Can an email sender's reputation be permanently damaged by repeated cycles of massive sends and pauses?
Summary
What email marketers say10Marketer opinions
Email marketer from Medium explains that email spam is a quick way to damage your email sender reputation. Email spam is generally defined as unrequested mailshots. Sending email without permission will cause a spike in spam complaints and will hurt your email reputation.
Email marketer from Neil Patel explains that poor email marketing habits such as sending to unengaged subscribers, using deceptive subject lines, and having a high spam complaint rate, will negatively impact your sender reputation over time. Repeatedly engaging in these practices can lead to a permanently damaged sender reputation.
Email marketer from StackExchange explains that if an email sender's reputation gets too low then their IP or domain will be blacklisted and it can be almost impossible to recover the reputation again. This can cause emails to always be routed to spam folders.
Email marketer from Mailjet shares that sender reputation is significantly influenced by consistency. Inconsistent sending patterns, such as massive sends followed by pauses, can negatively affect your reputation. These abrupt changes make it harder for mailbox providers to trust your sending behavior, potentially leading to deliverability issues.
Email marketer from Quora shares that repeatedly engaging in negative sending practices like sending unsolicited emails, or ignoring bounce messages eventually will result in tarnishing your IP and domain reputation making it increasingly difficult to land emails in inboxes over time. Remediation can be a long and arduous journey.
Email marketer from Email Geeks shares that relying on the 'forgiveness' of external parties is unsustainable for building a business, as what works now may cease to work at any time, emphasizing the need for control.
Email marketer from Email Geeks provides a short answer that, yes, you'll reach a point where reputation can't be repaired, eventually.
Email marketer from SendPulse explains that building a good sender reputation requires consistent effort and adherence to best practices. Repeatedly engaging in practices that harm your reputation, such as ignoring recipient engagement or sending to purchased lists, can lead to long-term damage that is difficult to recover from.
Email marketer from MailerLite says a dirty email list will hurt your sender reputation. Regularly scrubbing your email list to remove old contacts is vital to maintain a good reputation. Sending to old or unengaged addresses will damage your sender score.
Email marketer from Reddit explains that repeatedly damaging your sender reputation with bad sending habits makes it harder and harder to recover. While it's possible to rebuild a damaged reputation, the effort required increases each time, and there's a point where it may become too difficult or costly to restore your deliverability.
What the experts say5Expert opinions
Expert from Spamresource.com shares that sender reputation is a critical and ongoing element in email. Irregular sending cadence and poor list hygiene leads to a lowering of the reputation. Long term this causes permanent damage that may take a long time to fix.
Expert from Email Geeks notes that people and companies often prioritize short-term gains over long-term health, and it's difficult to change their decisions.
Expert from Email Geeks advises documenting the risks of deviating from the reputation repair plan and clearly laying out the potential impact on deliverability, allowing the client to make an informed decision while protecting your own position. Suggesting creative solutions to accommodate their needs within the repair plan.
Expert from Email Geeks explains that there is always a way to repair reputation if you're acting in good faith, but actions known to be bad will ruin it over time, similar to snowshoeing. Recovering from human intervention is harder than recovering from machine learning.
Expert from Word to the Wise explains that irregular sending habits and neglecting email list hygiene can lead to decreased engagement, increased spam complaints, and blacklisting, which negatively impact sender reputation. Repeated cycles of massive sends and pauses exacerbate these issues, potentially leading to long-term damage.
What the documentation says6Technical articles
Documentation from Cisco explains that protecting your sender reputation is a vital task. Bad sending behaviour such as large unsolicited mailshots will cause blacklistings that can eventually be impossible to recover from. Monitoring your domain on blacklists should be a standard practice.
Documentation from Microsoft shares that maintaining a positive sender reputation is critical for ensuring email delivery to Outlook.com and other Microsoft services. Senders who repeatedly engage in practices that harm their reputation, such as sending unsolicited emails or having high complaint rates, may find their emails being blocked or filtered, with long-term consequences.
Documentation from AWS explains that AWS monitors the sender reputation of users that send email via their email service. If a user repeatedly causes damage to their sender reputation by ignoring bounce and complaint rates then AWS will eventually block the account until issues are resolved.
Documentation from Google explains that senders with a history of spam or poor sending practices may have their messages filtered or blocked. Repeatedly sending large volumes of emails without proper list hygiene or engagement monitoring can negatively impact your sender reputation, potentially leading to long-term deliverability issues with Gmail users.
Documentation from SparkPost explains that a sender's reputation is a critical factor in determining email deliverability. Repeatedly violating email best practices, such as sending to invalid email addresses or ignoring unsubscribe requests, can lead to a permanently damaged reputation, making it difficult to reach recipients' inboxes.
Documentation from RFC-Editor explains that the Domain Name System (DNS) stores vital information about domains. This information can be used by recipient mail servers to identify spammers and low reputation mailers. Maintaining a clean domain and a good reputation will help emails reach the inbox instead of the junk folder.