. They are sent automatically from software systems once the customer has performed an action. This is different from email marketing, which is purely for promotional purposes. Marketing emails originate solely from the provider and are not sent as part of a business process. A transactional email is used to communicate with the customer. Examples include the following:

To confirm the subscription to a newsletter
To confirm that a product or service has been ordered
To send an invoice, receipt, or payment reminder
To notify a customer about a delivery or a new message in the customer portal
To notify a customer of a password reset or other account transactions

Users take these types of transactional emails for granted. They are even expected as proof that a transaction was successful. Retarus Transactional Email allows companies to send large volumes of automated emails. Comprehensive reputation management guarantees a high delivery rate.

What Are the Challenges When Sending Emails?

Sending transactional messages via your own email servers puts a strain on the infrastructure. Additionally, it carries the risk that the company’s own IP address will end up on a blocklist. Furthermore, it is difficult to comply with the constantly changing technical requirements that ensure a good email reputation and thus a high sender score.

Why Is Email Reputation so Important for Transactional Emails?

If the sender’s reputation is not good, it’s possible that the messages will not reach customers’ inboxes as desired. Instead, the emails end up in the spam folder, quarantine, or in a worst-case scenario, are not delivered at all. If this happens with transactional messages, user satisfaction and trust suffer. For example, customers do not know whether an order has been received, when to expect delivery, or perhaps never receive an invoice for a product they already purchased.

For the company sending the emails, this means additional costs and extra work. In addition, the reputation and image of a provider is negatively impacted if emails are classified as spam and are not delivered.

What Is the Significance of the Sender Score?

A sender’s email reputation is determined by the reputation of the sending IP address and domain, as well as the quality of the email content. The sender score measures said reputation on a scale of 0 to 100. The higher it is, the better the reputation of an IP address when compared to others. If the sender score is high, most emails end up in the recipient’s inbox. If the number is rather low, the sender’s emails are likely to have high bounce rates, high block rates, and low open rates.

Before sending emails for the first time, senders should be aware of their scores, because optimizing a bad score takes some time. Senders can check their IP address at www.senderscore.org. Professional providers for transactional emails, like Retarus, monitor this score and implement countermeasures together with their customers through active reputation management to prevent the score from deteriorating.

0-70

Room for Improvement

If your Sender Score is below 70, you should work on your sender reputation.¹

70-80

Good but Not Perfect

You are probably already aligning yourself with industry standards and are not far from an optimal reputation.¹

80+

Good Job

Your reputation as an email sender is at an appropriate level.¹

What Factors Affect a Sender’s Reputation?

Here are the most important factors affecting transactional email deliverability

Frequency of Emails

The frequency of emails sent has a noticeable impact on email reputation. Senders should send regularly and on a set schedule.

Marking the Sender’s Emails as Spam

The more contacts that mark a sender’s email as spam, the worse the email reputation.

Fluctuating Sending Volumes

The number of emails sent should remain roughly consistent. Sending volumes that fluctuate greatly have a negative effect on email reputation. The sending volume is always related to other index values. For example, the sender’s reputation improves the fewer complaints there are for the emails sent.

Reader Interaction

Reader interaction, meaning if emails are opened and links in the emails are clicked, also has an impact on reputation.

Email Undeliverability

If the distribution list contains contacts that are no longer valid, the result is more than just a high bounce rate. For ISPs, they are also an indication of poor address quality at the sender’s end. Senders who regularly send messages to invalid email addresses can be flagged as spammers. The sender score metric takes into account how often emails cause a bounce². This is why maintaining one’s own distribution lists and databases is of great importance.

Blocklists and Allowlists

How Does Retarus Ensure Good Email Reputation?

When it comes to reputation management for Transactional Email customers, Retarus applies the following processes, among others:

The cloud provider handles the administration of IP addresses as well as bounce management and continuously monitors the most important blocklists.
If an IP address appears on a blocklist, Retarus provides support in researching the reasons and delisting.
Thanks to CSA certification, Retarus is on the positive list as a sender for common ISPs.

If desired, Retarus can prevent the “burning” of an IP address by “IP routing by sender domain”, which distributes traffic to several IP addresses.
Continuous monitoring of all systems by experienced experts enables timely countermeasures in the event of problems.
Suppression lists remove invalid email addresses from the distribution list before sending.

In addition, there are many other mechanisms that ensure a good email reputation for the sender and thus a smooth business process. The Retarus offering is completed by expert advice and personal customer support.

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Sources
¹ https://senderscore.org/
² https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/16294-bounce-rate.html