Struggling to consistently hit the inbox with your emails?

Mailbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo gauge your emails' inbox-worthiness by how recipients interact with your emails. Sending to those who ignore you is slashing your sender reputation, pushing you closer to the black hole of the spam folder.

Trim the dead weight - those non-responsive contacts - and watch your deliverability soar as you focus your emails to an audience that's genuinely interested. Suddenly, reaching the inbox becomes the norm, not the exception.

As I always say, "If ya ain't makin' the inbox, ya ain't makin' money."

Your email reputation score is like your credit score but for emails. Just as your credit score helps decide if you're good for a loan, your email score helps mailbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo decide if your emails are inbox-worthy. They look at how your recipients have responded to your past emails to give you this score.

A good score means you're trusted, and your emails land in the inbox. A bad score could mean you're seen as a spammer. So, it's key to work hard to keep your email reputation score high. This way, your emails will more likely end up where you want them – in the inbox, not lost in the black hole of spam.

Many things affect your email reputation score, and how people respond to your emails is very important. If lots of people open your emails, click on links, and don't mark them as spam, that's good for your score. But if many emails go unopened, it might mean people aren't interested in what you're sending. Also, sending too many emails to full inboxes can hurt your score.

It's also important to keep sending emails at a regular pace. If you suddenly send a lot more emails than usual, it might worry the mailbox providers. Plus, implementing email authentication standards like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC helps your score. These standards prove you are who you say you are and help stop fake emails from pretending to be you.

Boosting your email reputation score by 25% can make a big difference in your email marketing. A better score means more of your emails will probably skip the spam folder and land right in people's inboxes. When more people see your emails, they're more likely to open them and maybe even buy what you're selling. So, getting a higher email reputation score helps a lot, making each email you send out worth more.

The simplest thing you can do to achieve and keep a high email reputation score is to regularly remove inactive subscribers from your email lists. This practice ensures that you're sending emails only to people who want them.

The most common tactic is to continuously run an automated “Win back Campaign.” Though “Win back” is the name of this type of campaign, it’s not its purpose. Its true purpose is to identify email recipients that don’t care about your emails. I suppose “Deadbeat Sweeping Campaign” doesn’t sound as good, so I’ll stick with what we typically call it.

The ones that you send this campaign to are those who haven’t opened or clicked any of your emails in over 90 days. I would even cut it off at 60 days. But that may be too aggressive for your tolerance. If you’re using an email service provider who charges you for every contact in your account, then you’ll especially benefit from the Win back Campaign because it means you’re not paying for those who don’t care about your emails.

But be careful. If you’ve never run a Win back Campaign before, then you need to proceed with caution when launching it for the first time. Sending a bunch of emails all of a sudden to people who don’t care about your emails means that you’ll have the lowest open and clicks rates that you’ve ever had. Mailbox providers will take note and unfairly penalize your email reputation score.

Instead, do a gentle trickle of your Win back Campaign on a daily basis. Send to only a few hundred or a few thousand each day, depending on your numbers.

Your Win back Campaign will include a series of 3 emails. Stagger the emails with 2 days in between each. The typical subject lines for your win back emails will be something like,

• Is this goodbye, {{first_name}}?

• Remember me/us?

• I/We miss you!

• What’s it gonna take, {{first_name}}?

Then depending upon your business, include a call to action with a link to click. I bring up this point because thanks to email privacy protection features, you don’t really know if someone really read your email. But at least clicking a link in your email is still a good indicator that a human did it.

Now, there will be a small percentage of these former non-responders who will open or click at least one of those Win back emails. But the majority won’t. These are the ones that you want to get off your email lists at the end of the series.

Understand and actively manage your email reputation score. Do this simple task to keep it high, and recognize the significant impact a high score has on your email marketing conversion rates. In the realm of email marketing, reputation is everything.