Sender Score Below 90: What It Means and What to Do This Week

You checked your sender score and it came back 78. Or maybe your deliverability uncovered that your open rates have tanked.

Sender score is the foundation upon which your email reputation is built.

And it is important to keep a track of it for your sending domain.

That being said, sender score is a constantly moving target. It's never one permanent locked number.

In this article, we'll take a deeper look into sender score, how it works, and how to fix a low sender score.

What is sender score anyways?

The sender score is a number assigned to your sending domain by Inbox providers. It is a rolling figure built from six specific things your subscribers do with your email.

The score runs 0 to 100. Services like Validity's Sender Score calculate it per sending IP, and increasingly per sending domain, from roughly your last 30 days of sending. It is free to check at senderscore.org.

Is that public number the one that actually matters? Not really.

Every inbox provdier - Gmail, Outlook and Yahookeep their own private sender score. And that's what decides whether your email lands. The public score is a useful reference point.

You can go deeper into this subject in my book, Ultimate Email Marketing Plan.

What is a good sender score?

Sender Score above 90 is a positive sign and it usually means your emails will land into the Inbox.

When the sender score is between 80 and 90 - it is a warning sign to act this week.

Below 80, you are almost certainly already seeing mail land in spam and some sends bounce.

What does a sender score below 90 mean?

It means that a mailbox provider has started treating your mail with suspicion. Not an outright block, but more of it filtered to spam, slower delivery, and some sends rejected at the door.

Think of a landlord deciding whether to rent to you. They do not read your application form closely. They call your last two landlords and ask whether you paid on time.

Mailbox providers do the same thing: they look at what your last several thousand recipients did with your mail, not at how your subject line reads.

So what put the number there? Almost always, sending to people who did not want the email or did not remember asking for it.

It could be one more of the following:

• A purchased list.
• A batch of addresses that have not engaged in a year.
• A large one-off send to a segment you never normally email.
• The score is reflecting what those people did with it: ignored it, deleted it unread, or marked it as spam.

How do I check my sender reputation?

Three places, and you want all three, because they measure different things.

• senderscore.org. The public score for your IP and domain. This is the fastest read and usually where the "below 90" number comes from. Run your email sender reputation check here first.
• Google Postmaster Tools. What Gmail specifically thinks of you: domain reputation graded High, Medium, Low or Bad, your spam-complaint rate, and whether your authentication is passing. It takes one DNS record to set up and it is the single most useful view you can get.
• Microsoft SNDS and JMRP. The equivalent for Outlook and Hotmail, including a complaint feedback loop so you see who is hitting the spam button.

Those free first-party tools, plus a blocklist check with mxtoolbox or our own email authentication checker, are the deliverability tools that matter.

Paid inbox-placement testers tell you where a set of seed addresses landed, which is useful, but it is secondary to what the providers report about you directly.

What raises a sender score fastest?

The biggest impact on sender score happens when you change the list you send to or improve the quality of your email list.

Reputation is built from subscriber actions and how subscriber interact with your email is what makes or breaks your sender score.

Here are six subscriber actions that move your sender score:

1. Reading the email push the score up
2. Replying to it push the score up
3. Forwarding it push the score up
4. Marking it "not spam" push the score up.
5. Marking it as spam pull it down
6. Deleting it unread pull it down.

Here is how you can improve the sender score this week:

1. Remove disengaged subscribers: Anyone who has not opened in three to six months comes off the sending list, after one short re-engagement attempt. This is the biggest single lever, because it removes both the deletes-unread and most of the complaint risk in one action.
2. Send only to the engaged, on a steady schedule. Your opened-in-the-last-30-days segment, at a consistent cadence, no sudden blasts. Smaller sends to people who want the mail generate the positive signals that pull the number back up.
3. Clean the list. Remove hard bounces, role addresses like sales@ and info@, and obvious typo domains.
4. Invite a reply. A reply is the strongest positive signal there is. Put a real question in your next send and read the answers.

Will better subject lines help? No, it won't help immediately.

Rewriting copy, switching email platform and buying a tool all leave the number where it is. Simply because none of them change who received your last few sends.

Segmentation is another version of step 2: relevant mail gets opened and does not get marked as spam, which safeguards your reputation.

How long does sender reputation take to recover?

Two to six weeks of consistent, wanted sending for a normal dip.

Sometimes it may take longer depending on the severity of the issue.

Why not faster? Simply because the score accumulates and decays over time, so there is no button that resets it.

It climbs back the way it fell: gradually, on repeated good sends to people who want the mail. A dip from a single bad campaign usually clears in two to four weeks.

A domain that has been emailing a stale list for months takes two to three weeks at least. That being said - sometimes, warming a fresh subdomain is faster than rehabilitating the old one.

The mistake that stretches it out is going quiet. The score rebuilds on positive engagement, and you get none of that while you are not sending.

Keep sending, to the engaged segment only, on a steady schedule, and let the good signals stack up.

Next Step

The first (or the next) thing you can do is to visit senderscore.org and Google Postmaster Tools and enter your sending domain there. Note down the sender score.

Then, this week: remove everyone who has not opened in six months, send only to the people who have, keep the schedule steady, and ask a question you actually want answered.

Re-check your sender score in two weeks.

If the score is goes above 90 and your email is still going to spam, the problem is authentication rather than reputation.In that case, SPF, DKIM and DMARC is the page to read.

For the full order to work through, why email goes to spam covers it.

If you would rather hand the rebuild over, that is what email deliverability services is.