I haven’t thought about reputation much since high school, and that was primarily other people’s reputations, not my own. Return Path resurrected this term during their webinar Thursday afternoon titled “Reputation 101: Five Things You Need to Know to Get on the Good Side with ISPs”.

The presentation discussed the importance of monitoring your IP address reputation to better understand and manage your email deliverability rates. Reviewing your email bounce rates is one thing, but understanding why your email subscribers are unsubscribing, or not even receiving your messages is another.

Both eBrochure Pro and eBrochure xPress are email marketing services that offer deliverability reports that show which subscribers received or complained about your message. So, if you’re an eBrochure client and scratching your head trying to figure out how to increase your deliverability rates, email me and I’ll send you your eBrochure IP address. You can use the following free resources to monitor your IP address reputation as well as general spam activity around the world.

1. Secure Computing’s Trusted Source
2. Iron Port’s SenderBase
3. Window’s Live Mail (beta)
4. Deliverability.com (general deliverability resources)

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So, if Paris Hilton was an IP address, it would probably be something like pa.ri.shi.lt or 72.74.144.58, right? SenderBase says this IP address has a “Poor” reputation score. Time for an analogy.

If Paris was an IP address, and the general media are the ISPs (Internet Service Providers), she would probably have some cleaning up to do before she could deliver some messages. For example, being seen carrying the Bible is hardly enough for a church to allow her to deliver a sermon in front of their members. The church would recognize her reputation from various media sources (ISPs) and likely would not allow her to deliver a sermon until her reputation improved.

So what are the “Five Things You Need to Know to Get on the Good Side with ISPs?” ReturnPath says.

1. Understand and Correct Email Complaints
2. Decrease Unknown User Rates (messages sent to emails the receiving mail server doesn’t recognize)
3. Spam Traps - Clean your lists from dormant email addresses.
4. Mail Server Infrastructure - Luckily Email Service Providers like eBrochure take care of this for you.
5. Increase Sending Permanence - aka decrease your bounce rates.

Tags:antispam emailmarketing email marketing ethics free resources ip address reputation tracking Useful Web

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 4:27 pm and is filed under General, education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.