With all of the mortgage and credit card issues today, much attention has been given to an individual’s credit score.  Our credit scores are extremely important because they determine whether we can get loans, what interest rate we will be charged and even cab impact the ability to get a job. 

As email marketers, we need to be equally focused on our email reputation which is essentially our email sender credit score. Our email sender reputation is the most important factor in determining whether an email is going to be blocked, end-up in a junk folder, or reach the inbox.  ISPs and others looking to prevent spam use your email reputation to determine how trustworthy you are just like lenders use credit scores.

If you aren’t checking your email reputation, you need to be.  A great and free resource to determine your email reputation is senderscore.org, which is provided by Return Path, a leading email services provider.  The sender score is a relative ranking of your email sender reputation with ‘0’ being the worst and ‘100’ being the best.  The senderscore.org website also provides additional information that helps to identify what issues can be negatively impacting your sender score.

Don’t forget that your email reputation can change, and so you need to continue to monitor it.

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.  – Michael Jordan

Failure is a tricky creature in the business world.  Fail too often and you are likely to be looking for a new job, but the reality is that no one continually finds success without encountering failure.  The problem is that the fear of failure can be so strong that it prevents people from expirimenting, testing, and innovating. 

Companies need to establish an environment where failure resulting from sound business decisions isn’t punished.  Look no further than Google.  Google realizes that not every idea will be a winner but they have created an environment where its employees are encouraged and even expected to constantly innovate – which means trying new things without a paralyzing fear of failure.

What Michael Jordan knows is that if you are too scared to try, you won’t succeed.