Six Steps to Improve Your Sender Reputation in 30 Days
Sender reputation is the single biggest factor in inbox placement. These six steps — from list hygiene to warm-up schedules — can lift your placement rate above 99%.
Inbox placement is the percentage of your emails that land in the inbox rather than spam or promotions. A 99% placement rate means 1 in 100 emails goes to spam. An 85% placement rate means 15 in 100 — at any meaningful volume, that's thousands of missed emails per send. Here are the six steps we recommend to every Sendbound customer who asks how to improve their reputation.
1. Clean your list
Remove addresses that have hard-bounced. Remove addresses that haven't opened an email in 180 days. Use Sendbound's verification API to check the remaining list for invalid and disposable addresses. A smaller, engaged list is always better for reputation than a large, stale one.
2. Set up DMARC, DKIM, and SPF correctly
These three authentication standards tell receiving mail servers that your email is legitimate. If they're missing or misconfigured, your emails look suspicious by default. Sendbound's deliverability dashboard checks all three and highlights any issues.
3. Warm up new IPs gradually
If you're starting on a new IP address, don't send your full volume on day one. Start with 200 emails on day 1, double each day for two weeks. Sendbound's warmup scheduler automates this — you set your target volume and the scheduler handles the ramp.
4. Monitor blocklists daily
Your IP or domain could appear on a blocklist for any number of reasons — a spam complaint spike, a compromised account, even a false positive. Sendbound monitors 40+ blocklists for your sending infrastructure and alerts you within minutes if you appear on one.
5. Segment your traffic
Don't mix transactional and marketing email on the same IP pool. A spike in unsubscribes from a marketing campaign can damage the reputation of your transactional IP. Use separate pools — Sendbound makes this a one-line configuration.
6. Watch your engagement metrics
Open rates, click rates, and unsubscribe rates are all reputation signals. A sustained drop in open rate often precedes a deliverability problem. Sendbound's analytics dashboard shows engagement trends across your sending domains and flags anomalies before they become reputation damage.