Email Clean HygieneMaximizing email deliverability does require managing many factors, but once you understand the various components, the process is fairly straightforward.

Even if you’ve followed all of my data capture advice, you still need to engage in list hygiene to ensure its quality. Without proper list hygiene, you risk losing contact with your customers, damaging your sender reputation and getting your emails blocked by the ISPs.

For example, if you continue to send emails to accounts that have been closed for some time (i.e. to “unknown users”), ISPs will take notice, which could lead to getting your email blocked. You also run the risk of getting in trouble with spam traps. Essentially, an unclean list tells the ISPs that you don’t care about your customers, or about following best practices. Maintaining a good reputation also requires that you respond to unsubscribe requests and bounce data immediately.

List hygiene best practices
The following activities are an essential part of a successful list hygiene program:

· Scrub your lists regularly.
Scrubbing your list is simply making sure that you are keeping it as clean as possible by running your list against a list of known bad domains and role accounts. While you should remove unsubscribes and relevant bounced email addresses immediately, you should also scrub your lists on a regular basis.

· Remove and/or correct bad domains.
Bad domains need to be removed or corrected right away. Closely review your failure reports, identify bad addresses and evaluate whether they are the result of a data capture problem or a non existent domain.

· Remove distribution accounts.
Mailing to a distribution account is never a good idea. Not only is it an unsuitable address for connecting with a customer (the equivalent of sending a letter to “occupant”), ISPs are looking for such behavior. Plus, it’s also sure to facilitate spam complaints from members of the list.

· Remove “spam” email addresses.
One simple step that can be easily overlooked is to remove email addresses with the word “spam” in them. These are most likely associated with spamtraps, which can lead to you getting blacklisted by ISPs or antivirus companies.

· Remove inactive addresses.
Review the email activity of your customers and compare open rates with the frequency of the email sent to them. One example might be, if you send a newsletter every two weeks and a customer hasn’t opened one email in the last six months, you should remove the address from your master list.

· Use data checkers.
You can avoid a lot of bad addresses by putting some common data checkers at the point of data collection on your website. These checkers can ensure that the entered email address is properly formatted before it is accepted into the database. Identifying the errors at the point of entry gives you the opportunity to have users correct the mistakes as they make them.

The importance of list hygiene cannot be overlooked as an essential email marketing practice. By employing the practices mentioned above, you can make great strides in improving your deliverability rates and safeguarding your reputation.