I saw this question posted to the Email Marketer’s Club today and I could not help myself, I just had to answer it here.
Q: Whats the best way to build reputation on new IPs?
A: The best way to build reputation, or to repair a reputation, on an IP address is to send small amounts of email to the ISP your working to build reputation at. These numbers have varied across the ISPs but you can be safe by starting with a few thousand message a day (<5,ooo) after a couple of days or a week you should double this and then double again after another week. To build a proper reputation on an IP address between 50 and 100 thousand messages need to be sent and monitored by an ISP, approximately 3 business weeks mailing daily ISPs measure the following;
- Number of unknown users attempted
- Number of spam/junk reports from recipients
- Number of spam trap or long inactive (12+ months disabled) accounts that are being attempted
- Number of concurrent connections attempted from one mail server.
Key items to note:
- Send relevant and permission based emails
- Send only to live addresses, remove invalid account immediately
- Monitor ISP feedback loops for high levels of user complaints
- Frequent mailings (daily) in smaller batches than less frequent and larger campaigns
- Authenticate your messages with SPF/Sender ID and DK(IM)
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These are excellent suggestions. I’d just like to underscore the vital nature of being able to monitor the reputation of your domains and IP addresses. Doing everything right, just as Matt has described, can put you on the road to rebuilding a tarnished reputation. But being able to monitor the effectiveness of those efforts and measure improvement over time requires the kinds of tools and relationships that a number of reputation monitoring services (my company’s included) can provide. Monitoring is the only way to know if you’re on the right track, and whether additional efforts are required.
Hi Matt,
What is the effect of not ramping up an IP – say if you do not have the volume needed? Can it still be done on a smaller scale?
Kelly