Overview
Each domain has a reputation that contributes to its overall health—think of domain health like a credit score for your email domain. A strong reputation means email providers are more likely to trust your messages, improving your email deliverability.
Your sending reputation is influenced by four key signals. Here's what each one means:
- Bounce Rate: This measures how many of your emails are rejected and returned by the recipient’s server. A bounce doesn’t always mean the email address is wrong—it can also result from the recipient’s server configuration (e.g., full mailbox, temporary server issue, or inactive account).
- Spam Complaints: This tracks how often recipients manually mark your email as spam. Even a few complaints can damage your domain’s reputation and deliverability.
- Open Rate (Not Recommended): Tracking open rates is no longer a reliable or recommended practice. The tracking mechanisms used to measure opens can actually hurt deliverability, and modern privacy features (like Apple Mail Privacy Protection) make open rates increasingly inaccurate.
- Engagement: The most important metric. This refers to real user interaction—specifically replies and link clicks. If people are replying or clicking, it means your content is resonating and your emails are landing in the right inboxes.
If engagement is high, it's a strong signal that your deliverability setup is working—and that you're reaching the right audience with the right message.
Bounce Rates
- Why it matters: A high bounce rate means you're sending emails to invalid or unreachable addresses. This signals poor list hygiene and can hurt your domain reputation.
- When to troubleshoot: If your bounce rate exceeds 20%.
- How to fix it:
- Regularly clean your mailing list.
- Remove hard bounces (permanent failures due to invalid addresses, typos, or deactivated accounts).
- Monitor soft bounces (temporary failures like full inboxes or server issues); remove addresses that bounce repeatedly.
Spam Complaints
- Why it matters: When recipients mark your emails as spam, mailbox providers see your content as untrustworthy—and future emails may be blocked or sent to junk.
- When to troubleshoot: If your spam complaint rate exceeds 0.1%.
- How to fix it:
- Make your unsubscribe link easy to find.
- Avoid spammy language and misleading subject lines.
- Use clear, relevant messaging aligned with the recipient’s needs.
First Bite proactively warms up your domains to start you off with a strong sender reputation, helping to minimize spam complaints and bounces.
Engagement
- Why it matters: The most important metric for deliverability is engagement—specifically replies and link clicks. These are the strongest signals to inbox providers that your emails are wanted and valuable.
- When to troubleshoot: If your aggregate campaign reply rate drops below 4%.
- How to fix it:
- Send personalized, relevant content that offers value to the recipient.
- Avoid over-sending to the same contacts.
- Use First Bite’s search and filter tools to build small, highly targeted campaigns. Focused messaging leads to better engagement and stronger deliverability.
Where to Monitor These Metrics
- Your outreach tool’s dashboard
Check for bounce rates, reply rates, and other engagement data under your platform’s “Reports” or “Analytics” section.
- Spam monitoring
Most modern outreach platforms—including First Bite—include tools to monitor domain reputation and spam rates.
- Google Postmaster Tools
Provides insights for Gmail traffic, including domain reputation, spam rate, and authentication status.