If you are doing Bulk Email marketing to target a list, then List Clean Services are absolutely must for you. Not only will it increase your Open and Click rates but List Cleaning will save you lot of headaches like getting blacklisted, affecting email and sales continuity, and much more.
Email marketing can be an extremely effective way to reach the type of audience that might help in promoting and selling your business, but even then, the destiny of your online efforts relies heavily on the quality of your email list.
Why do you need to clean up your mailing list? Let us tell you WHY?
REASON 1: YOUR LIST MIGHT CONTAIN SPAM TRAPS
Spam traps are trapping tools that are used by most of the Internet Service Providers and blacklist providers to identify the spammers so, they can block emails from them. Generally spam trap looks like a real email address, but it doesn’t belong to any real person. Since spam trap addresses can’t receive emails, the only way to end up on your list is if you’re not maintaining healthy lists, or you’re not working with the rules of permission-based email marketing. You can’t get involved with a spam trap without doing anything wrong. These spam traps are created in different ways. For instance;
1. Pure spam traps – The email addresses that have never been used by anyone are the pure spam traps. These type of addresses have never been opted into a mailing list, or used to sign up for an account.
2. Invalid email addresses – these are the email addresses that contain a typo, or are submitted deliberately as fake email addresses, they hit you as spam trap just out of pure coincidence.
3. Recycled email addresses – This is the trap you could hit even if every email address on the list was obtained with permission. Recycled spam traps are those email addresses that are old and are no longer in the use of original owner. The address has been abandoned for so long that the provider has repurposed it as a spam trap to block emails from the senders who are not managing their email marketing program with responsibility.
4. Fake addresses – most of the time Website registration and shopping cart forms attract fake emails.
REMOVAL TIPS:
1. Have a plan to identify unengaged subscribers from the moment they sign up. Send win-back campaigns with special offers to these subscribers and suppress any that don’t engage.
2. Send your unengaged subscribers a campaign asking them to re-confirm their commitment. Spam traps will not complete these actions. Suppress any email address that does not re-confirm.
3. Run all email addresses through an email list validation service to identify unknown users and temporary email addresses.
4. Remove all unknown users after one bounce.
5. Segment your email list and send to different segments on different days and at different times. At some point, the segments will be small enough where you can suppress the entire segment that has the spam trap.
6. Check your triggered message program. Look for signs of engagement for all subscribers receiving these emails and suppress any email address that has not engaged within the last 6 months.
REASON 2: THE LIST MIGHT CONTAIN EMAIL BOTS
At times, If you are putting an email addresses in your emailing list without taking special precautions, you might fall for spammers. Spammers use automated programs called spam bots which scour lists looking for email addresses to add to their lists. If you’re putting email addresses in your list, you must take precautions to prevent this. If you think, “That’s okay, I have a spam filter,” then you’re in for an offensive surprise. Your filter, sometimes, sends real messages to your spam folder by mistake, and you can’t see them. The point is, spam filters are not a solution. You have to prevent spam in the first place. And the first step is removing any plain address from the list ASAP. There are a number of ways to hide your email address from spammers. Unfortunately each of them has a downside. Then again, spam is worse than the downside so, we accept the downside because, it’s better than surrendering our addresses to spammers.
REASON 3: YOU MAY HAVE LOT OF SERIAL COMPLAINERS IN YOUR LIST
The problem of the serial complainant is one that, has grown in recent years, stimulated in part by the Internet. The flood of online articles, advice and support imploring customers to stand up for their consumer rights and not accepting sub-standard service is largely well-intentioned, but it can sometimes be interpreted to mean that if you make enough fuss about something then companies will invariably shower you with compensation. Serial complainers are those who exploit consumer power for nothing, they are habitual of this act. Serial complainers keep on marking your emails as spam, bringing bad reputation, draining time and effort. Their actions are causing companies to lose patience.
Dealing with the problem demands radical action. Serial complainers are impossible to deal with on their own terms; ignore a complaint and they will doggedly persist; deal with it courteously and they will be encouraged to try again another time.
REASON 4: YOU LIST MAY BE FULL OF EXPIRED EMAIL ADDRESSES
Email lists that are old and inactive often play host to addresses of unknown users and spam traps. It is important you opt for a list validation service and remove all such unwanted addresses. You should run your list through the validation service just before sending emails. If the ratio of unknown users and spam traps is high on your list, then be alert. Proceeding with such a list means inviting IP blacklisting. You create a robust email address list, full of people who are likely to buy your product or service. But according to Marketing Sherpa, email addresses decay at a rate of 2.1% each month. That means each year every one in four addresses is out of date. Just like cleaning as you go saves time, using email verification for each campaign prevents spending hours resolving a blacklist crisis. Verifying email also prevents you from losing out on potential sales.
Email verification is quick and affordable. Today’s self-service tools allow you to drag and drop your email file and identify the expired addresses in a matter of minutes. Email verification is more affordable than you would expect and the more you clean, the cheaper each email is to verify. List verification services like BulkResponse provide such feature, which predicts how much percentage of emails are invalid and needs cleaning.
REASON 5: DIRTY MX RECORDS MAY BE THE CAUSE OF BAD LIST HYGIENE
When a marketer sends a campaign to an old or unverified list, that list may produce high spam complaints, mail bounces, and unsubscribes. These metrics may lead to account warnings or suspension due to the severe nature of the problems these issues can cause. To minimize possible list-related hygiene issues, you are strongly encouraged to consider proactively scrubbing your data prior to importing it. Conducting a list hygiene exercise does not guarantee deliverability, but it can help identify known bad records that must be eliminated from your emailing list prior to sending. Cleaning the list is the first, crucial step to increasing the odds that your email marketing messages will be delivered successfully, fully valid and deliverable.
If you have lists that need to be validated or cleaned, consider List Hygiene services. Try to use a cleaning process that checks each email address up to around 70 times to authenticate, determine address validity, and detect spam traps.
REASON 6: YOUR LIST MAY BE FULL OF ROLE BASED ADDRESSES
Addresses like admin@, help@, sales@, leads@, etc. are Role-based email addresses that are not associated with any particular person, but rather with a company, department, position or group of recipients. They are not intended for personal use generally, as they typically include a distribution list of recipients. It is impossible to guess whether everyone, who is receiving emails at these addresses, has given their consent to receive them. Additionally, these types of addresses are associated with high bounce rates, high spam complaints, and spam traps. Sending informative emails to such email addresses results in a high complaint rate and we, do not allow such addresses to be imported in bulk. However, valid contacts that use these types of addresses, they can be opted. Manually add your known contact to the Allowed Contacts with generic email list.