Brevo Sender Reputation: How to Build and Improve Your Score

Sender reputation is the invisible score that determines whether your emails reach the inbox or get filtered into spam. Understanding how it works — and how to improve it — is one of the highest-leverage activities in email marketing.

What is Sender Reputation?

Sender reputation is a composite score assigned to your sending domain (and IP address) by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and email clients like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo. It's not a single number you can look up — it's calculated independently by each receiving server based on your sending history.

Factors that influence your sender reputation:

Positive signals:

• High open rates
• High click rates
• Replies to your emails
• Adding your sender to the contacts list
• Moving your email out of spam (rare but powerful)

Negative signals:

• High bounce rates (especially hard bounces)
• High spam complaint rates
• Low engagement (sending to contacts who never open)
• Sudden spikes in send volume
• Sending to spam trap addresses

Why Brevo Users Should Care

When you send through Brevo, your emails are tied to your authenticated domain. Unlike some cheaper platforms that use shared IPs where other senders' bad behaviour can hurt you, Brevo's infrastructure separates sender reputations and provides dedicated IP options for high-volume senders.

But domain reputation is entirely yours to build or damage.

Check Your Current Reputation

Several free tools can help you assess your current domain reputation:

Google Postmaster Tools — if you have a significant volume of Gmail recipients, connect your domain to Google Postmaster Tools (postmaster.google.com) for direct visibility into Gmail's view of your sender reputation.

Sender Score by Validity — provides a reputation score from 0-100 for your sending IP address.

MXToolbox — checks your domain and IP against major spam blacklists.

In Brevo, monitor your campaign statistics regularly. Healthy benchmarks to aim for:

• Open rate: 20%+ (industry average varies)
• Spam complaint rate: below 0.1%
• Bounce rate: below 2%

Step 1: Warm Up a New Domain or IP

If you're starting fresh with a new sending domain, don't immediately blast your entire list. ISPs are suspicious of new senders who appear from nowhere with large volumes.

Domain warm-up process: Start by sending to your most engaged subscribers only (those most likely to open). Gradually increase your daily send volume over 3–4 weeks.

Week 1: Send to 500 contacts Week 2: Send to 2,000 contacts Week 3: Send to 10,000 contacts Week 4+: Full list

Brevo's Business and Enterprise plans include dedicated IP options with guided warm-up support.

Step 2: Segment for Engagement

One of the fastest ways to improve sender reputation is to stop sending to unengaged contacts. Create a segment in Brevo of contacts who have opened or clicked at least one email in the past 90 days. Send primarily to this engaged segment.

As your reputation improves (reflected in better open rates), you can gradually re-introduce less-engaged segments with re-engagement campaigns.

Step 3: Improve Your Open Rates

Higher open rates directly improve your reputation. Tactics:

• Better subject lines — test, iterate, and learn what works for your specific audience
• Sender name optimisation — "Mark from Sendexy" often outperforms just "Sendexy"
• Send time optimisation — Brevo's Business plan includes AI-powered send time optimisation
• Segmentation — sending more relevant content to smaller, targeted segments consistently outperforms broad blasts

Step 4: Handle Complaints Immediately

If you receive spam complaints, Brevo will notify you (ISPs report complaints back to the sending platform). Take these seriously:

• Investigate why that segment or campaign generated complaints
• Remove complainants from your list permanently
• Review the email content and subject line for anything deceptive or overly promotional

A complaint rate above 0.3% will trigger warnings from Brevo and may result in sending restrictions.

Step 5: Maintain Consistent Sending Frequency

Erratic sending hurts reputation. Sending 100,000 emails one month, nothing for two months, then another 100,000 looks suspicious to ISPs. Consistent, predictable volume is a positive signal.

If you're running an infrequent business (seasonal, event-based), at minimum send a small "stay connected" email once a month to maintain activity.

The Long Game

Sender reputation is built over months, not days. The good news is that a consistent approach — clean list, authenticated domain, engaged subscribers, regular sending — reliably builds a strong reputation over time.

Brevo Pricing at a Glance

All plans include unlimited contact storage. See full pricing on Brevo →