Email marketers need to exercise a green thumb when it comes to managing their subscriber lists. Regular list maintenance is crucial to maintaining high deliverability. Simple steps like removing certain departmental email addresses, removing email addresses that continually soft bounce, and not sending to lists that produce a high percentage of complaints can keep
email campaigns blossoming all year long.
The first step is to ensure that your current email system is correctly processing unsubscribe requests and invalid email addresses. Once an email address is identified as being invalid, the status of that address should be changed so it is never mailed to again, and any list member that chooses to unsubscribe from your mailings should also have their status changed. These addresses should never be outright deleted from the database because this can lead to the address being re-added. Resending to either of these will cause reputation issues.
Many email lists contain email addresses that they shouldn’t. These addresses are often times departmental addresses like sales@, info@, abuse@, hr@, webmaster@ or postmaster@. These addresses are often pulled directly from websites and should never be emailed to. Sending to email addresses that go to a group such as all@, everyone@, and people@ is also inappropriate. To be safe, all forms of departmental and group addresses should not be mailed to, and if possible set to a non-active status.
