Your Reputation: Like High School, it Matters

Remember back in high school when your reputation meant the difference between staying in on Friday nights or going to the cool kids’ party every week?

Just when you thought those days were behind you, you’ve found yourself in the position where, once again, your reputation is EVERYTHING.

Only this time, we are talking about your hotel’s email sender reputation. And now, it’s not the popular kids you’re trying to impress, but the Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

Email sender reputation impacts deliverability

ISPs like Gmail, Yahoo!, and Hotmail are making it harder than ever for legitimate email marketers to reach the inboxes of their recipients. And no, it’s not because they are relishing their roles as the class bullies. Rather, they’re trying to protect consumer inboxes from fraudulent spammers who have become increasingly more sophisticated in how they send email.

The ISPs determine which emails get delivered and which go straight to the spam filter by monitoring the email sender reputations of IP addresses, which are unique identifiers that act as portals delivering email from one address to the next.

So how do you protect your hotel’s email sender reputation to make sure your emails always reach your intended recipients? The first step is checking the health of your sender reputation by visiting senderscore.org. This is a service managed by Return Path that assigns you a “sender score” between one and 100, with one being the lowest and 100 being the highest.

Return Path calculates sender scores based on the following:

• Bounce rates
• Unsubscribes
• Spam complaints
• Blacklist status
• Content
• Engagement

Researchers at Return Path found that one quarter of email marketers with sender scores between 71 and 80 had their messages landing in spam/junk folders. For those sender scores between 81 and 90, 10 percent of their messages landed in junk/spam. So, you can see why your sender reputation is so important. It’s hard to communicate with your guests if your emails never make it into their inboxes.

Your sender reputation is in your hands

If you find you have a low sender score, there’s no need to panic. Just like your classmates in high school, ISP’s have short memories and it’s easy to reverse your reputation in two easy steps:

• Maintain a good, clean list. Make sure you’re only sending campaigns to legitimate and valid email addresses.
• Send content that your subscribers genuinely care about. Email marketing is not a one-size-fits-all form of communication. It’s important that you are sending the right offers to the right guests at the right time. This will help you get the opens/clicks you need to convince the ISPs that you are a legitimate sender.

I will be blogging monthly with tips and tricks on how to maximize the effectiveness of your email campaigns so you can become an email marketing superstar. After all, work isn’t all that different from high school—your reputation still matters.