Three Bad Things That Can Happen If You Don’t Clean Your Email List

If you have an email list, you want people to receive your promotions and newsletters. Email hygiene is crucial in this equation. This article will explore the three bad things that can happen if you don’t clean your email list.

You’ll get a bad sender reputation

Internet service providers (ISPs) assign a score to anyone who sends emails, and this goes for both personal email addresses and organizations. The score determines what emails go into the inbox and which ones are spam. Put simply, good scores mean “email goes to inbox” and bad scores mean “email goes to spam.” As someone who has an email list, it is of paramount importance that you have a good score.

You may be thinking, “Well, my customers are legitimate! These email addresses are good!” First of all, how did you acquire those email addresses? Did they write it down? What if there were typos? One character being wrong makes an email address invalid. Apart from that, your subscribers may have changed their email address or may have abandoned it.

Then, are you sure all of your subscribers have opted-in or did you add them yourself? If they haven’t opted-in, you run the risk of spam complaints, and that hurts your sender reputation.

Every email list is going to have some bad email addresses on them. Even if you follow all of the best practices. Frequently the bad emails don’t look any different from the other emails on your list, but they could be invalid, spam traps, catch-alls, malicious, or role-based. All of these email types will inevitably lower your sender score. An email cleaner or scrubber will identify these potentially damaging emails so you can remove them.

You won’t be reaching the inbox anymore

As mentioned, not cleaning your email list will cause its quality to deteriorate. When your score is low, ISPs start to make the determination: “Yes, this is a spammer.” Now that you’re a spammer, they send your campaigns right into the junk folder. Some people never check this folder and therefore, would never see your email and mark it “not spam.” Others would maybe see it, but because it had been so long since they saw an email from you, they forgot all about you and assume that you are, indeed, spam.

For almost all of your emails that end up in the spam folder, your campaign has been rendered useless. Reaching the inbox is the cornerstone of any email campaign. If you don’t, it’s game over.

Your email marketing will be in vain

By not cleaning your list, the sender reputation score has decreased and now you’re not reaching the inbox. As your open rates decline (the percent of people opening your emails), your email marketing will be in vain. Although email marketing has the highest ROI, without cleaning your email list, you’ll find your conversions dropping. You simply can’t expect results without a clean email list.

The solution: keep an accurate email database

You probably guessed it! Clean your list by using a quality email verification provider. If you already have a list, it’s best to use a bulk email checker. Simply upload your list onto the site’s platform and allow it to identify the inferior email addresses, which you should remove without mercy.

If you’re starting a list and have a sign-up form where people can subscribe, you can use an email verifier API to check anyone who signs up in real time. That way, these invalid and poor-quality emails never find their way on your list to begin with.

Even if you’ve had a sign-up form for a long time, it’s never too late to start using an email verifier API to make life easier for you. If you use an API, then periodically you can utilize bulk email validation to ensure that the list stays in optimal quality.

It’s up to you

Cleaning your email list can mean the difference between having a successful email reach or not. Make it a habit and you’ll start seeing results. Remember it’s not the quantity of emails on your list, it’s the quality.

Tom Parillo

I am interested in all things technology, especially automation, robotics and tech that helps change how society will live in the future.