We’ve all heard the term ‘clean subscriber list’ but how many companies out there actually place this as a priority when setting their email strategy goals? In a recent Email List Strategy Report by industry leaders Return Path, they recorded that 71% of the marketing professionals they approached, had placed having a clean subscriber list as highly important.  The truth is, having and maintaining a clean subscriber list should be at the top of every marketer’s priority list.

Why? Because the quality of your list will determine if your email lands in the inbox, the spam folder, or gets blocked by the mailbox provider.  What is the point in preparing your email campaign with great content and beautiful design, illustrating your business service or product at its best if no-one, or at least the key individuals you need to get in front of, don’t even get to read it. In order to avoid this happening, you need to be diligent and take action to ensure your list is free of any spam traps, unengaged subscribers, and unknown users.

There are two kinds of spam traps which can have a significant impact on email deliverability and cause emails to land in the spam folder, or be blocked altogether. The ‘Honey Pot’ trap shows mailbox providers that a list is unsatisfactory, often built from website scraping or list purchases, or through a poor data partner.  ‘Recycled spam’ traps, indicate that marketers are not practicing regular list cleaning based on engagement or properly removing bounces.

Validation is imperative to keep the invalid email addresses and unknown user rate of your list to below 10%. It is worth checking your list for typos or missing characters as these will increase the unknown user rate and reduce your email deliverability. Consistently sending to unknown users will increase bounce rates and result in poor list quality and sender reputation, and increase your chances of your mail landing in the spam folder.

Mailbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo, are using subscriber engagement make decisions about where to place emails; inbox or junk folder. The premise is that marketers should be sending to subscribers who are active in their mailboxes, and that unengaged subscribers are regularly cleaned from the email list.

It is worth reviewing potential unengaged subscribers and preparing a re-engagement campaign to determine who wants to remain on your list or who doesn’t.  Unengaged subscribers should be removed from your regular email list to avoid your sender reputation and overall deliverability being damaged.

Always remember, it is important to send timely, relevant emails to people who want to receive them. Use opt-in validation tools, clean your lists and remove unengaged or bounced emails and enhance your email deliverability so you can generate more revenue and better relationships with your customer base.  http://www.247emaildata.com