Email Hygiene: Keeping Lists Clean Before the Christmas Rush

Poor list hygiene is a leading cause of email deliverability issues. Internet service providers use the way your list bounces or hits spam traps as a way to help determine if you are a spammer and therefore cause harm to their customers. As an email marketer, it is important to adopt best practices, as you never want to appear as a “spammy” provider and suffer from poor deliverability.

Deliverability issues can be a major cause for concern for your brand. Coming up to the holiday season, you want to ensure your emails have the best and highest chances of being subscribed to or ‘clicked’ on – deliverability issues can severely dwindle these chances. In extremely cases, you may be put on a blacklist, preventing all email you send from being delivered to any domain within a given Internet service provider.

If you want to run a successful and legitimate email program, email hygiene must be top-of-mind.

The first way to enable having a good email list is to ensure you are collecting email addresses on a permission basis and are not acquiring lists. List acquisition is one of the top ways your sender reputation can be harmed because these lists are often riddled with outdated and invalid email addresses.

Another key best practice is to ensure all email addresses you collect directly from the subscriber are valid and deliverable (from the moment they are captured and over time). The ListWise software runs continuous checks of all addresses separating the valid from the invalid.

To get a head start this holiday season, here a few tips for producing the cleanest email lists possible:

· Clean old email lists
Keep email lists up-to-date. By using email-cleaning software such as ListWise, email lists are checked to be sure they don’t contain any inactive or bad email addresses.

· Validate emails at the point of entry
Real-time email verification instantly determines if an email address is valid, accurate and actionable. It should be utilized on the front-end across every channel that collects email addresses, such as web forms and landing pages, point of sale systems, and call centers. Always validate email addresses for recent opt-ins before sending a welcome message. This ensures harmful and undeliverable email addresses never enter into your systems.

· Remove bounced emails
2% of all contact data goes bad every month. Why do email addresses go bad? The email channel is very dynamic with accounts constantly being abandoned, blocked or changed. To account for these changes, be sure to remove any hard bounced emails from your list permanently.

Following these best practices is critical to achieving success with your email program, as well as lessening the risks associated with deliverability problems this holiday season. We hope that you trust ListWise for your email list cleaning needs.