Email Marketing News and Tips

I know, you’re thinking that you probably don’t have time to deal with managing your list.  But, the quality of your list is very important to your success.  Also, you will want to understand the many pitfalls you can have with user generated input data in your lists.

User input data

When you allow users to input their own email address information into your web forms, you’re likely to get anything and everything input as email addresses.  This is why it’s important to verify your lists in several ways before you use them. While Boomerang offers its List Hygiene product to help you clean up your lists, it can’t clean up every conceiveable user generated data.  It’s also important, if at all possible, to create up front Web programming practices to weed out bad addresses from user input.

Manual verification and correction of your list

There are lots of things that are simpler to see as a human than to try to programatically locate these same issues with a computer. Simply scanning your list visually can help find immediate problems and correct them.  For example, some list issues we’ve seen at Boomerang include the following:

• user@yahoo.cmo
• user@aol
• user2@aol@com

These three examples above are easy to spot and see the issue.  Programatically, the best we can do is weed them out.  But, these three examples above are likely fixable.  This means, were you to go through your list manually, you could correct these three email addresses and get successful delivery.  This would be three more users who may have wanted to see your information, but because they input the data incorrectly, would have been excluded by using only programatic List Hygiene processes.

However, there are some ambiguous examples that you probably don’t want to correct.  For example,

• user@yahoo.co

You wouldn’t want to correct this user because the user could have meant yahoo.com, yahoo.ca or yahoo.co.uk.  You don’t want to target the wrong user your information.

Periodically re-verifying

To maintain the highest quality list, you should periodically (about every 6-12 months) send out a verification email that requires the user to re-validate their address and verify that they wish to remain on your list.  This process means sending an email and clicking a link to reactivate their subscription, store the date and time and method of re-verification.  This allows users who don’t want to see your emails to opt out.  It forces the users to opt-in again.  It allows you to update your database on the method, place and time of verification.

Storing verification information

While you don’t need to store the verification information within your job’s list, you should keep a master list of all of your email addresses.  In that master list, you should also store such information regarding the date, time and place of sign-up.  You may even want to record the circumstances (trade show, web form, etc) under which they signed up.  If the user signups were as a result of a physical paper request (direct mail piece, warranty filing, trade show form, etc), these should also be recorded into your master list.

Why verification information is important

Storing your verification information allows you to easily keep track of when and how a user signed up for your list.  When a question arises from the user regarding how you may have obtained their address, this will allow you to tell them when and how they signed up.  Many users don’t remember doing this two or three years later.  So, it’s important not to purge this data from the record as long as it’s still active.

The other reason is that sometimes email addresses get retired and placed into spamtrap status.  Sometimes when we see spamtrap complaints, the admin claims that the address may not have been used for several years.  This is also why it’s important to keep date and time of collection.  Hitting spamtraps because you’re using an old list is very common and you want to avoid this.

How old is too old?

The general rule of thumb on an address is that if you haven’t mailed it for over 6 months, you should re-verify the address.  This thwarts two things: 1) It prevents the address becoming a spamtrap issue and 2) it ensures the address is actually owned by the same person who originally signed up for it.

Once an address gets older than 12 months in age, especially if you haven’t sent an email in over 3 months, then you need to re-verify that address.

When you choose to drop an old email address from your list is your choice, but the older it is the more likely it will have changed hands (or become a spamtrap).  This is especially true of ISP addresses like Yahoo, Gmail, AOL and Hotmail.  In an economy like this, even corporate addresses can turn over rapidly.  So, re-verification is key to keeping your list current.

The better your list…

The more active role you take in managing your list, the better results from your email marketing campaigns you will also see.  Management steps include using Boomerang’s List Hygiene processes, but also manually scanning the addresses for correctable errors.  Further, as your list ages, you should re-verify the addresses to ensure that people want to continue to see your information.  Note, if you regularly these email addresses in regular communication with your customers (for billing or other business reasons), then you may already know the addresses are valid.  For the users who don’t have that level of interaction, the above tips are important to keep the quality of your list high.