Purchasing an email list in today’s email marketing place is a normal and common practice. When used in addition to your own email list building techniques, it offers you as the marketer a quick surge of prospective contacts for your products and services. But what happens to that list you bought when your bounce rate starts to inch up after importing and sending your first outreach?
While we can say our own efforts at Emailtor have grown considerably when working with email list providers in a proactive manner, not all of them are verifying the contacts they are selling upfront. Unfortunately this passes expired contacts on to you to deal with, and an unacceptable bounce rate to accompany it. Still to many list brokers, email list cleaning is something new and somewhat of a moving target of acceptance in the industry.
We agree, as at first their have been some unacceptable email verifier products giving the industry a bad wrap. Times are a changing though and this can’t be used as an excuse anymore when email validation is getting more precise and accurate as ever with grey listing and mailbox level technology entering the stage right.
So what does this mean for you? It means importing an email list with a 10% or higher amount of invalid contacts could serve up a warning from your email marketing service to do something about it. High bounce rates due to invalid contacts and false leads isn’t something you should pay out for. It does no good to market to people that do not exist, in email form at any rate.
Where do we go from here? To our happy place is our suggestion. That happy place is where your email list is narrowed down to real and valid contacts that you paid for, and that you fully expect want to hear about your product or service.
In a time when fly by night email list brokers are entering the field, choose a trusted source and don’t get caught with a list that is a few years old (and we hear of horror stories of even older ones) because the chance is higher than ever of the contact’s email changing in our disposable society. Email addresses are too easy to setup and dispose of once a user’s account gets to a certain Spam level or they change Internet Service Providers. There are any number of reasons why contacts change their email address, including name change from marriage or new employers.
Your mind is already swirling with ideas now and concern sets in about your own email list, and it should. Routine list hygiene should be a normal part of your email marketing gameplan. Now that’s what.