It’s normal for small business owners and leaders to be concerned about their company’s reputation in the marketplace. You may even think about the owner’s or president’s personal reputation as well. These are important concerns for any business and brand. But there is another reputation you should be very concerned about as well. Your Internet domain and your IP address also have reputations of their own. Who do you think is the great protector of these reputations? Answer: your marketing team. (Make sure they understand and are staying on top of this!)
Internet, email, and spam devices scattered across the globe are continuously evaluating the content you put out on a regular basis. They are keeping track of how many people complain about receiving emails from you.
Mailbox providers also monitor how many emails you’re sending to unknown users. These are mailboxes that either never existed or have been abandoned and terminated. In fact, one strategy to combat spam is to purposefully create mailboxes that don’t belong to active users and use them to identify people who send to that particular inbox. Since this inbox was never owned by a real human being, it should never have ended up on any marketers mail list.
In the next few weeks, I will be writing articles that lay out the different reasons for a bad reputation and strategies to avoid this from happening. I will also show you how to repair any damage that may already have been done.
Here are some of the topics we will cover.
1. Understanding your domain and IP address reputation, what is it? Why does it matter? How do you manage and protect it?
2. What is email deliverability and how do you make sure your emails end up in the inbox instead of the junk folder?
3. How do you find out what your reputation is? What tools can you use to understand and monitor your reputation?
4. What strategies can you use to maintain a positive reputation or repair a damaged reputation?
So stay tuned to this blog for a number of helpful articles on how to manage this critical aspect of your brand reputation on the web.
Jim Anthony | So-Mark Founder