A good reputation goes a long way
Reputations are an essential piece of how we make decisions in day-to-day life. Think about how often some measurement of reputation is used in your life: looking at online reviews of restaurants, driver rating and passenger ratings on ride-share apps, credit scores that determine whether or not you are eligible for major loans or financing.
Your email sender reputation is no different. It is the sum of all activities that occur with regard to your email sending activity. Each inbox provider monitors trends in your activity to determine your reputation, and your reputation may not be the same across all inbox providers.
Understand the 3 types of spam traps
Inbox providers use spam traps to identify senders who aren’t adhering to good sending practices. Spam traps are email addresses that are not used by a real person. They are essentially fake email addresses used by these organizations to identify and catch malicious senders.
If you send emails to a spam trap, it is a good indication that you are not regularly cleaning your subscriber list, or that you may have even purchased a contact list illegally from a third party.
Pristine
A pristine spam trap is an email address that has been published on a public website, but is hidden so a typical user would never find it.
If you have pristine traps in your email list, that is a good indication that you either scraped a website for addresses or purchased a list that contained scraped addresses. Spammers use both of these techniques to collect email addresses.
Recycled
A recycled spam trap is an email address that was used by a real person at one point in time, but has since been abandoned and turned into a spam trap by the inbox provider.
When you email a recycled spam trap, the inbox provider will return a hard bounce. Good senders will remove hard bounces from their lists and avoid sending to them again.
If you ignore hard bounces and continue sending to them, the inbox provider will automatically mark your messages as spam. Klaviyo does not allow you to send to addresses that have hard bounced.
Invalid address
Invalid or misspelled email addresses can be used by inbox providers as spam traps.
This is why double opt-in is highly recommended. Limit any likelihood of getting caught in an invalid address spam trap by always having users verify their subscription before adding them to a list.
The common thread between all 3 spam trap types is that you should not be sending emails to addresses that have not explicitly subscribed to your communications. And if they show little to no likelihood of engagement, you should remove them from your list.
Control your sender reputation
Your actions are directly responsible for how you are perceived by inbox service providers. Aside from setting up the necessary sending infrastructure like a branded sending domain, there are other best practices you can adopt in order to become a good sender. Allow the following principles to guide your email sending strategy, and you will be able to foster a good relationship with inbox providers.
Only send to consented profiles
The best way to keep a good sender reputation is to send messages only to the people who want them, and avoid messaging people who don’t. Klaviyo makes it easy to tell whether a profile has given explicit email consent. On a profile page, you will see a green check mark with the word Subscribed next to it.
You can use this information in the segment builder, too. Always make sure to include the 'Person is subscribed to email marketing' condition in any segments that you plan to use for email communications.
Use double opt-in to build your list in good faith
When you create a list in Klaviyo, it is set to double opt-in by default. This means that when someone submits their email address to your list, they will receive a system-generated email confirmation message that prompts them to verify their subscription before they are actually added to your list in Klaviyo.
This process helps keep invalid email addresses off of your list altogether, saving you money and headache. We do not recommend disabling double opt-in, unless you have a very specific business use case for doing so.
Send relevant messages
Your goal is to get recipients to read and click through your emails. Keep them engaged by serving up relevant content that is personalized to the recipient. You can achieve personalization on a variety of levels through Klaviyo via segmentation, show/hide email blocks, dynamic content, or using profile properties within your email body copy. Further personalize your communications by creating flows that are branched based on subscriber activity.
Do not send to your entire list regularly
We cannot stress this point enough: do not repeatedly send to your full subscriber list. This will result in a quick decay in your sender reputation, since there will always be some percentage of your list who will not engage. Continuously sending messages to recipients who have not engaged with any message from you in a long time wastes your money and also deteriorates your reputation.
Use an engagement-based sending strategy
Send most of your messages to the recipients who are most likely to engage. When you do this, your average open and click rates remain high because you know with confidence that your smaller group of engaged customers are more likely to interact with your messages. This allows you to layer less engaged segments on top of your engaged segments and send to them less frequently.
If you take this approach to your campaign sending strategy, layered on top of always-on flows that are based on customer behavior, you will have a solid customer retention strategy that is optimized for deliverability.
Clean your list regularly
The reality is that no subscriber will remain engaged forever. List cleaning is the habit of systematically identifying unengaged subscribers and suppressing them from receiving future marketing communications. We will cover the steps on how to do this in more detail later on, but it is a regular practice that every email marketing organization should adopt in order to maintain a good reputation. Out with the old, in with the new!