Email marketing plays a significant role in business promotion and sales at present. Email list management is considered to be one of the crucial aspects of online marketing. It is time-consuming to launch an efficient email marketing campaign unless you generate a list of people with an interest in your brand and goods. 

It’s impossible to overstate the value of keeping an up-to-date, clean and healthy email list currently. In a perfect world, a mailing list ought to include email addresses of those who take an interest in your company and are looking forward to your regular messages. Regrettably, not everybody follows this practice.

Some marketers focus their attention mainly on the quantity of email addresses in the list and ignore the quality of the leads they possess. This may lead to issues concerning email deliverability. To prevent problems, it’s necessary to avoid certain detrimental errors and implement email marketing tools in your routine marketing work.  

Practices which it’s better to avoid if your aim is produce a perfect email list:

1. Don’t purchase or harvest emails.
2. Don’t send out undesirable messages.
3. Don’t write to addresses which cause hard bounces.
4. Watch out for spam traps.
5. Keep an eye on the reduction of reputation.

Now it’s time to read about the above-mentioned mistakes, their consequences and some ways to prevent them.

Don’t Purchase Email Addresses and Use Email Marketing Tools

The least time-consuming way to develop an email database is unquestionably to purchase or to scrape addresses from publicly available sources. Nevertheless, obtaining irrelevant email addresses or subscribers, which aren’t engaged with your business, in the following way can have an adverse impact on the email marketing campaign and may lead to some consequences:

• hard bounces;
• poor sender reputation;
• spam complaints;
• getting into spam traps.

It’s possible to implement email marketing tools in your work to prevent the above-mentioned difficulties. For instance, spam checkers help to identify whether your messages are blocked by spam filters. Email delivery tests detect whether your messages may be delivered into the inbox of your customers. Applying various tools provided by Folderly can turn your marketing campaign into a less troublesome and more enjoyable process.  

Instead of purchasing subscribers, it’s better to attract customers when they look through your blog or a sales page and capture them with your brand.

Don’t Send Out Undesirable Messages

There is a very strong possibility that your messages may seem spam to people who are not privy to your company’s goods and services or who haven’t subscribed to participate in your email campaign. It has an adverse impact on your sender reputation as spam reports encourage mailbox providers to dispatch your messages into spam folders. Moreover, your IP address is likely to be blacklisted and it complicates the delivery of your forthcoming messages to reach customers who are willing to get information from your company.  

It is worth recalling that sending emails to people who haven’t granted you permission to be opted-in disrupts the CAN-SPAM Act and is unlawful in some countries.

Cold emails are worth mentioning here as cold emailing implies sending messages to recipients without preliminary contact. They are sent to people who are probably interested in the goods you offer. They are not usually regarded as spam. Cold email involves repetitive work, therefore it is a good idea to use cold email marketing tools to save time, build an efficient cold email campaign and target the right people. Remember to make your cold emails as personalized as possible and check if your emails aren’t spam.

To make your email campaign robust, send your messages with unique content to subscribers who have already opted in to be a member of your marketing list.

Implement Online Email Marketing Tools not to Write to Addresses Which Cause Hard Bounces

You can’t always be confident in the quality of leads you have bought. You don’t even know the origin of the addresses or whether they exist. A mailbox provider may have deleted an address or a user doesn’t use it, so email addresses may not be relevant any more. Some of the addresses which are sold may have typos and be incorrectly written.

Sending messages to irrelevant email addresses from email lists, which have been harvested or bought, may cause an increased hard bounce rate. A hard bounce signifies a permanent basis that a message can’t be delivered. Senders need to decrease the number of bounce emails and keep hard bounce levels low to prove that they don’t apply wrong email list management practices. It affects the sender’s reputation.

To avoid hard bounces, it is essential to check your marketing list. You may do it with the help of an email checker which verifies the addresses in your list and detects invalid ones. A perfect bounce rate is approximately 2%. It provides a high likelihood of getting your messages into the inbox. Bear in mind that 10% bounce rate is likely to bring about email deliverability problems.

Watch Out for Spam Traps

Spam traps present email addresses which are made and applied by anti-spam organizations and mailbox providers to detect spammers and those whose email list management practices are improper. Active users don’t own such addresses.

Mailbox providers monitor senders’ spam trap hits. In such a case, mailbox providers doubt the quality of an email list and might take steps like briefly or constantly blocking email addresses, forwarding sender’s messages to spam folders, or flagging IP addresses of the sender. The harshness of the verdict depends on the type and age of a trap which is triggered.

 Spam trap managers tend to hide these traps on websites, and only scraping tools can identify them. While companies harvest addresses from the internet, spam traps are added to their marketing list by chance. Messaging to these addresses is regarded as spam. Run an email delivery test to make sure your messages land in the inbox of your prospects and customers.

Keep an Eye on the Reduction of Reputation

The objective of any email campaign is to enhance engagement. Bear in mind that engagement affects your reputation as a sender. Positive engagement improves the reputation. If a message is sent to an irrelevant marketing list or those who aren’t willing to receive your emails, you are likely to get spam complaints and get people unsubscribed. It deteriorates your reputation as well.  

If you care about your sender reputation, follow several tips:

• Don’t purchase off-the-shell lists of email addresses.
• Do away with irrelevant and misspelled email addresses and keep your marketing list clean.
• Monitor the quality of the content you provide.
• Attempt to send your messages to people who are interested in your company’s services and products.
• Be consistent in your marketing campaign and monitor the frequency of your messages.
• Segment your list.

Sender reputation may be determined by means of some online email marketing tools like Sender Score by Return Path, Postmaster Tools by Google, Barracuda Reputation System, etc. They are supposed to measure your reputation rate. The higher your sender reputation is, the more likely your messages will be in the inbox and be opened.

The key to having a high sender reputation is to work on a healthy list of emails of relevant and engaged subscribers who are willing to receive your content.

Outcome

While creating an email list, it’s essential to avoid some common errors which aggravate it and to implement email marketing tools. You should avoid ready-made email lists, spam traps, sending emails to hard bounce addresses and you should keep track of your sender reputation. Remember that these actions have a negative impact on your email deliverability and the overall success of the campaign.  

I have experience in freelancing as a content writer and a copywriter. I’m interested in digital marketing.  I’m an author of multiple publications and articles. I am keen on English and know the value of words. Reliability and attention to details are my priorities.

www.linkedin.com/in/maryna-khvostyk-88b834240