What is email credibility?
Email credibility is a measure of reputation that internet service providers assign to each incoming email. It's an important factor that they use to determine if the emails from your organization are trustworthy enough to be transmitted to the inbox or not.
Why is it important to measure email credibility?
From daily correspondences to targeted marketing, businesses rely on emails to perform various sales and marketing activities. Because of this practice, recipients' inboxes are often cluttered by newsletters, periodic promotions, or cold sales emails from various sources. This accumulation of emails makes it hard for recipients to distinguish useful emails and promotions from spam messages clogging their inboxes.
In order to control spamming attempts, internet service providers have started to scrutinize all incoming emails for credibility and deliver only the valid and trustworthy ones to the inbox. Upon assessing your emails, these providers rate the sender's IP address with credibility scores, based on which it determines whether a given email should be directed to the inbox or to the spam folder.
Thus, to increase your email deliverability and yield more email conversions, it's important that you maintain a healthy credibility score.
How does Zoho CRM ensure email credibility?
Email credibility score, although a rating based on individual emails, impacts other emails that are sent using the same server. In this case, the poor or average email credibility score of one CRM organization hampers the score of other CRM organizations using Zoho's shared email sending infrastructure.
In order to curb this domino effect, help mitigate poor credibility scores, and help you to self-assess your senders' reputation , Zoho CRM analyzes your email sending practices and provides you with an email credibility report.
Based on bounce volume and the number of spam complaints reported on the sender's IP address, the credibility report displays three analyses:
- Credibility score and recommended actions
- Bounce report
- Credibility score trend
Notes :
- Zoho CRM calculates email credibility only for the following:
- Emails sent using the built-in email functionality of Zoho CRM
- Emails triggered by automation
- Bulk emails sent using the mass emails feature
- Those organizations who have opted to receive email insights are also factors in determining email credibility.
- Emails that are sent from inboxes configured with IMAP or POP3 will not be taken into account when calculating the email credibility of an account if Email insights are turned off. This is because these emails are sent through the servers of the configured email provider and do not utilize Zoho CRM's email infrastructure.
- Zoho CRM calculates an account's email credibility score based on a collection of internal parameters that include the total active users present in the account, and the number of emails sent by these active users.
Availability
Permissions required
Users with an administrative profile can view email credibility reports.
Credibility score and recommended actions
The credibility score is a numerical value set on a scale of 1 to 100, where any score above 70 is considered a good score.
The following are score ranges, for reference:
- >70 - Good
- 40 to 70 - Average
- 30 to 39 - Bad
- <30 - Very bad
Your score is generated by assessing the number of spam complaints and bounce volume accrued over time. This component also recommends actions that will help you improve your score.
See also: Email sending best practices.
From the image below, you can infer the following:
- The credibility score is 72; the organization has a good email sending reputation.
- Their spam complaints and bounce volume are low; their emails will likely be transmitted to their recipients' inboxes.
- They have a recommended action; if they update their template with an unsubscribe link, they can improve their sender reputation.
Notes :
- Zoho CRM calculates an account's email credibility score based on a collection of internal parameters that include the total active users present in the account and the number of emails sent by these active users.
- The report displays only the current score of an organization.
Bounce report
Your email bounce is an important determinant of your credibility score. The higher the bounce, the lower your score. The bounce report will display the total number of emails sent and number of bounces as a pie-chart.
For a granular analysis, you can view this report by choosing a specific duration, features, and users from the dropdown.
Credibility score trend report
The credibility score trend report depicts how your credibility score has changed over time. It compares your score with your total number of outgoing emails and the number of bounces accrued for the duration selected. An upward trend indicates good email practices, whereas a decline indicates otherwise—affecting your credibility score.
To view the email credibility report,
- Go to Setup > Channels > Email > Email Deliverability > Email Credibility.
Tips and tricks to ensure email credibility
Emails, thanks to their accessibility and availability, are highly susceptible to frequent malicious attacks, spamming, phishing, hacking, and spoofing. To ensure security and prevent fraud attempts, recipient servers scrutinize your emails for different factors and determine if they should be accepted, quarantined, or rejected.
- Email authentication - Every sender requires DKIM and SPF authentication to prove their ownership and authenticity. An authenticated email account will indicate that the incoming email is authentic, free of suspicious content, and is safe to open and engage with. Click here to learn how to authenticate your emails in Zoho CRM.
- Email content/template - The body of your email templates should comply with the requirements mentioned in the respective compliance guide for business of every country, regarding marketing emails and mass emails. For example, the CAN-SPAM act.
- Frequent hard bounces - While there could be multiple reasons for a bounce, like incorrect email address, exceeding email limits, exhausting mailbox storage, etc., frequent bounces will affect your email reputation. Click here to learn how to minimize email bounces in Zoho CRM.
- Mailing list - Periodic refresh of the mailing list is required to remove the presence of any spam-trap email addresses or incorrect email addresses. Proper maintenance of the mailing list increases the chance of delivering your emails into your recipients' inboxes.
Click
here to learn more about best practices for sending emails.