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As an email deliverability consultant, I often get asked what affects deliverability more – reputation or content? This is a good question; unfortunately the answer isn't so straightforward. In fact, it really depends.

If you have a poor sender reputation it won't matter what your content looks like, because it probably won't get to your customer's inbox. On the other hand, if you have a good reputation, but your content is getting caught by every anti-spam software available, your customer still won't get your message.

To answer the question, it helps to start at the beginning. Imagine that you are setting up a brand new mailing system and are going to start sending email off of new IP addresses. What would you focus on first? Hopefully, you answered "reputation," because that's exactly where you should be focusing your attention at this stage of the game. The fact is that many receivers do not trust new IP addresses and will view you as guilty until proven innocent. That being said, you need to build a positive reputation with the receivers, and you do that by starting SLOWLY.

When building a new reputation on a new system, make sure to send smaller segments of your list and test them to make sure that they are getting through. As you continue to see positive delivery rates, you can increase the percentage of your list that you are mailing until you get to full production. By doing this in a very iterative-type approach, you allow the receivers to look, assess and put a formal (hopefully) positive reputation on your new system.

Remember that during this time you want to send to your best and most active customers. By doing this, you are less likely to see the complaints or unknown users that can quickly put a negative affect on your reputation.

Once you have a positive reputation for your mailing system, you should make sure that your content is not causing you any issues. There are many ways to do this, but the most important one is to test. There are plenty of tools available to test your messages against the most common anti-spam software. By testing, you will be able to tell if your content might case a delivery issue. Also, remember to follow best practices like a good HTML-to-Text ratio, personalization of the content in the message and steering clear of commonly used SPAM words.