You don’t want to use a provider who has a checkered reputation with Return Path as your emails will get the corresponding spotty deliverability.  I recommend Constant Contact and Mail Chimp as top Email Service Providers and both have Return Path Certified Status.

Note that the IP addresses any Email Service Provider uses for delivering emails sent from the free email accounts they offer may not have this Certified status.  Continue reading →

Since it’s not cost effective for real estate professionals to get Return Path Safe or Certified level directly by themselves, you need to send your email through companies who are Return Path Certified.

As I’ve recommended many times before, you should be using an Email Service Provider for sending your email campaigns, and email reputation is yet another reason why.  Many email providers are Return Path Certified.  Make sure the email provider you use has this certification.  To attain this certification the Email Service Provider themselves has to demonstrate a strong reputation over time in various ways for the clients they send emails for. Continue reading →

Return Path rates your mail server’s IP between 0 and 100, 0 being the worst, 100 the best.  Presumably, individual email providers set their own minimum acceptable score for sending mail servers.  If your reputation score is at or above that score your emails go directly into the inbox, automatically bypassing any other anti-spam measures the email provider has.  If your reputation is below the email provider’s minimum score then your email gets put into the spam folder.  If your score is REALLY low then an email provider may outright block your emails so their users aren’t seeing them at all, even not in their spam folders.

With Return Path you can give your email reputation a big boost by Continue reading →

The biggest tell-tale sign of a spammer is the huge quantity of their lists and huge lack of quality.  Since spammers have huge databases they don’t care much (if at all) about how many dead email addresses their databases have.  If they have 10 million emails in their database they don’t really care if 2 or 3 million of the emails no longer exist because they’re still emailing and reaching a colossal number of people (or at least hoping to do this).  Continue reading →

Email reputation is based upon two primary factors: input from past recipients of your email campaigns and how current your email database is.

Recipient Input

This recipient input is mostly based upon Continue reading →

Few real estate professionals think about (let alone look at) how well their email campaigns are being delivered.  Are their emails reaching recipient inboxes?  Getting put into spam folders?  Or blocked and not seen at all by their recipients?  These are critical things to know.  Fortunately, there are now ways of guaranteeing your emails are reaching inboxes with the great majority of the email providers out there and not getting put into spam folders or blocked and not seen at all.

The traditional way anti-spam technology assessed whether an email was junk mail or not was Continue reading →