Hi friends 👋🏻

A client is migrating from an old email listserv product to Campaign Monitor to deliver a better newsletter experience to a big membership list.

They tagged me in to help with domain authentication and provide some advice about maintaining email deliverability rates through this move to a new sending service. And we realized that the email list had never been scrubbed of bad email addresses.

If you've never done this email list clean-up task, read on to learn why this is important, and how to do it!

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Why does sending to bad email addresses hurt your email program?

Email addresses fall into the "bad" bucket for several reasons:

• Emails bounce because the mailbox no longer exists. An example: the subscriber joined with their work email address and has since changed jobs, so the mailbox has been removed.
• Emails bounce because the subscriber mistyped the email address. How many ...@gmial.com addresses do you have in your list?
• Disposable or "burner" email accounts. These accounts only function for a short period of time, and people may use them to access a gated resource without handing over their real email address.

And there are more categories too:

• Spam traps
• Abuse emails
• Catch-all emails

Sending email campaigns to a list that includes too many of these "bad" email addresses harms your deliverability rate, and can result in fewer of your emails reaching your real email subscribers.

And if there's any link between the amount you pay for your email sending platform and the size of your email list (or the number of emails you send), you might be paying extra to send emails that are never delivered and harm your sender reputation.

Enter Email Validation

An easy fix for this problem is to make email validation a part of email hygiene routine. At least annually, or better, quarterly, get into the habit of running your email list through an email validation tool.

I use a platform called Zerobounce. They don't require a subscription – you can just pay-as-you-go with a number of credits tied to your list size.

You upload a spreadsheet containing your entire email file and within an hour or so you'll get reports identifying the specific email addresses that might be:

• Invalid
• Abuse emails
• Spam traps
• Disposable emails
• Catch-all addresses (like info@...)

Once you have this data, you can remove some or all of these classes of emails in bulk from your email marketing platform.

The benefits:

• Improved email deliverability, because you've removed that (hopefully small) percentage of bad contacts
• Increased open and clicks rates
• Improved sender reputation with the big inbox providers
• A lower monthly bill from the email marketing platform, since the audience size decreases

If you want a deeper dive into how email deliverability works, check out this article that covers deliverability and how email validation can help keep your list in good shape.

If you're struggling with declining email metrics I hope this tip helps!

Until next time ✨

— Ed Harris (your digital strategy guide)

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