Understanding IP Reputation: Why It Matters for Your Business and How to Improve It

When it comes to promoting your business, you should use email marketing strategies that can help expand your reach and allow you to generate more leads. The goal is to generate the best returns possible, so you might think that being more aggressive in your email campaign will work to your benefit.

However, beyond building email lists and crafting enticing email content, you need to make sure your messages are delivered successfully and do not end up in the spam folders of your recipients. IP reputation is a crucial ingredient in your email marketing efforts. Here’s an overview of why it’s important and what you can do to give it a good boost:

What is IP Reputation?

Let’s start by talking about email marketing. For your business to initiate email marketing campaigns, it needs an email service provider to deliver your messages to multiple people. However, it won’t do this right away, as it needs to assess your IP reputation.

To put it simply, IP reputation is a metric that gauges your trustworthiness when sending emails. You can think of it as your credit score when you apply for a mortgage. A poor credit record will not qualify you for a loan that has the best terms. Your past financial decisions determine how likely you are to make timely repayments and avoid defaulting on your loan.

IP reputation works almost the same way. Like your credit record, your IP reputation increases or decreases based mostly on the quality and quantity of the emails you send. If it increases, your messages will more likely get delivered to and be read by your recipients. On the other hand, poor IP reputation makes it more likely for your messages to be flagged as malicious and spam.

Improving your IP reputation is crucial in ensuring the success of your email marketing campaign and preserving your brand’s credibility and legitimacy.

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Top 5 Causes of Poor IP Reputation

In a bid to counter spam and other abusive email tactics, service providers will need to take a look at your IP reputation for anything suspicious or any sign of you abusing your IP address. Here are some of the things that could lead to a poor IP reputation:

1. History of Spam Reports

If it isn’t your first time initiating an email blast, an email provider will check how many times your IP address has been flagged as untrustworthy. This will be determined by the amount of emails that end up in the spam folder versus the emails that reach inboxes.  

2. Unsegmented Email Blasts

Email providers hate companies that send emails regardless of who gets to receive them in the hopes of maximizing sales conversions. With this in mind, you will have to make sure your messages contain content relevant to your target audience or risk getting your IP address sanctioned. If it talks about travel marketing trends for 2024 and 2025, make sure your email list contains destination marketers that match your target audience. 

3. Sharing IP Addresses

Even if the email content you create is relevant to your target audience, it won’t matter when you’re sharing an IP address with a company that doesn’t follow email marketing best practices. There’s a good chance a shared IP address has a tainted reputation,  so the safest solution is to build a dedicated one, instead. 

This is where understanding what is a residential proxy can be useful. A residential proxy routes your emails through real residential IP addresses, helping improve deliverability and protect your sender reputation. By using a dedicated IP or a reputable proxy service, you can maintain better control over your email marketing efforts.

4. Lack of Email Authentication

Another key factor in ensuring your emails reach your recipients is to enable authentication protocols. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC must be in place to secure your email infrastructure and ensure hackers cannot spoof your brand to initiate phishing campaigns on your behalf. This can be damaging to your IP reputation. 

Without activating and maintaining these protocols, email providers may flag your IP address as untrustworthy. When all of these red flags are present, most if not all of your messages will end up as spam. 

5. High Bounce Rate

A bounce rate refers to the volume of emails that never reached your recipients. This usually happens when you send an email to an invalid or inactive email address as well as an unavailable domain. A bounce may also occur when a recipient’s inbox is too full to accommodate a new message, in which case, it is considered a “soft bounce.” What you should watch out for is a high “hard bounce” number which may indicate typographical errors in your mailing list. In some cases, a high bounce rate can be caused by the recipient blocking or blacklisting your IP address which disallows you from receiving your emails.  

What Are the Effects of Poor IP Reputation?

You might think that a poor IP reputation won’t be a big deal because email only comprises a part of your digital marketing strategy. However, if your business relies on reaching out to C-suite decision-makers, email marketing establishes brand authority and generates better conversions compared to other channels.

Ask any business-to-business agency or supplier and they will tell you that emails provide better sales numbers than social media and content marketing. It’s for this reason alone that you should be convinced to take IP reputation seriously. Poor IP reputation can have the following impacts: 

Poor Email Deliverability

Your campaign’s success does not hinge on the kind of email marketing platform you’re using. While you may have paid a big amount for a MailChimp or Brevo subscription, you will only be throwing free money when your IP reputation is anything but decent. Spam filters will flag your emails as suspicious which will seriously hurt your engagement rate. In effect, you miss out on valuable conversations with motivated clients as well as high-value sales. There’s also a good chance your email platform account will be locked as it flags suspicious activity.

Damaged Brand Reputation

When your emails land in the spam folder, the recipient is likely to question the credibility of your brand. Even if your messages get through their inboxes, they may not find your content relevant and will either flag you as spam or hit the unsubscribe link. As more people flag your messages as spam and opt out of your campaign, it’s not only your IP reputation that suffers but also your brand reputation. This would often result in your IP being included in a spam blacklist. 

Lower Engagement and Open Rates 

Because of deliverability issues, critical engagement metrics suffer. If you paid for a mass mailing subscription, you may not get the full value of what you paid for when your emails are not engaging your recipients. This could also mean a waste of time and effort, especially if it took you a long time to craft great email content for it to be dumped in the spam folder or get ignored outright. 

Impact on Business Revenue

Low engagement rates translate to losses.  Running an email campaign on a poor IP reputation will not guarantee a good return on investment. If anything, it could only serve as a liability. You would be spending too much on a campaign that is not generating enough in terms of lead nurturing and sales conversions. 

Risk of Blacklisting

Perhaps the biggest blow you would get from a poor IP reputation is having your business blacklisted. When you’re frequently flagged for sending emails that end up as spam, your credibility is put into question and your business may end up getting blacklisted. No matter what email platform you use, getting blacklisted disallows you from sending emails to high-value recipients and, worse, running future campaigns. Once that happens, your ability to reach high-value recipients is restricted, and future email campaigns may suffer. This loss of trust can extend beyond just email marketing – for instance, applying for cards for high spend may become more challenging if your company is viewed as unreliable due to poor digital practices.

What to Do to Improve Your IP Reputation?

IP reputation is everything if you want to get the best ROI from your email campaign. Here are a few tips that can help boost it:

1. Get Your List from the Right Sources and Prep Up Your IP Address

If you’re new to email marketing, the first thing you will need to do is to ensure your email list contains active recipients that align with the campaign’s target audience. To be safe, source your list from opt-ins instead of mining them from directories. It’s also important to obtain a dedicated IP address and ensure all authentication protocols are in place. Another trick is to separate your marketing IP address from your official corporate IP address. 

2. Warm Up Your IP Address By Taking it Slow

As you begin your email marketing campaign, start slow by sending out small batches of personalized emails (ideally, below 150 recipients). This helps your IP address build trustworthiness. Gradually ramp up the number of emails you send while monitoring your deliverability, spam, and bounce rate. What’s more, avoid a sudden spike in your sending frequency. Going from 100 per week to 200 per day is deemed suspicious. 

3. Keep Track of Your Deliverability Metrics

If you notice your spam and bounce rates are gradually increasing, put a hold on your next send-out and try to figure out what went wrong. It could be that your mailing list may contain inactive users or invalid addresses, requiring data cleaning and updating.

On the other hand, your emails may also have a high spam score, which usually happens when the content contains spammy words and lacks an unsubscribe button. Your IP reputation also suffers when more people opt out because they don’t feel interested in your messages. Watch for sudden changes in your deliverability metrics and tweak your campaign as you go along. Use deliverability testing methods to measure how likely your messages will be flagged as spam. 

Endnote

Email marketing is still an efficient means to build brand awareness and generate sales conversions. Without a good IP reputation, however, you will end up wasting precious time and money and risk getting blacklisted. Use the guide above and lead your emails to where they need to be. You should also use PowerDMARC’s IP reputation checker to know if your IP or domain is blocklisted, by monitoring more than 200 public DNS blocklists. That way, you can send emails that actually reach your audiences, instead of getting blocked out or marked as spam!

• About
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Ahona Rudra

Domain & Email Security Expert at PowerDMARC

Ahona is the Marketing Manager at PowerDMARC, with 5+ years of experience in writing about cybersecurity topics, specializing in domain and email security. Ahona holds a post-graduation degree in Journalism and Communications, solidifying her career in the security sector since 2019.

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