Did you know that having poor list quality can seriously affect your sender reputation?

I’m always surprised by how many senders have no insight into what their data looks like. One of my favorite things to do is spend time analyzing my customers’ bounce logs. You’d be shocked to see how many different ways a subscriber can mis-spell an AOL or Comcast address. In addition to that, I often find parked domains, domains for sale, and role account addresses. 

In case you are wondering, here are some definitions for those:                                                   

Domains for Sale

Domains for sale may be new, or may have been active in the past but have since expired.

Parked Domains

Parked domains are registered  without being associated with email or a website. Some parked domains display advertisements, while others don't. Sending email to parked domains can be risky as they may be monitored by blacklist operators.

Role Account Addresses

Role account addresses are usually set up as aliases for more than one recipient (admin@, info@, etc.) Since role addresses are set up for a group, recipients may not recognize the sender, understand why they are receiving a sender's email and/or decide to complain, as opposed to unsubscribing. Recipients who have not signed up are more likely to complain or mark as spam.

As if that were not enough, I find many email addresses set up with 1 or two letters (or a letter and a number) at an ISP that doesn’t allow email accounts to be set up that way.

Here’s an example:

ER@aol.com   

AG@yahoo.com

 Many marketers may not be aware of that limitation and so collect addresses that are never going to be able to receive email.

What’s the solution? Senders should ensure they or someone on the ESP-side is paying attention to bounce logs and looking for problematic data. But that’s really a back-end solution, as the addresses would need to be sent to in order to determine they are invalid.

What can I do on the front end you ask? I’ve worked with clients that built website functionality to reject ISP domain typos, gobbledygook, and malformatted email addresses based on bounce log data. Another solution would be to work with an email validation service that, through API calls, could do basically the same thing on your web form if you don’t have the internal budget or resources to build this functionality out.

The bottom line is the onus to maintain good list quality is on the sender and not doing so could put you at risk for bulking, blocking, or blacklisting. So be sure to work with a dedicated resource internally or with your ESP to ensure your data is clean.

Happy hunting!