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?
Why Is Email Reputation so Important for Transactional Emails?
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
70-80
Good but Not Perfect
80+
Good Job
What Factors Affect a Sender’s Reputation?
Frequency of Emails
Marking the Sender’s Emails as Spam
Fluctuating Sending Volumes
Reader Interaction
Email Undeliverability
Blocklists and Allowlists
In addition, certification with the Certified Senders Alliance (CSA) ensures allowlisting for major ISPs. In order for senders to appear on the CSA’s positive list, they must fulfill certain defined and independently verified criteria. If senders are allowlisted, emails sent with the recipient’s consent by reputable providers can actually reach the customer. If not, there is a risk that the emails will already be sorted out by spam filters on the provider’s servers.
How Does Retarus Ensure Good Email Reputation?
- 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.

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