If you’ve been working hard on your email marketing campaigns and seeing low engagement rates, it could be because your emails have a poor IP reputation. You may have no idea what that means, but ISPs do and they use it to determine whether your emails should make it to the inbox or straight into the junk folder. In this article, we’ll explain what an IP reputation risk score is and how it works as well as the steps you can take to improve it so your emails get where they need to go.
An IP reputation risk score is a number that tells ISPs how likely it is that a particular IP address will exhibit malicious behavior. It takes into account past activity as well as current behavior to produce a risk score for an IP address. The score is calculated based on the behavior of the IP address, including associations it has with other malicious online objects. The score also considers the time frame of the IP address’s association with malicious online objects – for example, how long has it been linked to malware?
There are many factors that contribute to an IP’s reputation, and it can be difficult to predict. However, one of the most important factors is engagement. ISPs look at your open and click rates as well as bounce rates (both permanent and temporary failures to deliver email – known as hard and soft bounces) to see if your recipients are engaged with your emails. If not, this will affect your email delivery and your ISPs may flag you as a suspicious sender.
Other factors include the age of the IP address and its history – older IP addresses are considered more stable, and therefore less likely to be compromised by bad actors. The reputation tracker will also assess if the IP address is listed in any of its blocklists and provide a threat score (which indicates the likelihood that an IP will exhibit malicious behaviour) based on its analysis of this data.
While it’s difficult to predict an exact IP reputation risk score, there are a few things you can do to improve your score. For example, making it easy for customers to unsubscribe from your mailing lists will reduce spam complaints and help you maintain a good reputation. You should also ensure that the email addresses on your lists are valid – regularly removing duplicates will also help you avoid spam complaints.
In addition to these individual steps, you can also take advantage of a dynamic reputation intelligence solution. This is a powerful way to protect your organization from known malware sources by disabling inbound communications with them using network solutions such as next-generation firewalls and network load balancers. This solution provides real-time, granular intelligence about an entire network or IP space. It can be a highly effective and cost-efficient way to keep your networks secure and prevent fraud. If you want to learn more about how dynamic reputation intelligence can help you, click the button below.