How To Clean Your List!
By September Danforth
As a high performing marketing pro, you want to utilize the power of email to raise performance and reach your target market. That’’s a no brainier. In order to do this, however, you need list integrity and effective campaigns. A great strategy for this is developing a healthy email list. Once you understand and implement the “way to clean,” there’’s no stopping you!
Time passes, people change their email addresses and don”t tell you, emails bounce back, and non-responders pile up. If you”re not careful, ISPs may mark this activity as harmful… and flag you a spammer. Let’’s face it, a bad email list is harmful. If left unchecked, the fallout can reflect badly on your brand and harm your company. How can you ensure the integrity of one of your most important assets, your email marketing program? Here is a list of best practices.
Clean vs. Messy
Neat lists are like treasure troves, they possess big opportunities for wealth and success. That’’s why it’’s so important to clean them on a regular basis. The cleaner they stay, the better they perform. Old names, unconfirmed addresses, and questionable sources may wreak havoc on your email marketing program. Don”t let this happen to you!
If your list does get messy over time, you must recognize the symptoms. Here are a few notorious indicators:
1. Lame delivery rates
If successful deliveries regularly fall below 85%, your list smacks of mucky muck. It’’s probably time to open the hood and perform a tune up.
2. ISPs flag you.
Low deliveries go hand in hand with higher bounce numbers-and eventually ISPs will detect and label this as unsavory behavior and flag you. These flags jeopardize your ability to attain and maintain whitelist status.
3. Caught in a spam trap.
Of course you don”t intend to spam, but dirty lists actually are breeding grounds for spam traps. Without proper bounce management your old outdated lists may contain invalid addresses, which ISPs can covertly reassign as spam traps. Be wary of this-it could cost you.
4. You become a ”marked domain.
Sans Whitelist status, ISPs may simply shun your domain.
Clearly, a dirty email list can ruin your marketing efforts, profit, productivity and public relations. The secret to being clean and staying clean involves two things: prevention and plucking.
Steer Clear of Poor Sources
Make sure to protect your list by carefully controlling address origins. The easiest way to get clean opt-ins is always your own customer list. To establish cleanliness here, collect opt-ins from all customers and explain how you intend to utilize their information through your privacy policy. Send “Welcome” messages to solidify the opt-in process. This tactic also helps to make brand awareness, set expectations for future marketing communication, and build trust with new subscribers; it is a critical, foundational step in your email program.
If you implement paid acquisition tactics, ensure that you are using permission based sources.
Check-In Regularly
Getting rid of list losers is another important strategy to keeping fit. Over time, list quality and currency atrophy. If the stalemates stay, your bounce rates will likely increase and your key response metrics will deteriorate. Spam traps made of outdated names may hook onto your domain alerting ISPs. And trust us, negative attention from ISPs is always bad.
That’’s why cutting underperforming or nonperforming names is of such grave importance. Often referred to as “Proactive Deactivation,” it could save your list’’s vitality! Think of it as feng shui for your domain, restoring order, clearing cobwebs and making room for new energy.
Once or twice monthly identify non-active, under performing email addresses, bounces from undeliverable addresses and hard bounces indicating abuse/spam complaints.
Be Sure to Use Double Opt-ins
As you build your list, consider using double opt-in permissions. With these important opt-ins filling up your database, delivery rates will fly. Single opt-ins will result in lower response and could prevent whitelist approval if your abuse complaints are high.
Doubling your opt-in permissions enables you to send cleaner and higher percentage deliveries, enjoy longer lifetime list cycles, earn additional respect from ISPs, avoid spam traps, abuse flags and bounce backs and easily earn and preserve whitelisting.
Whitelisting
A sure way to craft your list’’s success is to establish and maintain whitelist status. This is granted to domains by ISPs 10-30 days after an email campaign initiates. Whitelisting assures credibility with ISPs and helps you sneak past the worst spam blockers. If your list has the right stuff, double opt-ins, bounce rates below 10%, and low abuse or spam reportages, you”ve got it made.
About The Author
Yesmail is a leading email marketing company that offers professional email marketing solutions and permission based email marketing services for enterprise businesses nationwide. Our products are easy to use, visit http://www.yesmail.com to see for yourself!
