It is crucial for you to send emails that are deliverable as a sender, especially if you are sending transactional emails. It means you have most likely read through many lists of email best practices. But if you don’t confirm that the actions you’re taking are actually effective, what good is trying your hardest and crossing your fingers?
It’s important to keep up with your sender reputation to make sure there are no leaks that need to be fixed. Your IP reputaion is one of the first things you’ll check during this process. This is an important factor in determining your sender reputation.
What is IP reputation?
The idea of reputation becomes important when comparing IP addresses to physical addresses. An IP address with a clean history of proper usage and connections—never being linked to malicious behavior, malware, or hacking attempts, and only being linked to safe domains, locations, and online entities—will earn a positive reputation, much like a property’s value can be influenced by its location in a “good” or “bad” neighborhood.
Why is IP Reputation Important?
Any email marketing campaign’s main goal is to get recipients to open and interact with their emails. However, if the emails aren’t delivered at all, this will never occur. Email providers may flag your genuine emails as spam if your IP reputation is poor.
To guarantee email delivery, organizations must establish a positive IP reputation. A low bounce rate from viewers and fewer spam complaints are criteria for this formula. Sending emails exclusively to recipients who have expressly agreed to receive them is one way to maintain a positive IP reputation. If a marketing email is sent to someone who never signed up for it, companies may be in violation of GDPR legislation in the European Union.
In addition to guaranteeing that emails come from genuine IP addresses, IP reputation plays a crucial role in preventing cyberattacks. IP reputation helps in identifying malicious intent, forwarding questionable emails to the spam folder, or completely blocking them by verifying the authenticity and quality of an IP address.
How does an IP address work?
Based on the behavior of the IP address, an IP reputation grows over time. This includes things like how much and what kind of traffic the IP address is sending out, whether it contains malware or spam, and if the IP address has ever been used for any malicious purposes like hacking or phishing. Many organizations, such as internet service providers (ISPs), security vendors, and reputation services, gather and examine IP reputation data.
What are IP Reputation Attacks?
When a hacker takes control of a website or server and damages its IP reputation, this is known as an IP reputation attack. This can occur in many different types of cyberattacks. An attacker may affect a business’s IP reputation in a number of ways, such as:
- Hacking the company website
- Hijacking servers to send malicious emails
- Using a system for DDOS attacks
On a large network, this can happen with just one compromised device. Furthermore, it is possible to use outdated, unpatched devices with active network connections and permissions.
An attack breaking into your system might quickly change your IP reputation, even if you took all the necessary precautions with your email marketing efforts to establish a good one. It interferes with your ability to communicate with your audience since they believe that your emails are no longer reliable. Your company’s email marketing may be dead unless you restore your IP reputation.
How can I Find My IP Reputation?
An email marketing campaign’s ability to be successful depends on its IP reputation. Use these procedures to find out your organization’s IP reputation if you’re not sure what it is.
- Determine Your IP Addresses: To begin, create a list of all the IP addresses connected to your company. To determine the IP addresses of email servers permitted to send emails on your domain’s behalf, check your Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record. IP addresses from your email provider (such as Gmail or Outlook), any subdomains, and external mail servers (such as MailChimp) should all be included in this record.
- Use tools to analyze: Static lists can easily become out of date, so look for an IP reputation solution that offers real-time data. Sender Score, BrightCloud, Google Postmaster Tools, Microsoft SNDS, and other tools are among the many solutions that offer various slices of data pertinent to your IP reputation.
- BrightCloud: provides an overview of IP address data, along with details on threat analysis, threat status, and virtually hosted domains.
- Google Postmaster Tools: gives businesses using Google Workspace information on spam reports, delivery difficulties, and performance problems.
- Microsoft SNDS: provides reports with full data on specific IPs and when users trash your mail for businesses that use Outlook.
- MX Toolbox: It offers a free IP lookup tool that provides details on the reputation of the IP address along with other elements like DNS records and blocklisting status.
- Spamhaus: You can use its free blocklist lookup tool to see if an IP address is included in any of its blocklists.
- Cisco Talos: It offers a free reputation lookup tool that classifies IP addresses as good, neutral, or bad based on their reputation.
- Evaluate your result: Sender Score provides up-to-date information on how customers and ISPs are seeing your emails by averaging thirty days. Additionally, it offers a real score between 0 and 100 that is divided into three categories:
- Needs Repair(0-70)
- Room for Improvement(70–80)
- Excellent Reputation (80–100)
How to improve my IP Reputation
If your company has a bad IP reputation, it will need to do more to prove its validity to email filters and ISPs. This may take some time to resolve, but it’s important to develop your reputation as a reputable source.
You can start improving your IP reputation through the use of the following email-related actions:
Review your email marketing approach: There might be a good reason why recipients are marking your emails as spam. Focus on quality over quantity to avoid having your emails frequently regarded as spam.
Start slowly: In order to establish a reputation, you must warm up the IP address if you have a new SMTP server, domain, and IP address. ISPs and spam filters may raise warning lights in response to a new sender’s high email volume.
Maintain consistency after increasing sending: Massive increases in sending volume could raise questions.
Use separate email servers: The requirements for marketing emails differ greatly from those of regular business emails. You can protect and improve your company’s reputation by using different email servers for every purpose.
Respect the unsubscribe option: Users are more likely to flag your emails as spam if they don’t have it. Furthermore, they are not the right target audience for you in the first place if they wish to unsubscribe.
Trim your email list: Avoid sending emails to unresponsive or inactive users. Focus on smaller, more individualized email lists that have attainable goals. The quantity of a mailing list is not as important as engagement.
Additional security measures to enhance IP Reputation and online security:
To improve online security, it is vital to take extra security precautions in addition to verifying the legitimacy of IP addresses and URLs. The following suggestions are provided:
- Update your program frequently: To guarantee you have the most recent security patches and bug fixes, update your web browser, operating system, and other apps on a regular basis.
- Use strong and unique passwords: Don’t use the same passwords for all of your online accounts. To safely keep your passwords, think about using a password manager.
- Turn on two-factor authentication (2FA): To further secure your online accounts, turn on 2FA wherever you can. Usually, in addition to your password, you also need to input a verification code that is texted to your mobile device.
- Install trustworthy antivirus software: To protect your devices from malware and other harmful threats, use reliable antivirus software. Update the antivirus program regularly to make sure it can identify the most recent threats.
- Watch out for suspicious emails and attachments: When opening emails from senders you don’t know or clicking on dubious links or attachments, proceed with caution. These might be malware or phishing attempts.
Why choose LeaseIPx?
There are several ways that leasing IP addresses from LeaseIPXs can strengthen your online security. To begin with, you can spread out your online activities among multiple IP addresses by using leased IP numbers, which prevents hackers from targeting you. Attempts to follow your movements or launch focused attacks are blocked by this technique. In addition, LeaseIPx ensures that you use IP addresses that are less likely to be compromised by providing stable, high-quality IP addresses that are updated frequently and checked for security threats. You can stay ahead of potential security dangers and offer superior protection against various cyber hazards by simply adding or altering IP addresses as needed. By adding an extra degree of protection, using LeaseIPx’s IP leasing services improves overall online safety.
Conclusion
It goes without saying that every company that sends emails to customers needs to take IP reputation seriously. An email marketing campaign can be made or broken by it. Your IP address may even be included to a blocklist due to poor IP reputation, which is tough to remove.
Now that you know how crucial it is to understand, keep an eye on, and enhance your IP reputation, you may take action to guarantee that you consistently score highly. I hope this blog will be useful to you in the future.
