Kathy Jameson

Email is the most popular marketing communication channel. On the surface, email marketing seems relatively inexpensive and easy-to-do. However, there are many challenges to fully leveraging the channel.

A very deceiving area is the email marketing database. While it seems like you would just collect emails and then send to them, there are far more complications. Poor email list hygiene can lead to an inability to communicate with subscribers and a poor sender reputation. When this occurs, any investment in the email marketing channel is worthless and can seriously damage the effectiveness of an email marketing program.

In email list hygiene, there are several common mistakes, which include:

1. Treating all subscribers the same
2. Purchasing email lists
3. Letting email addresses go stale and out-of-date
4. Failing to collect email addresses on every channel
5. Looking at the wrong metrics

There is a correlation between data hygiene and email campaign performance. Why?

Poor list hygiene is a leading cause of email deliverability issues. Internet service providers use the way your list bounces or hits spam traps as a way to help determine if you are a spammer and therefore cause harm to their customers. As an email marketer, it is important to adopt best practices, because you never want to appear spammy and suffer from poor deliverability.

You may be having deliverability issues if you are seeing very high bounce rates or are hitting spam traps. In extremely cases, you may be put on a blacklist, preventing all mail you send from being delivered to any domain within a given internet service provider.

If you want to run a successful and legitimate email program, email hygiene must be top-of-mind.

The first way to enable having a good email list is to ensure you are collecting email addresses on a permission basis and are not acquiring lists. List acquisition is one of the top ways your sender reputation can be harmed because they are often riddled with outdated and invalid email addresses.