Cleaning — it is something we all know is essential for our health. Some of us are better than others at cleaning on a regular basis. But...can we say the same about cleaning for the sake of our marketing health? One of the biggest areas we need to keep clean in marketing is the email addresses in our CRM to ensure we aren't put in an email time out.

Are You Keeping Your Email House Clean?

Even before the great resignation, B2B email addresses have been difficult to keep up to date. However, this is a critical piece of an email marketing campaign to ensure the best email deliverability by keeping your sender reputation in good condition. The top two factors that can compromise a sender reputation are bounce rate and blacklists.

It is widely known that several organizations track and monitor sending behavior and blacklists. Email service providers rely on these organizations to look and consider both factors to determine whether or not an incoming email is safe to receive.

Hard Bounces Hurt

Too many hard bounces can hurt your email sending reputation even with a single send. Hard bounces mean that the contacts are no longer active, have outdated email addresses, or the email service provider has blocked your email from entering. It is best to keep your hard bounce rate under 0.3%. The best way to achieve lower bounce rates is by using an email list validation to "scrub" the list clean to remove any contacts that are likely to hard bounce in the future.

A clean, well-managed subscriber list can be your best asset, whereas “dirty” lists with out-of-date information are a leading cause of deliverability failures and are sure to damage your sending reputation.

Understand and improve your email deliverability with this free 3-part video series by clicking the button below. Get started creating a consistent list cleaning practice to keep your email marketing going far into the future.