Data is at the foundation of email deliverability because it helps you maintain a strong email reputation. By managing and updating your email addresses frequently throughout the year, you can ensure low bounce rates and consistent deliverability. In today’s blog, we’re going to discuss how clean data impacts email deliverability and how you can verify and validate your email marketing lists.
Your contacts’ email addresses are not permanent, and people often change their personal addresses or work emails on a whim without notifying you. And since up to 30% of all email addresses are either deactivated or replaced every year, cleaning and maintaining your lists is an increasingly important task.
Long-term inactive email addresses are often maintained by email providers as sensor addresses or recycled spam traps. These emails used to represent relevant contacts, but now they signal providers that you don’t know who is active in your lists. In extreme cases, this practice can even get you blacklisted with some services or providers.
Contact List Verification & Validation
Every major email provider regularly monitors and cleans its inactive and unused accounts, so ensuring you aren’t sending to a large batch of invalid addresses all at once is important to your email deliverability health.
If you aren’t certain of the validity of your contacts’ email addresses, you can verify and validate that the email addresses you have are both real and active. Manually cleaning your email contact lists can be an incredibly tedious process, but using verification services can substantially (and efficiently) reduce the number of invalid email addresses in your database. If you aren’t using email marketing automation best practices (including double opt-ins) to confirm subscriptions before mailing, verifying email addresses with a list verification service will help reduce the number of invalid sign-ups you receive.
Email Deliverability: What Is It and Why Should You Care?
Similarly, contacts you haven’t emailed in over a year can be incredibly dangerous to send re-engagement emails simultaneously. Reconfirming the validity of these contacts is the best way to ensure clean data for great email deliverability and consistent inboxing.
While there are many comparable services you can use to verify your lists, Act-On has an especially effective integration with Neverbounce that you can use to clean your lists, improve your reputation, and hit the inbox consistently.
Keeping Your Email Lists Clean and Active
Even though they may be technically valid, inactive email addresses can still be dangerous for the health of your email deliverability. On top of reducing engagement levels and decreasing your open rates, inactive (but valid) email addresses are often used as sensors or recycled spam traps, which can get you in even more trouble! Understanding your contacts’ activity and working to suppress long-term, habitually unengaged contacts is just as important for ensuring email deliverability and avoiding potential blacklisting.
Act-On partners with Webbula to provide list cleaning services. Together, we compare your email marketing lists to a historical database of known traps, reputation threats, and other dangerous delivery threats. If you have concerns about the integrity of your email marketing list, Webbula can be a great option to help remove some of these threats.
Learn More About How Clean Data Impacts Email Deliverability
Act-On’s Email Deliverability Services Team is extremely experienced with data cleansing and contact validation, and we’re here to help. If you’d like to learn more about how clean data impacts email deliverability, please contact us today. Or, if you’re interested in speaking with one of our marketing automation experts, click here to book a demo.