What are 5 star email reputations?
In the old days, "word of mouth" is considered to be most important in improving one's business. This is generally achieved by the satisfied customer recommending to their near and dear ones about their experience with a service or the product brought by them. This is one among the best options adopted to expand the business. But now, technology has invaded us and we show least interest to go out. We want the world to be at our fingertips. Likewise, thank the technology developers, they have brought everything at the fingertips, we just touch, tap, scroll and click for anything we require and require doing.

Since "word of mouth" is nowhere now, to replace this, 5 stars reviews evolved. This is nothing but the customer gives reviews about the promotional offer or service or about any product made him or her interested will give ratings accordingly with stars. The other customers based on these ratings, evaluate the brand and company's reputation and decide whether to show interest in them or not. 4 or 5 stars are considered to the high and highest ratings.

What does a good reputation mean? Why it is important?
A good reputation is achieved by following good sending practices. The email newsletter which reaches your clients’ inbox without any complaints, naturally rises up your brand reputation. But the email devoid of such things will naturally land with the name blacklist causing immense damage in the eyes of ISPs and to your company reputation.

Apart from the sending practices, the delivery of your email newsletter also matter with the reputation. When your email newsletter delivers fast and accepted by the server of your clients faster and hits the inbox faster also counts.

If you are able to maintain the best sending practices, you send more relevant emails, your emails are more likely to be subscribing by interested clients and ultimately increasing your return on investment rates which shows that email marketing is cost effective business.

What to do to maintain good reputation?

• Make sure that your complaints are lower than 0.01%
• Your invalid email id rates lower than 3%
• Validate your domain with to check for any HTML code errors.
• Check your subject lines for spam words, to avoid spam filters.

Reputation score calculation
Reputation score is calculated based up on a number of factors like sending newsletter to invalid email address, spam rates, newsletter content and email volume, which are controlled by you. These are explained below:

Invalid Email addresses: Sending your email newsletter to invalid addresses and unknown customers is a sign of bad sending reputation in the eyes of ISP's attacking your email delivery.

Spam complaints: Uninterested clients marking email newsletter as spam.

Newsletter content: While crafting your subject lines, be clear that it is devoid of spam words, too many punctuations, and exclamatory marks to avoid spam filters.

Email Volume: Too many emails than your customers’ expectation may hurt your overall reputation because of spam complaints.

How to improve your reputation
To improve your reputation, first you need to be in the good books of domains or ISPs. To achieve this email newsletter should require the following steps to be taken care of:

Best sending practices
This is the most important step in considering your company's reputation. Email newsletter should directly hit the client's inbox.

• Spend time on your subject lines to avoid spam filters and keep your content scan-able.
• Check for HTML code errors.
• Send your newsletter with your real name and addressing client's name.
• Scheduled time to send emails.
• Include actual links with words and phrases, avoid text links.
• Faster email delivery.

Avoid Spam Traps

• Make sure that your newsletter does not have any hyper language to attract spam filters.
• Make use of punctuation, exclamation mark and other symbols to its minimum.
• Don't keep your subject lines in CAPS or block letters.

Maintain list hygiene

• Wash out invalid addresses from the list which you have not used for a long time.
• Segment uninterested clients, and work them accordingly.

Domain Validation
Domain validation is a process to validate your data or to check your data with the third party concern to make your domains to trust the third party server to send emails on behalf of you. If this is not set up, then the email will be received by the clients in the third party domain on behalf of your domain. ISPs score lower spam rates for such validated emails and your clients will not be easily convinced as they get an email from an unknown address. So validate your domain with DNS entries for SPF and DKIM for custom tracking.

Use of personal IP address

• Don't use multiple “From” domains while sending your email newsletter because the interested clients may not recognise you, and mark you as spam.
• Use personal IP address at times while sending your email newsletter for isolated reputation of your email marketing.

What to do if reputation doesn't improve?
In spite of your current reputation, if you still find it to be improved or to earn 5 star rating or if you have any queries about the reputation score, then feel free to contact MailGoes team.