Protecting your legal newsletter’s sender reputation in 2021

Your law firm email newsletter has been getting rave reviews from your clients and potential clients. But you’ve noticed some numbers in your email platform dashboard that you’re not sure how to analyze.

Were you aware that your law firm email newsletter carries a score that you can look to improve upon once you know and understand the metrics?

Referred to as your sender score, this metric determines your law firm’s overall newsletter sender reputation. Over time, if your law firm newsletter sender reputation drops, it can impact your law firm newsletter’s deliverability.

In this article, we’re going to help you protect your legal newsletter’s sender reputation by providing you with clear guidelines on how to make sure your sender score remains in good standing.

Let’s dive in.

Understanding Newsletter Sending Reputation

Newsletter sending reputation comprises complex metrics focused on different standings that determine the fate of your email deliverability into your clients’ inboxes.

The three most important reputation metrics are:

1. Your IP reputation
2. Your content reputation
3. Your domain reputation

Let’s look at those three metrics further to understand their impact on your law firm newsletter sender reputation.

IP Reputation – What Does It Mean?

IP Reputation identifies how many people want to get your email based on your firm’s IP address. This is measured by email bounce rates, spam filtering, or any unwanted bulk emails.

“IP reputation used to be the only governing metric for measuring newsletter sender reputation, but it proved to be inefficient because it doesn’t consider how different IPs could deliver (junk) emails with identical content.” Source: Mailjet.com

Content Reputation – What Does It Mean?

Content reputation was introduced as a metric in 2000 and works on specific standards that help determine your law firm newsletter content’s quality.

There are clear red flags for ISP (internet service providers) content filters, such as a virus attached to an email or bank account details being requested. Your content reputation can also go down if your law firm newsletters continue to have low open rates or your readers flag them as inappropriate, block them or unsubscribe.

Combined, your IP and content reputation demonstrate the state of your law firm’s newsletter practices.

Your IP reputation influences the quality of your newsletters through your email history. In contrast, your content reputation measures the type of content you’re sending and determines whether it can be trusted or not.

Domain Reputation – What Is It?

Sender reputation authentication has become an additional indicator of your overall newsletter health, which has led ISPs to develop additional criteria to measure this called domain reputation. This looks at the quality of the domain your emails are being sent from, which is usually your law firm’s website URL. This concept was introduced to examine website domain names since IP addresses can be different.

The best way for you to protect your law firm’s newsletter sender reputation is to ensure that you’re delivering great content that your readers want.

Keeping Track of Your Newsletter Sender Score

If you’re worried about your sender score, there are ways that you can check this.

But before we show you how to do this, what is a good sender score?

Return Path’s Sender Score

Your sender score determines your law firm’s newsletter reputation and works within a range of 0 to 100. It is collated using non-personal data from “over 60 million inboxes from different ISPs, spam filtering, and security companies.” Source: Mailjet.com

This sender score creates a clear picture of how good or bad your practices are when sending your law firm newsletters.

Typically, your Sender Score is derived from an average of your email behavior over the last 30 days.

Calculating Your Newsletter Sender Score

Your Sender Score is based on the data that Return Path acquires. It’s only relevant to the ISPs that consider it, though.

At the end of the day, your ISP decides whether your law firm newsletter reputation is good or not using their own set of criteria and data points.

So, while you might receive a high score using Return Path’s calculator, it doesn’t mean that all your law firm email newsletters will get to your reader’s inbox.

How to Check Your Sender Score

Follow the steps below to check your Return Path’s Sender Score:

1. Visit https://www.senderscore.org
2. Set up your account using your business email
3. Look for the confirmation email in your inbox. It will have a subject line of “Activate Your Sender Score Account.” Open that email and click on “activate your account” to complete the process.
4. This will take you to a page where you can log in. Once you’re logged in, you’ll be able to enter your email sending domain or your IP address.
5. You will then be presented with your results.

What’s an Acceptable Sender Score?

If your Sender Score is 90 or higher, this is considered an excellent Sender Score and means that your newsletter sender reputation is doing well.

The lower the score, the more likely it is that you’re getting people unsubscribing from your newsletter or not opening your newsletters at all.

Improving Sender Score and Email Reputation

Now that you have a good understanding of your Sender Score and what your law firm newsletter reputation looks like, how do you ensure that you continue to enjoy a good reputation?

The answer is by keeping track of your scores and maintaining or improving your open rates and click-through rates for your legal newsletters.

Important KPIs To Track

Determining key performance indicators (KPIs) for legal newsletters starts with understanding what the average industry standards are for the legal services industry.

Below is a list of the KPIs that you should keep track of, ensuring that your numbers are equal to or better than the numbers listed here:

• Average open rate = 20%
• Average click-through rate = 1.5%
• Average unsubscribe rate = 0.24%
• Average spam rate = 0.02%

You’ll find most of this data located within your email platform account and available for each email you send.

Jessie Bower is a marketing expert specializing in email and automation processes for lawyers and small law firms. Her role as a Marketing Manager with Denver Legal Marketing allows Jessie to consult with various types of solo and small law firms to optimize their communication with clients and streamline their digital presence