by David Manning
Did you know that 17% of Americans create a new email address every 6 months and that 30% of all Americans change their email address at least once annually?
Those are alarming figures if you are serious about keeping your data relevant and continuing your consumer reach. This has become even more important recently as Major ISP’s like Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft are recycling unused email accounts in an effort to monitor sending reputation and preventing fraud. For instance, the Microsoft Service Agreement states that they “periodically, at a minimum of every 270 days” have the right to recycle any account and make it available again after 360 days.
In order to maintain the list health and relevancy,
it is recommended that email addresses be cleaned and re-cleaned every 3-6 months. Reducing the number of hard bounces as well as detecting the validity of each email record is critical in maintaining email deliverability as well as enhancing marketing results. Hard bouncing email addresses indicate a permanent reason they cannot be delivered to.
Removing spam traps from your data, otherwise known as complainers – legal or otherwise, is also crucial. The penalty for mailing to one spam trap can be having all ip addresses and server addresses associated to you and people you work with shut down immediately and indefinitely. This can be catastrophically costly and anyone that has gone through it will tell you to take any and all precautions so it doesn’t happen to you.
Taking the time to use a verification service like SiftLogic not only helps to protect you from these potential pitfalls, it also increases your sending capability. By mailing to the top rated addresses as identified through our verification process, your sender score (like a credit score based on the mail sent from your servers) improves and your mailings will hit more inboxes.
Final fact, the size of an email list does not always mean more money can be made. You will have more success sending to 500k active email addresses than you will sending to 3 million addresses filled largely with hard bounces and other emails we don’t recommend mailing to (i.e. admin@, sales@, 1234test@, etc). We have worked with numerous companies whose email businesses saw massive growth once they were able to identify and remove their bad data.
Guest blogger, David Manning is V.P. of Sales and Operations at SiftLogic, the market leader in email verification and data scoring and is a proven software solution for those seeking actionable intelligence on their subscribers.
Email Marketing Blog 
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