5 Tips for Email List Hygiene – Scrub Gently

A typical problem that small businesses face as they move into web marketing involves the accuracy of email addresses in their contact list. Assuming that your sales lists are put together over a period of years, you may have legacy data that is not accurate. Your first impulse may be to send emails to your entire contact list – after all, more is better, right? The answer may surprise you.

Always play within the rules.

Email Service Providers, or ESPs, typically have stringent rules about loading a bunch of records into their system and firing away – so you need to ensure that you have accurate data, or you’ll probably be kicked off of their service. While we want to reach the most people possible, losing our ability to send email is surely not a preferable option.

So now we’re seemingly at an impasse. Our legacy data may not be clean, but how do we know if we can’t send a huge email blast out and watch the list self-clean via bounces? Sending a “blast” is a bad idea here. We’re also talking about marketing emails, so by law we have to be careful about how we add members to our list. If they’ve not explicitly opted in, we cannot simply add them and blast out email.

Impulse may tell you to just send an email and let the bounces fall where they may, but risk outweighs the reward here.

How do you clean your list?

1. Give your users a way to unubscribe. Not only does this give you a clean list, but it’s required by law.
2. Remove the contacts you know will bounce. This is a no-brainer. Give your sales guy something to do and purge the contacts who no longer work in the industry or whose companies do not exist.
3. Check that your previous email system automatically removed hard bounces. Usually this is done after a set number of bounces.
4. Scan your bounce lists for consistent domains. If you see a lot of bounces in historical reports from a single domain, you should get in touch with the administrator of that network and ask them to whitelist you.
5. Send small batches of emails to clean the list. Do not send a massive batch of all your contacts at once! By using small batch segments, you reduce the chances that an ISP will flag your IP as a spammer and block you. You’ll also have time to check the bounces of your sample batches and make proper adjustments to the rest.

Get a checkup!

List hygiene is a big deal for your sales team. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up with legacy data that will require a ton of work in order for it to be useful and actionable. Proper maintenance is critical, and it’s worth getting help in the event that you are struggling with how to keep your data healthy. If you’ve got questions about the steps outlined above, or want to talk about your own email list, get in touch with us.