You are an email marketer. Your biggest concern (after deliverability) is the placement of your emails in the inbox. The deciding factor on your emails getting to the inbox is your email server, specifically your email server’s domain and IP(s).

As long as your recipients are opening your emails and clicking the links in your email (and replying to your email), your reputation increases. This is ideally what you want to happen. It’s also what email providers like to see. This means that you are positively engaging your audience.  The challenge is this rarely happens out of the gates, and even if it does, one false move can land you in spam, and keep you there.  With very little you can do to get back to the inbox.

So how do you get started warming your own IP and domain reputation when you cannot control the actions of your recipients? Will they open the email? Will they click SPAM? Will they click your links? Will they unsubscribe? Will the spam filters flag your content? Sometimes you’ll send out an email and it just doesn’t quite connect. Recipients don’t open the emails, they don’t click the links, they delete the emails or, the absolute worst case scenario, they click “Report SPAM”.

When they click the “Report Spam” button, or your content is flagged, or you have limited positive email activity, a few things start happening. First, your reputation score decreases. What this means is that your IP and domain scores begin to drop. This is bad, because now your emails start going to the Spam folder. At this point, your recipients stop seeing your emails and you have no way of increasing or rehabilitating your IP and domain. You are stuck. No matter how well you write your emails, no matter what “tricks” you try, your emails just keep going to the spam folder. It all seems hopeless.

This is a frustrating and powerless experience that we set-out to change.