Good Email Marketing: Keep it lean, keep it clean!

The key to maximising the value of your email marketing activity is simple: make sure your email address list is lean and relevant, and doesn't contain any addresses that could muddy your marketing activity.

Over the last 20 years, and while most online tools have evolved, email has remained relatively the same. If anything, the only difference is that it’s now harder than ever to get your information into the right inbox.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Email Service Providers (ESPs) largely remain very different entities, and far from being co-ordinated in their approach to minimising spam, ISPs lean on ESPs until ESPs lean on their customers, blocking who they see as the worst offenders.  

Plus, ESPs are more inclined to assume you’re a spammer because they’re not overly concerned with your careful opt-in processes or how you've audited your list.

In fact, larger ESPs have been known to send warnings and shut down email accounts that they consider malicious.

It may not even be that you’re deliberately spamming. An out of date email list that triggers a given bounce rate will be automatically in the firing line. And if someone signing up to your list makes a typo, which happens more than you think, the bounce back from that dodgy email address will also affect your numbers.

For best results, make sure your email marketing list is as lean and clean as it can be – and there are quite a few email verification and list hygiene tools who are the experts in making sure you maximise your email marketing.

For efficient e-Mail Verification, we recommend BriteVerify, who provide all the tools you need to clean up invalid email addresses, plus you can get detailed reporting on your list.  

eHygenics have real time API platforms that are used every day by subscribers, and they can remove all possible issues from your database.

Upload your list to LeadSpend easily and securely to have harmful email addresses removed.

DataValidation have easy and customisable solutions to keep your email list clean.

If your email marketing is a core element of creating revenue, FreshAddress will help you to clean, grow, segment and maintain your list.

Impressionwise is a data intelligence platform that uses a multi-layered approach to identify and protect against a range of e-mail threats.

StrikeIron claims to increase message deliverability by 90% with no effort from you by checking addresses and domains and ensuring they are valid.

Investing in tools like these can pay dividends in the long run, making sure more of your marketing emails get through, are on target, and preventing you being shut down by your ISP or ESP.

Or we’d be happy to talk you through how we can help your email marketing campaign be the best it can be.