Clean Email List + Good Email Infrastructure = High Deliverability
Updated March 29, 2024
8 min read
Having a clean email list means that user regularly checks their contact list and updates it to maintain the most up-to-date information. The act of cleaning an email list requires you to go through and remove any contacts that may be outdated or invalid. Doing so periodically can significantly increase email deliverability and open/engagement rates. By removing the outdated recipients on an email list, you are able to narrow down specific, target customers for their campaign.
Sending emails to invalid email addresses can also increase bounce rates on an email campaign, which nobody wants. Excluding the bad emails can decrease the amount of bounce rates and, in turn, improve sender reputation. Sender reputation is very important for high email deliverability because it is the score that lets Email Service Providers know that you are a trustworthy source and not a spammer.
What Is A Clean Email List?
As we just mentioned, a clean email list is when contact lists are periodically checked to make sure there are no outdated or invalid email addresses. While cleaning your email list, be sure to take the time to look at where you are getting conversions, who is answering your emails, and how effective your campaigns are. By doing so, you can really hone in on who your target or ideal client is. Here are a few ways to clean your email list:
- Create a list of recipients who are not engaging with your emails at all. You can attempt to send a re-engagement email before removing them.
- Investigate who hard bounces during an email campaign. This usually means that the email you attempted to reach is undeliverable. As a reminder, soft bounces happen when an email reaches a recipient’s mail server, but gets bounced back undelivered before it reaches the intended inbox of the recipient. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to wipe them from your list.
- Do you think someone has marked you as spam? Although there is no clear way to tell, being marked as spam is damaging to your reputation. You definitely want to get rid of any recipient within your email list who you think may mark you as spam.
How Can An Email List Get Dirty?
A dirty email list is when your lengthy contact list has become outdated with old emails. Dirty email lists can significantly damage your email deliverability rates. Here are a few ways you can scan through your list and get rid of any unwanted email addresses:
Check for disposable email addresses
Disposable email addresses are temporary email addresses that customers may create to use for a short period of time. If you come across any disposable email addresses, it’s important to get rid of them as this can affect your bounce rate.
Check for typos
A common mistake that can lead to bounced messages are typos. Be sure to check that the recipient’s email addresses are typed in correctly. Here are three trick on how to cut down on typos:
1. One way to cut down on typos is to ask your customer to type in their email address twice when signing up for your newsletter, product, or whatever the case may be
2. Another way to decrease the amount of typos is to ask your customer to verify their email after opting in to your email.3. A third way to limit the amount of bounced messages is to use a real-time email verification tool. Emailable Widget allows installation of this easy to use widget to any website. The tool can verify emails at the point of capture and keep bad email addresses off your list.
Email Verification Tools
Luckily, there are email verification tools that anyone can use, like Emailable. Emailable is a fully equipped email verification solution. Email verification tools assist users in verifying if an email address is valid/active or not. Using an email verification tool can help users clean their lists, eliminate hard bounces, and cut down on being reported as spam. Emailable can put your list cleaning on autopilot so you never have to worry about it again.
Bounced Emails Drastically Affect Your Reputation
Sending emails to those on your contact list who are no longer active can cause your email to bounce. You’ll know your email has bounced if you receive an error message similar to this example below. The technical details will explain why your email bounced and should help you determine the problem so it doesn’t happen again.
A bounced email can drastically affect your sender reputation. A bounced email triggers an alert that you may have a dirty list, which will result in your ESP deducting points from your reputation score. A few reasons for a bounced email are:- Recipient’s inbox is full
- Email address is no longer valid
- Email address is spelled wrong
- Email address is fake
- Server is not responding
What Are The Benefits Of An Email Cleaning Service
There are a number of strategic benefits for using an email cleaning service to verify your address list:
Protect domain reputation
Using an email cleaning service can help protect your domain reputation. Your domain reputation can be referred to as an email’s domain overall health. It’s an extremely important factor when it comes to email deliverability. Some of the factors considered in a domain reputation score are:
- Engagement levels
- Spam complaints
- Bounce rates
Keeping your sender score high can promote accurate inbox placement.
Stay away from blacklists
Avoiding blacklists should be everyone’s primary goal during an email campaign. Emailable protects users from being blacklisted by automatically cleaning your address list, which also decreases your chances of landing in the spam folder.
Keep your list clean
Maintaining a clean address list can significantly increase the positive results of an email campaign. Having a large list of leads may look great, but when it comes to producing results, having a clean list is always best.
Reduce bounce rates
As covered above, reducing the number of bounced emails is only going to benefit you and your email campaign. Emailable reduces bounce rates by clearing the invalid emails from your list.
Improve deliverability
Imagine putting so much effort into a campaign, sending it out, and it isn’t even seen by your customers. Using an email cleaning service can help you gain confidence that your emails are going to be seen, and hopefully interacted with.
Get realistic metrics
Engagement rates can tell a lot about your campaign success. Removing those bad emails can clarify some of that data for you. When using Emailable, users are able to see exactly what is working and what needs help.
Improve engagement rates
Engagement rates will rise when you are only sending to real, qualified leads. As a result, positive engagement rates can significantly impact your sender reputation. Keep in mind, Marketers consider an average open rate of about 15% to be successful. If your open rates are any lower than this average, using an email cleaning service like Emailable would be in your best interest.
Eliminate bad signups
Emailable will automatically remove any misspelled email addresses as well as screen for fake accounts. It’s not your fault that someone entered a fake account to sign up, so it shouldn’t affect your email campaign. Emailable will take those fake addresses out before they damage your reputation.
Save time and money
Never spend another dime to send an email to an invalid account. Using an email cleaning service can help you only spend time and money on contacting qualified customers.
Email Infrastructure Explained
Email infrastructure is the complex system in place to help your emails get to where they need to go. Email infrastructure is made up of:
IP Address
A user’s IP Address is a combination of numbers that relate to the domain. There are two different types of IP Addresses: shared and dedicated. A shared IP Address is when a number of domains use the same IP Address together. A dedicated IP Address is when there is only one IP Address related to your domain name. Some choose to opt for the dedicated IP Address in order to protect their email deliverability. When there are multiple users on a single IP Address, other people’s actions can directly affect your email deliverability.
Domain Reputation
Domain reputation is a score that ISPs and ESPs give an email domain. Domain reputation is very important when it comes to good email deliverability. To maintain a high level of domain reputation, users must warm their domain consistently. The best way to achieve a warm domain is to use an email warming service such as Warmup Inbox.
Mail Agents
Multiple mail agents are used in an email infrastructure to help with communication between the sender and recipient. Mail user agent is the software that helps users read their emails, reply, and store them. Mail transfer agent is the software that assists in sending emails to and from users. Message delivery agent is the software that maintains the emails received in the inbox for users to read, reply to, favorite, move, and delete.
SMTP Server
The SMTP assists in moving the sent message to the recipient while validating if the email addresses involved are active. The SMTP server also looks into the email reputations to see if they are trustworthy or not.
SPF, DKIM, DMARC
SPF, short for Sender Policy Framework, helps to protect your domain from being marked as spam. DKIM, short for Domain Keys Identified Mail, adds an encryption signature in the header of each email a user sends. The encryption helps email servers identify which emails have not been altered after being sent. DMARC, short for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance, is a DNS TXT record that should be set up for your domain to control the outcome of your message if it fails to deliver.
How To Prime Your Email Infrastructure For Success
Warm Up Your IP Address
Properly warming your IP Address by using an email warming tool is the key to success. Warmup Inbox automatically raises your email sending reputation through our network of inboxes that talk to each other. By syncing to the platform, Warmup Inbox will automatically increase your email deliverability rates and your domain reputation, while decreasing the likelihood of your inbox and domain being added to any blacklists or deactivated for suspicion of spam.
Maintain Domain Reputation
It’s a good rule of thumb to know your domain reputation since it’s one of the most important factors in email deliverability. You can take a domain reputation test to identify any issues that may be arising within your domain. Warmup Inbox provides a live performance tracker for all customers to see how healthy or unhealthy their inbox is. Since it’s so critical to maintain high reputations, this is a great tool to track progress and discover the problems.
Check If You’re On Any Blacklists
Every inbox synced with Warmup Inbox will get checked against all major blacklists every hour. Getting added to a blacklist is detrimental to deliverability rates, so using a service to automatically check for you is one of the keys to success.
Maintain Sender Score
Maintaining your sender score is easy with Warmup Inbox. You’ll never need to worry about a lapse in engagement, even on your off days. Warmup Inbox will automatically engage with other users to show active, positive engagement levels. Constantly warming your inbox in the background is an incredible tool to use if your goal is a successful email outreach campaign.
Conclusion
As we mentioned above, maintaining clean data and properly warming up your domain are two of the most important factors of ongoing email deliverability. We can all agree that setting up an email account and periodically cleaning your email list can take a good amount of time to do, but the good news is there are fantastic tools on the market to take those tasks off of your plate.
Both of these steps are imperative when it comes to achieving a high rate of email deliverability. Once you’ve completed those steps, you have set yourself up for a successful high deliverability rate.