Why should you clean your lists?

One crucial factor that can affect the outcome of your email campaigns is the quality of your email list. Over time, email lists can accumulate inactive or invalid email addresses, resulting in decreased deliverability and potentially damaging your sender reputation. Let's look at some of the reasons why cleaning your email marketing lists is essential for the success of your campaigns and how it can improve your sender reputation, deliverability, and engagement rates.

1. Changing data
   People change jobs, change inbox providers, and may abandon old email addresses as they move through different phases of life. This means that as time passes, your lists decrease in quality simply by existing. Critical Impact will automatically unsubscribe any subscriber that has suspended their email address, but many email addresses simply remain unmonitored. These abandoned email addresses will continue to be soft bounced indefinitely (because we want you to be in control of your sending habits) until they are suppressed or removed from your lists.
2. To improve sender reputation and deliverability
   A clean email list that consists of engaged, opted-in subscribers will result in a steady increase in your sender score. This will, in turn, lead to high delivery rates and happy recipients. Additionally, ISPs are more likely to trust and deliver your emails to the recipients' inbox if they see that you have a good sender reputation.
3. To prevent spam complaints
   High spam complaint rates can negatively impact your sender reputation and decrease deliverability. Even a small number of spam complaints can affect your reputation, and if an ISP detects too many spam complaints for a send, they may refuse to deliver the rest of your emails. Being proactive and removing inactive or unengaged subscribers can help mitigate this issue and prevent spam complaints.
4. You’ve inherited a list from another coworker
   Just because a coworker was using Critical Impact before you doesn't mean they were practicing good sending habits or list hygiene. They may have ignored best practices, resulting in a list that contains inactive or unengaged subscribers. Inheriting such a list can negatively impact your email marketing strategy. So, it's important to clean such lists before using them.
5. You’ve purchased an email list
   Purchasing email lists is never recommended, but if you have inherited one, cleaning is essential. These lists could contain spam traps - email addresses that ISPs and blocklist operators use to identify senders with poor sending habits. They may include previously valid email addresses that are now invalid, as well as email addresses purposely distributed by ISPs to various dark locations across the internet to identify senders who are not practicing best practices.

Keeping your information up to date means your delivery rates will increase and, coincidentally, more subscribers will receive your messages.

Can't I just let the emails bounce?

Critical Impact will certainly do a fine job of unsubscribing invalid emails from your account after they hard bounce (are returned as invalid email addresses from the recipient mail server), but if that is happening, this means that the damage is being done before the subscribers are removed - and not all mail servers give a definitive answer when an email is retired (an employee may no longer be with the company, but may have an out of office response informing senders of this, appearing to be a valid recipient). So, sending to "dead" email addresses only hurts your deliverability over time.

Working with a list cleaning service

There are plenty of third party list cleaning services that help "scrub" lists by removing invalid lists and providing helpful information such as email addresses that have transitioned to being "pristine spam traps" - email addresses that were once valid but have been retired and turned into spam traps. Critical Impact has partnered with Email Industries to help provide email delivery services at a discount which include list cleaning credits.