Improving Your Sender Score

When using the Email Campaigns feature, you may have noticed that your email campaigns cannot be all sent at once. This is because your nonprofit is assigned a sending frequency, which is calculated based on several elements, in particular, based on your reputation rating.

Find out below why we've put this measure in place, as well as how you can increase your sending frequency.

This article covers the following points:

• Understanding your reputation rating
• What we do to preserve the reputation rating
• Increasing your emailing frequency

Understanding Your Reputation Rating

Definition

When sending emails, email service providers (such as Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc.) take into account the reputation of the sender to determine if the emails sent are considered spam or not.

An account's reputation corresponds to the confidence score of the sending server. This reputation rating is therefore common to all of our clients. As such, in order to protect it, we will send your first email campaigns in batches to make sure new clients do not impact our overall confidence score. 

If your nonprofit sends unsolicited emails, is often reported as spam, or sends emails to email addresses that no longer exist or have never existed, your email campaigns might negatively impact our overall reputation rating. Because of this, your email campaigns could be blocked.

Why a Good Reputation Rating Is Key

Having a good reputation rating is essential, otherwise, the email delivery rate suffers. This is what determines whether emails are:

• Placed in the receiver's inbox 
• Placed in the receiver's spam box
• Blocked

If a reputation rating is tarnished, it is difficult to regain the trust of email service providers. Because of this, and the fact that our reputation rating is shared by all our software users, we have put in place certain actions (described below) to ensure our reputation rating remains high.

Certain email providers have aggressive anti-spam filters that stop emails from being sent. We have no control over this filter.

What We Do to Preserve the Reputation Rating

Controlling the Rate of the First Email Campaigns

When you first start using the email campaign feature, the sending frequency of your first email campaigns will be low. This will increase with time. 

Your first email campaigns are sent in batches of 50 every 30 minutes. This aims to ensure that your spam rate/bounce rate is low. Once this verification is done, this frequency will increase. 

Unsubscribing

When you send an email from the Email Campaigns feature, the receiver always has the possibility to unsubscribe.

This option appears at the bottom of each email sent:

Once a person clicks on I no longer want to receive these emails, they will be automatically unsubscribed from all mailing lists.

Thanks to this system, people can unsubscribe from your emails instead of reporting your nonprofit for spam, helping maintain the reputation rating.

Increasing Your Emailing Frequency

To increase your emailing frequency, follow these simple tricks.

Improve Your Email Content

The more interesting you make your email, the more people will want to read it. The reputation rating depends on the behavior of the recipient and varies depending on the opening rates of your email campaign and the number of spam reports.

Delivering the right content to the right audience reduces the spam rate. Here are some tips to help you with this:

• Only send emails with content that is appealing to your followers
• Make sure there is interest and commitment from the receivers - you can use your email campaign statistics to analyze this
• Segment your contacts by creating several receiver lists

Some criteria can trigger email spam filters, and should be avoided:

• Use special characters (i.e. #!$À) in the subject of the email
• Having too many images (you should prioritize text instead)
• Linking your email with a domain that has a bad-quality score

Do Not Send Unsolicited Emails

The stronger the relationship is with the recipient, the lower the risk that the emails will raise suspicion of the spam filters.

Do not hesitate to ask your community if they want to receive your newsletter and make sure to not send them too many emails. Also, ask them to update or check their email address to verify that:

• It still exists (otherwise, the email might bounce)
• It is still used (or else, the email will not be opened)

Buying a database is never a good idea as it will negatively affect your reputation rating.

Mechanisms to Increase Your Sending Frequency

As explained, your first email campaigns are divided into batches and distributed according to an hourly quota.

Increasing your sending frequency depends on the spam/bounce rate of your campaigns. We send emails in batches that double every 30 minutes.

Example: You send 500 emails over 30 minutes with a low spam rate. We will double the frequency of your next email campaign. If you only send 200 emails, your frequency will not change.

To increase your frequency, you must have both a high number of emails sent and a low spam/bounce rate.

If your campaigns have a high spam/bounce rate, we will temporarily block your email campaigns in order to verify this. This process also blocks email campaigns that are damaging to the reputation and that would trigger repeated blocking anyway.

Blocked Campaigns

If a campaign is blocked because of bad statistics:

• We display the reason why it has been blocked. It will be because of one of the two following reasons:
  • High bounce rate
  • High spam rate
• We put a label on the campaign in the global Dashboard

How to unblock a campaign?

At present, it is not possible to unblock a campaign once it has been blocked. The reasons for a campaign being blocked may vary, including substandard content requiring revision or an inadequate recipient list necessitating cleaning.
To avoid being blocked again at the campaign level or, worse, at the email application level, the client must create a new campaign and ensure that it is enhanced.