Data hygiene is just as important as personal hygiene!
Do I have your attention? I know it sounds crazy, but think about it!
If you do not keep up with personal hygiene, would someone want to be in your proximity? And will people want to do business with you if they can barely stand the stench of your outdated practices?
The answer is no!
The importance of high-quality email list data hygiene could not be more important. If you do not keep your data clean on an ongoing basis, things will get out of control fast.
With unclean contacts on a list, you run into the following problems: inbox placement issues, higher bounce rates, lower ISP reputation, high probability of blocks, and an increased expense every time you launch an email campaign.
It doesn’t take long to realize how important data hygiene should be to you and your company.
You should never upload any new contacts you receive to your list without running them through a data-cleaning program. There are many options you can use for data cleaning, and many can clean your emails quickly and provide great feedback – and are reasonably priced.
With some data-cleaning programs, you will receive your email records back with classifications of valid, accept-all, unknown, or invalid. After contacts have been cleaned, you should only add accept-all and valid to your list right away. Depending on how much time you have, you can take the .csv files and clean them up further, adding city and state information if they provided the zip code in your email acquisition.
After you have done any further cleaning, you can upload them into your ESP. You should never send to emails with the classification of invalid. They are probably invalid because either the Username or domain name does not exist anymore. With unknown emails, if you plan to try to use them, incorporate them very slowly and make sure you keep a close eye on the bounces and inbox placement.
Inbox placement is heavily impacted by clean data, because it is based on how people interact with your emails. Let me give you an example.
- You send to a list of 100,000 contacts
- 20,000 of these are “active” contacts
- 10,000 contacts open your email, after one send
In this example, only 10% of the contacts you sent to opened your email. In other words,90% of the contacts you sent to did not react in the way you’d hoped.
You had a pretty good idea before you sent this email that you would get 20% interaction at most. When ISPs see this type of lower than anticipated interaction, it can create a negative impact on your IP addresses, damaging your reputation with ISPs. This can result in more emails either getting blocked or placed in the spam folder.
Another risk when you fail to clean your data? Your chance of dealing with spam traps increases. Spam traps can drastically affect your inbox placement, delivery, and increase the chance of blocks and placement on blacklists.
There are many different types of spam traps. According to MailChimp, there are three primary types: the typo, the expired, and the purchased. A typo spam trap can be someone that simply types their email in wrong or uses the email my@email.com. AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and other major providers are even submitting emails with the domains incorrectly entered as oal (AOL), gmial (Gmail), and hotmial (Hotmail).
Expired emails are addresses that have not been used in years, were deactivated and then later reactivated. Providers know that anyone sending emails to these deactivated and then reactivated addresses must be spammers.
MailChimp explains it this way: “Since [the contact’s] email bounced for a long time, [the company] assumes anyone sending legitimate emails to [the email] back in the day would have long since removed [it] from their list. Only spammers who never clean or prune their list would still send to a long-dead email address.” If you fail to clean emails, and closely watch emails after purchase, you can get into some serious problems because you could be buying a list that has emails from 10 years ago and that are no longer active but still valid.
Many experts in our field believe that you should purge your lists at least once every six months. When you purge a list, make sure you get rid of any contacts that have not engaged for a prolonged period of time. You can try to re-engage some of the non-engaged contacts, but be sure to closely watch and analyze their performance – a high bounce rate could indicate that there are issues with these contacts, and you’ll want to fix those problems as soon as possible to protect the rest of your list.
One of the many benefits to cleaning your list is that it will reduce the cost of your email campaigns. If you have a list of one million contacts, and it costs you $0.01 per email sent, sending one campaign to your full list costs $10,000.00. But when you clean your list you may find that half of those one million contacts do not engage with your content. Why throw good money at those poor performing records? If you reduce your send list to five hundred thousand contacts, now it only costs you $5,000.00 per campaign. You dramatically increase your chance of generating a profit and achieve higher interaction measures.
More importantly, consistent good data hygiene leads to better long-term results for you and your clients. The better your hygiene, the better inbox placement you will receive. And if your emails are landing in the inbox, then there is obviously a much greater chance of your contacts taking action or making a donation.
Mustard Seed Interactive is an expert email provider, that works diligently to make sure that your emails reach our contacts inbox. We’re here to help you optimize the inbox placement of your email, which will greatly increase the likelihood that your audience will open it and act upon your message.
Daniel R. Glass is the Email Manager of Mustard Seed Interactive. He can be reached at Daniel@mustardseedinteractive.com
