Quality rating is the number that governs everything else. It is not a vanity metric and it is not slow-moving — it can change within a day, and it takes your sending limits with it.
The three states
- High (green) — normal. Limits can increase.
- Medium (yellow) — a warning. Something in recent sending is generating negative feedback.
- Low (red) — limits may be reduced, and progression stops. Act immediately.
It is assessed per phone number over a recent rolling window, which is both good and bad news: bad sends hurt quickly, and good behaviour repairs it within days rather than months.
What feeds it
Primarily negative signals from recipients — blocks, and reports with reasons like "no consent" or "spam" — weighted against your volume. Positive engagement helps, but nothing offsets blocks as effectively as not being blocked.
The rating is attached to the number, not the campaign. A marketing send that generates blocks degrades the same number that carries your order confirmations. This is the argument for separating marketing and transactional traffic onto different numbers once volume justifies it.
The day it turns yellow
- Pause outbound marketing. Not reduce — pause. The window is rolling, so the fastest lever available is adding no further negative signal.
- Keep transactional running. These are wanted, and they generate the positive engagement that helps recovery.
- Identify the send. Look at the 48 hours before the change. It is almost always one campaign, one segment, or one newly-added list.
- Check what changed. New data source, wider segment, higher frequency, different send time, altered copy.
- Fix the cause, then resume small. Restart with your most engaged contacts and watch the block rate daily for a week.
What does not work
- Sending more to "dilute" the bad signal. It compounds it.
- Switching to a new number and repeating the behaviour. The new number will follow the same path, and you will have burned two.
- Waiting passively while continuing to send.
- Appealing. There is no appeal that substitutes for changed behaviour.
Leading indicators
By the time the rating changes, the damage is done. Watch the things that move first:
- Block rate per campaign — track it every send, and know your normal.
- Reply rate falling across consecutive campaigns to the same segment, which signals fatigue.
- Rising opt-out rate.
- Delivery failures climbing, which often indicates list decay.
A block rate that doubles is worth investigating even while the rating is still green. That is the cheap moment to intervene.
Keeping it high, in one paragraph
Message people who remember agreeing, about things relevant to them, no more often than you implied, at civilised hours, with an obvious way to stop. Every quality problem we have seen traced back to breaking one of those five, and usually the first.