The Importance of Clean Email Lists

If you run an email marketing campaign and don't ever want to be marked as a spammer, it is very important to comply with the highest industry standards. Keeping your mailing lists clean, by regularly removing invalid email addresses, is one of the most important tasks for any email marketer. 

Why is it so important?  

There are several reasons why keeping your mailing lists clean and up-to-date is your number one task if you are using email marketing for your promotional efforts.  

Email addresses become obsolete. If your newsletter hits an address that is no longer valid, it will bounce. If your emails bounce too often, your ISP may block your email domain, because unattended mailing lists are considered a footprint of a spammer.  

Email addresses added to your list may contain typos. As a result, sending newsletters to such addresses results in bounced emails, too.  

There are also so-called "prank" subscriptions, when someone subscribes with an email address that is not their own.  

Of course, some problems can be eliminated using the so-called “double opt-in” method, which is now used by most respectable email marketers. “Double opt-in” means that when a person subscribes to a newsletter, a confirmation email is sent to the entered email address and, in order to complete the subscription procedure, the recipient must click on a link contained in the email. Only after the link is clicked is the email address added to the list.  Whilst this helps combat “prank” subscriptions and weeds out mistyped addresses, it doesn't solve the problem with outdated addresses.