Having an exceptional sender reputation is something we as ESPs always strive for. It’s a common exercise in the industry to always be aware of what your current score is and how you can be consistent at maintaining it. You can dedicate your resources as such; practicing good list hygiene, keeping those FBLs intact, elevating mail frequency when possible and dedicating certain IPs to those proven quality recipients. Practices like this are an easy way to keep your reputations on the up and up; however, just because you might have a stellar reputation doesn’t mean that you will automatically be granted access to excellent deliverability. Misconceptions about the overall validity of Sender Score are always being questioned. A few common myths about having a great sender reputation would include:

Protection From Filters
This has got to be my favorite misconception about sender reputations. Let me tell you that a good reputation helps, no doubt about it. But the only thing that you’re saying to those ISPs when you have a great reputation is “Hey, take my word for it.. I’m sending meaningful Opt-In messages over here!”. Albeit that is good enough to get you past the front gate, it’s not always going to get you past those filters and corporate firewalls. If your content contains explicit language, or is egregious in nature, then no amount of reputation on this planet will save your delivery from getting stalemated. I don’t care how engaged your users are or how much they participate. The same goes for using one giant image as your entire content, excessive punctuation(!!!), or using all CAPS in your subject lines. Use your head when creating content, doing so will enable that ‘awesome’ reputation to work towards your benefit.

Avoiding Rate-Limit Schedules
Nobody ‘really knows’ what formula actually triggers an ISP to put a rate-limit on your bulk delivery. Sure you can put down a mix of a few variables that include volume, along with complaints, and of course sending attempts per instance or even per hour. But nobody really knows the formula, or for that matter, the time schedule in which those rate-limits are imposed. And anybody claiming that they do know, or that claims a perfect reputation will remedy this, is selling a tall tale of fantasy. I can’t imagine how a perfect sender reputation would hurt you in this situation; however, I can tell you that it has little to do with how and when you might be rate-limited. This is tricky because sometimes it doesn’t matter what you do. You might have all of your elements of deliverability in order, the stars are aligned perfect for your email and then – BANG!, you still get nailed by an ISP with rate-limits. I think that sometimes an ISP will impose rate-limit schedules simply because its cloudy outside.

There are a couple ways, among others, to try and remedy a problem with untimely and over the top rate-limit schedules that you may be incurring. First, you can call the ISP and ask about their schedules – LOL! I’ve actually tried that one, granted you are lucky enough to get a human on the phone that holds any power at the ISP. Information like this is highly sensitive and closely guarded by the engineers. A more realistic way would be to add or repurpose more IPs to your delivery structure in order to spread around your bulk delivery. It’s costly, and for those who have done it, can tell you that it helps immensely. Lastly, and above all else, better node management can also play a huge factor. You can try reducing the amount of sending attempts per minute/hour from your server. In time you can find what is a better fit, given the resources you have available.

More Inbox Placement
Sure your sender reputation is perfect, but are all of those messages you send actually hitting the inbox because of it? Having a perfect reputation score never hurts, but the answer is a resounding – NO! I have a couple years of delivery management under my belt.. not as much as some other experts in the industry, but certainly enough to tell you that inbox placement is bent around user engagement, more so than anything else. Their is no bible or industry certified manual that illustrates this as a fact(that I can find), you have to base these facts off of months and years of analyzing delivery results. In time, you will come up with this same conclusion.

What does user engagement mean? Well as an ESP, we aren’t necessarily the only ones counting opens and click traffic; ISPs do this as well. They use their own formulas that plug in their subscriber’s activity with messages coming from your domain(e.g. Opens, Clicks, Complaints, etc..). If someone opens your email for the first time, then participates by clicking on a link in your content(other then the unsubscribe), then I would bet the farm that their is a really good chance your next email correspondence, given a successful delivery, will land in that person’s inbox.