Good list hygiene practices are recommended for all B2C and B2B senders and is an important factor that impacts your sending reputation and ability to reach the inbox.
The following Validity products can help you assess list quality, clean your data, and monitor performance based on your cleaning activities.
What are some list hygiene best practice recommendations?
- List acquisition. Prevent bad data from entering your CRM.
- Do not purchase email lists or harvest email addresses from social media or other websites as they often contain a large number of invalid email addresses and can lead to high complaint rates and spam trap hits.
- If you choose to use these high risk methods, verify all addresses using Everest's List Validation or BriteVerify prior to sending email.
- Use Everest's List Validation or BriteVerify APIs to identify invalid email addresses at all points of collection.
- Require a valid email address to submit a web form.
- Reject malformed addresses such as name@gmial.com at all points of collection.
- Deduplicate leads upon import into your CRM using DemandTools.
- Prohibit the use of role accounts such as postmaster@, abuse@, or sales@ to sign up for your email program unless it makes sense for your business.
- Community mailboxes are often unattended or checked infrequently, resulting in low engagement.
- Do not purchase email lists or harvest email addresses from social media or other websites as they often contain a large number of invalid email addresses and can lead to high complaint rates and spam trap hits.
- List cleaning. Clean bad data after it has entered your CRM. It doesn't matter how good you are at preventing bad data entering your database, bad data will always be present and need cleaning.
- Regularly deduplicate your CRM data for leads, contacts, and accounts using DemandTools.
- Duplicate records with the same email address can end up in different segments, receive different versions of the same email campaign and cause spam complaints.
- Use Everest's List Validation or BriteVerify to identify and remove invalid email addresses.
- Remove or fix malformed email addresses from your list file; such as name@gmial.com or name@ooutlook.com.
- Both B2C and B2B senders need to sign up for all available feedback loops and promptly suppress subscribers who complain.
- Strive to suppress subscribers before you send your next email campaign.
- List of all available complaint feedback loops (FBLs)
- Remove unknown user addresses after the first bounce.
- Remove or fix malformed email addresses such as name@gmial.com or name@outlok.com.
- Many spam filters use misspelled domain data to identify companies with poor list hygiene practices.
- Implement a strategy for identifying and segmenting inactive subscribers. This can include changing the frequency you send to your inactive subscribers, sending them a win-back campaign, or, if necessary, removing them from your list entirely.
- Ensure subscribers are able to update their email address, either through a preference center or Email Change of Address (ECOA) service.
- Regularly deduplicate your CRM data for leads, contacts, and accounts using DemandTools.
- Unsubscribes
- Immediately honor unsubscribe requests. If you can't unsubscribe a subscriber immediately, strive to unsubscribe them within 24 hours or before your next email campaign.
- Offer a global unsubscribe option and allow subscribers to unsubscribe from specific email streams via a preference center.
- Tracking
- Ensure addresses are tracked to help clean your list and identify sources of bad data.
