Bronto Blog

This is the first in a series of three posts written by our partners at Return Path on issues affecting email deliverability. Want more deliverability information? You can check out their blog, the Email Marketing Water Cooler and sign up for real-time alerts when new content is published.

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JupiterResearch recently released a report on email service providers that found that marketers are focused on deliverability when choosing a vendor. While it’s important to work with a top-quality vendor that has the infrastructure in place to get email through to the inbox, most of the reason your email gets blocked is based on reputation factors that are completely outside the control of ESPs.

There are 5 factors that make up your sender reputation:

1. Complaints: Your complaint rate is the most important element of your sending reputation. ISPs collect complaints in a number of ways, the most well known is the "this is spam" button. But email recipients can also complain by writing to their ISP directly (e.g., abuse@yahoo.com) or by using a third-party service like SpamCop.
2. Unknown User Rate: Sending large volumes of undeliverable email into a system suggests that you might be "guessing" at email addresses in an attempt to spam or that you have poor list management practices. Either way it's a red flag to ISPs. Read the rest of this entry »