What's the Reputation Score on MailReach and how it's calculated?

Your Reputation Score is the best indicator of your sender reputation mostly towards Gmail (Google Workspace) and Outlook (Office 365) and to a lesser proportion, other inbox providers.

The sender reputation isn't equal to deliverability. Sender reputation is one of the 3 main criteria of deliverability.

A perfect deliverability (landing 100% in inbox) requires meeting 3 criteria:

A perfect sender reputation : the hardest part of the deliverability job. Our email warmer helps you improve and maintain it over time (including during your campaigns).
Sending non-spammy email content : making sure your content doesn't make you land in spam. One link is enough to land in spam. Use our Spam Test to check this.
Using a non-spammy sending setup : using a well-known email service or inbox provider, not an exotic one (custom SMTPs) and being properly authenticated (SPF, DKIM).

You have to meet these 3 criteria. If you don't meet the 3 at the same time, you will land in spam. Using both our Email Warmer and our Spam Test (Spam Checker) will help you maximize your results.

1. The Reputation Score is 100% based on where your warming emails land.

Sending 100% innocent emails to inboxes and see where they land is the most reliable way to score your sender reputation. MailReach emails are 100% innocent as they contain zero spammy element: no links, no tracking, no images, no attachments, no spam words. If an innocent email like ours lands in spam, it's because of your sender reputation (on the address, domain, IP level) or email service provider.

2. The score gives more weight on the last days.

Obviously, to be the most accurate and up to date, the score gives more weight on the last days as your reputation may vary significantly between days.

3. It gives more weight on Gmail (Google Workspace) and Outlook (Office 365) inboxes.

When your warming emails land in inbox in Google Workspace or Office 365 mailboxes, it has more weight in your Reputation Score than landing in inbox on a IONOS mailbox since Gmail and Microsoft are more used than the smaller inbox providers.

What makes the Reputation Score decrease?

Most of the time, your Reputation Score is the result of your sending practices. Best sending practices = best score. Bad sending practices = low score.

Over-sending: sending too many cold emails daily per address. The absolute max should be 150 / day / address. It could be even fewer depending your case. Read below.
Too many spam complaints from your recipients: people are pissed off by your emails: bad targeting, error in the email, shitty email, too pushy, shitty offer, etc
No easy-to-spot and working unsubscribe link: no unsubscribe link = more spam complaints.
Too many follow-ups: the more follow ups you send, the more spam complaints you get.
Sharing a sending IP with spammers: if your emails are sent from an IP also used by spammers, then this low reputation IP will impact your Reputation Score.

How to get the highest Reputation Score: the most efficient actions 🔥

⚠️ If your score is below 60 (red color), read our dedicated guide : How to restore a bad sender reputation and fix a low score with MailReach

Below you'll find the best actions you can do to maximize your chances of improving your Reputation Score.

🚀 ACTION 1 : Send fewer emails or even stop sending campaigns [GAME CHANGER].

If your email address / domain / IP is new, you have to let MailReach run for 14 days without sending anything on your end. That's the warm up pre-sending phase.

For cold outreach, 150 cold emails / day per sending address should be your maximum. 100 / day or fewer is even better.

From our tests and data, 150 cold emails / day per sending address and domain should be the absolute maximum to maintain a good sender reputation (and deliverability). The fewer the better. If you can send 100 or fewer, do it.

If you exceed 150 cold emails daily per sending address, your risk of landing in spam is multiplied.

What's the point of sending more emails per day if most of them land in spam and very few people read them? That's waste, nothing else.

If you want great results, follow this crucial recommendation. If you prefer having shitty 💩 open rates, don't follow it. You have been warned.

More information in our dedicated article: The Best Cold Email Sending Strategy

Important : it's not because we recommend a maximum of 150 / day that it will be the best maximum for YOU. Your maximum number could be 90 per day. Why? Because it depends on several factors.

Example : if your target recipients are constantly bombarded with cold emails and are angry each time they see another one landing in their inbox, you'll receive more spam complaints. And more spam complaints = lower sender reputation.

On the contrary, if you only send emails to people happy to receive your emails and your spam complaint rate is very low, then you'll be able to keep sending 150 per day without any negative impact.

For some, 130 / day will be the sweet spot, for others it will be 80 / day.

How to find the sweet spot ?

Your graph "Where your warming emails land" and your Reputation Score are your best friends. If your score decreases (= more warming emails landing in spam), it means there's something wrong and your first weapon will be to reduce your volume. If you manage to maintain a Reputation Score of 95+ over time, it means your volume is fine.

For cold outreach, have fewer sending addresses per domain. Only one is the best.

Usually, people don’t like this advice. We understand, but that's for your growth and peace of mind.

That's simple, if you have multiple sending addresses per domain :

You multiply the volume of cold emails sent per day per domain.
You're putting multiple eggs in the same basket.

This leads to 2 consequences:

Higher risk of damaging your sender reputation (and Reputation Score) because of over-sending per domain.
If one sending address starts landing in spam, it will spread on the other ones sharing that domain. Disaster.

Our recommendation:

Buy several domains: avoid domains with hyphens, numbers. Avoid exotic extensions and prefer ".com", ".co", ".io"
Set up one address per domain.
If one sending address per domain is too low for you, add more but be aware that spam spreading can occur between addresses.

If you're sending newsletters or transactional emails: minimize your volume and send to the most engaged subscribers.

If you send newsletters or transactional emails, people intentionally subscribed to your emails (opt in). If that's not the case, then your risk of landing in spam is much higher, read the section just above since that's kind of a cold email practice.

Make sure to removed the non engaged recipients to avoid sending emails to ghosts. That decreases your engagement rate and thus, your sender reputation.

🚀 ACTION 2 : Make sure to have an EASY-TO-SPOT and working unsubscribe link in your emails

That's simple and mathematic: no clear unsubscribe link in your emails = more spam complaints = damaged sender reputation = spam.

And no, saying to unsubscribe, reply "unsubscribe" to this email is NOT a clear unsubscribe link. This practice leads to spam complaints as it pisses off the recipients. People don't have time to reply "unsubscribe" or "stop" to your emails, respect their time.

The most common objections are:
But no, it looks less human and will decrease my results : NO, you can send 1-1 emails and have an unsubscribe link. That's just respect and UX for the recipient.
But I don't want to make it easy for people to unsubscribe as it will decrease my results" : If you don't make it easy, they'll mark your email as spam. It will destroy your reputation and decrease your results even more.

We've compared the results between campaigns including an unsubscribe link VS campaigns without one: more sales generated on the campaign with an unsubscribe link as the one without resulted in landing more in spam.

Having an easy-to-spot and working unsubscribe link will help you make more sales as it will increase your sender reputation and deliverability.

🚀 ACTION 3 : Send fewer follow-ups (cold outreach use case).

We all have heard that the more follow-ups you send, the more sales you make. In a wonderful word of easy deliverability it may have been true, but in the real email world, that puts you in spam.

For each follow-up, you receive spam complaints. Why? Because you're contacting (again) people who didn't reply to your previous email. And most people who didn't reply are just not interested. In other words, you're coming back to mostly uninterested people. And a significant part of uninterested people mark your emails as spam. Period.

Remember that spam complaints hurt badly in 2023. Each of them is a nasty kick in your sender reputation 🩸

The more follow-ups you send, the more spam complaints you get.

What's the point of sending 5 follow-ups if that makes you land more in spam? It destroys your sender reputation and at the end of the day, makes you miss customers and growth.

At MailReach, we recommend to send maximum 2 follow-ups after your first email and space them of 3 days at least to let people breath.

🚀 ACTION 4 : Make sure to follow the best practices.

Reminder: in 90% of the cases, a low Reputation Score means your sending practices are wrong. The other 10% is choosing a bad email provider (most of Custom SMTPs).

To get the best score, you need to follow the best practices. Of course MailReach helps, that's a solid boost, but MailReach can't magically fix all your mistakes. Putting a turbo on a car with flat tires won't fix the car, you have to fix the tires.

But we got your back, we have all the information you need to know to be a true deliverability pro 👑.

Our advice here is simple : READ, RE READ and APPLY the best practices that we listed here :

The Ultimate, No Bullshit Email Deliverability Guide

Following the advice of that guide will definitely help you have a better sleep, trust us.

🚀 ACTION 5 : Raise the volume of warming emails on MailReach.

Doing that shouldn't be necessary if you followed the 4 previous actions and especially the Action 1. Putting a turbo on a car with flat tires doesn't make sense, repair the tires first.

In MailReach > Email Warmer > Find the email account you need to heal and click on Show
Go in Settings > Edit sending and ramp-up volumes
Turn off the Autopilot Mode by clicking on the green selector
In Max sends per day > Set to the maximum > 35 conversations
In Starting volume > Set to the maximum > 35 conversations

This should be a temporary fix to help you go back to a 90+ Reputation Score.

🚀 ACTION 6 : Have a bounce rate lower than 5%.

This one is a classic but having too many bounces can hurt your deliverability as it sends a bad signal : the signal you don't really know your recipients. Because if you really knew your recipients, you'd know their email address is not valid anymore, etc.

You have to show the providers you have a clean, up to date contacts list.

Our recommendations :

Make sure to verify your emails before sending them an email. At MailReach we use Verifalia but you can also check Debounce, etc.
If you send emails to 'catch-all' addresses (emails that you can’t know if they’re valid or not) : have max 20% of your contact list as catch-all emails to cap / control the bounce rate. The rest should be "valid / success" emails. More info about the 'catch-all dilution' in the section "The best email verification strategy" our famous guide here : The Ultimate, No Bullshit Email Deliverability Guide.
The email list verification has to be 1-2 months old max. If you verify your list in january but you send emails to this list in june, it has to be verified again as some % of this list will be invalid with time.

🚀 ACTION 7 : If you have done the 6 previous steps and didn't reach a 90+ score, consider changing your inbox provider.

This section is for those who are using an inbox provider different than Google Workspace and Office 365.

For a cold emailing activity: the providers with the highest reputation are Office365 and Google Workspace

Office365 is the provider with the highest reputation. Google Workspace is second. Zoho is third.

These are the best providers to choose for a cold emailing activity, there's nothing better to land in inbox.

For newsletters / transactional emails: we recommend Sendinblue.

In all cases, avoid exotic / custom SMTPs, they're pretty bad. Using this kind of setup gives you a handicap and limits your results.

Google and Microsoft are the major inbox providers and most of your recipients are using them. To land in the inbox of a Gmail or a Outlook mailbox, you need to be like them.

These major providers don't like when they see emails from weird setups, SMTP used to send bulk emails and all that.

You need to have a human behavior, not a bulk sender behavior. A normal human uses a Gmail or Outlook inbox, he doesn't use Mailwizz, PowerMTA or other spam sending tool.

RECAP

Not having a great Reputation Score means landing in spam. Landing in spam makes you miss customers and revenue. Take this very seriously by taking these actions.

Never more than 150 cold emails / day. The fewer the better. Minimize the number of sending addresses per domain.
Have an EASY-TO-SPOT and working unsubscribe link in every email of your campaigns.
Send fewer follow-ups (for cold outreach). We recommend 2 follow ups maximum. 3 emails in total.
Apply the best practices following The Ultimate, No Bullshit Email Deliverability Guide
Raise the volume of warming emails on MailReach if needed.
Have a bounce rate lower than 5%.
Consider changing your inbox provider if the 6 previous actions are not enough to reach a 90+ score.

Updated on: 22/05/2023