Jimmy Kim says marketers fixate on email reputation scores that don't actually predict deliverability. Focus instead on what matters: compliance status, spam rates, authentication, and engagement data from your ESP. These concrete metrics let you fix real problems instead of chasing a number.
A pivot from chasing a reputation score to focusing on an underlying metric that's created that the score is in the first place. Basically compliance status, spam rates, delivery errors, and most importantly, your own engagement metrics from your ESP. So instead of saying my domain reputation is good because I look at my spam rate, it's below 0.01% and my SPF and DKIM is passing and my compliance rate is low, all this stuff that you hear, these are actual indicators of deliverability health ultimately.
And I'd say overall this might be a good thing because too many brands were fixating on the reputation score without actually understanding what drove it. Like they'd see the reputation dip and panic, but they wouldn't actually fix the underlying issues where they were sending to unengaged subscribers or having authentication problems.
