Zrinity Email Marketing Blog

Although it seems obvious, keeping your email list clean is the key to email marketing campaign success. Below are four steps that you can follow on “repeat cycle” to ensure your organization is following best practices with regard to your list.

 1. Email Capture—First and foremost, you will want to make sure to validate all email address additions. Validation tools pick up inconsistencies as soon as a user enters his or her information so that not as much work has to be completed on the backend. For instance, the accidental of “.con” as opposed to “.com” would immediately be caught by the tool with a generated response to the user such as, “.con is not a valid address.” Validation tools go one step further to ensure the URL in the email address can truly receive email, thus eliminating some of the potential for bounced email. As an added tip, conduct careful examination of all companies offering to sell email lists that have been obtained from organizations that have said “yes” to opting-in to receiving your type of email communications. In most cases, this is not true..

 2. Bounced Email—Once a bounced email has been received, ensure that it is removed from the list immediately. This will ensure that your reputation as a valid sender and not a spammer is protected. Your organization will want to know exactly what level of bounce management is in place either in-house or being used by a third-party ESP. If a soft bounce occurs, which often means that the recipient’s inbox is full, then your organization will want to know that so the address is not eliminated from future communications. On the flip side, if it is a hard bounce, or the recipient server reports that the user does not exist, then it should be automatically removed..

 3. Inbox Seeding—If planning to use a third-party ESP, then your organization will want to verify the availability of inbox seeding, or allowing email campaigns to be “seeded” with essentially a test email that verifies deliverability. This way, you can monitor delivery to Web-based email providers to ensure emails are delivered to an inbox and not the SPAM folder. This is an important response to a growing issue with email marketers as there are few ways to prevent an email campaign from suddenly being dumped into a SPAM folder. But with seeding, marketers being seeding at the very beginning of a campaign and are enabled to pause the campaign for delivery problems, fix the problem and then continue the campaign..

 4. Connection Limits—Typical servers are not built to handle a large quantity of email distribution. Therefore, when an organization attempts to send a mass campaign, the result is that the server violates the recipient servers’ policies. This can cause the IP address to be blacklisted. By utilizing more recent technology, however, organizations gain access to email that has automated sensing technology to detect the recipient server policy and respond appropriately..

More Resources: Email Marketing Best Practices: List Management.