Your email lists should ideally only contain email subscribers that are delighted to receive your communications every day. Regrettably, not everyone follows best practices.
Email deliverability heavily influences the quality of your email list. Email service providers check email addresses and will filter or prohibit communications if the list quality is inadequate.
Here are five email list management mistakes to avoid when developing your ideal email list:
- Avoid buying or harvesting email addresses
- Avoid sending unsolicited emails
- Make sure you avoid sending to hard bounce addresses
- Avoid Spam Traps
- Observe a decreased reputation
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Avoid buying or harvesting email addresses
So far, buying or extracting email addresses from public sources appears to be the easiest and quickest option. Unengaged subscribers and incorrect email addresses can significantly affect your email marketing efforts and result in the following:
- Spam Reports
- Bounces
- Spam Trap Hits
- Reputation Issues
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Avoid sending unsolicited emails
Your emails may appear like spam to new subscribers who don’t know you or haven’t signed up for your email list. As a result of spam reports, mailbox providers start filtering your emails into spam. This can result in your IP address being banned, making future email campaigns harder to deliver.
Sending an email marketing campaign to those who haven’t explicitly opted-in is unlawful in many countries and against the CAN-SPAM Act. Send tailored emails just to subscribers who have opted in to your list.
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Make sure you avoid sending to hard bounce addresses
A purchased list isn’t always reliable. You have no idea where those addresses came from, if they are authentic or even exist. Aside from the mailbox provider deleting it, the user may have abandoned it.
Sending emails to invalid or bounced addresses from purchased or scraped lists is risky. Mailbox providers want senders to reduce bounced emails and keep hard bounce rates low since it demonstrates good email list management.
Bounce rates above 10% may affect email deliverability. To get a high inbox placement, keep your bounce rate below 2%.
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Avoid Spam Traps
Spam traps are email addresses set by mailbox providers, anti-spam organizations, and blacklist administrators. They are use to identify spammers and senders that abuse list management.
When a mailbox provider receives spam trap hits, they may flag the sender’s IP addresses, temporarily or permanently ban their email, or route their email to the spam folder. It is well-known that the age and type of a spam trap affect the severity of the verdict.
Only scraping programs can capture many spam trap managers’ website URLs. Incorrectly harvesting email addresses from websites can lead to addition of traps. Sadly, sending an email to these addresses is considered spam and is deleted.
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Observe a decreased reputation
Your goal when sending an email campaign is to enhance engagement, however engagement can be positive or negative. Positive engagement raises sender reputation, whereas negative engagement reduces it.
Instead of opens and clicks, you’ll get spam complaints and unsubscribes when your email is sent to the wrong lists or to subscribers who didn’t opt-in.
Sending too many re-engagement campaigns can potentially harm your reputation. That’s like sending an email to your least engaged list, which can backfire.
Conclusion
The above are things to avoid when building your email lists. Your email marketing expenditures rise with your contact list. Marketing to incorrect email addresses and inactive subscribers costs more and yields less. Ensure to always avoid the mistakes above.
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