Maintaining Healthy lists

Permission and Privacy

• Provide explicit information about your email program at the point of address collection. For example, if you have several newsletter options make sure your subscribers understand their choices
• Include a link to your privacy policy at the point of address collection and make sure your privacy policy sets the correct expectations in clear language, not legalese
• Offer a quick and easy sign-up process, limiting the number of mandatory fields and avoiding passwords unless absolutely necessary; be sure to have a website confirmation page
• Send an automated Welcome/Confirmation message within 24-hours offering more details on your email program and the value your customer will experience
• Provide your customers with a preference center so they can manage their subscriptions with ease

Address Collection Process

• Reject malformed addresses
  • abuse@ and postmaster@ addresses,
  • malformed addresses with misspelled domains (i.e. me@hotmai.lcom)
  • role accounts (i.e. sales@company.com, customerservice@company.com)
  • nonsensical email addresses (ex. 123abc@xyz987.com)
• Send a Welcome or Confirmation message.
• Provide an email preference center so your subscribers can easily update their email addresses
• Use Google’s reCaptcha – Read all about it here.

Database Maintenance

• Establish an on-going process to consistently remove old and inactive subscribers.
• Example:
  • Every 3-6 months..
  • Find all addresses that has received more than X emails (set the right amount for you, but let’s say at least 5 emails)..
  • Find those that has not opened any of them..
  • Send them a last email and ask them to subscribe again or they will be removed from the list..
  • Remove/Invalidate those that didn’t subscribe again.
  • This is to prevent email addresses turning into spam traps, bounces or complaints.

Keep it clean

• Have a very low amount or no bounces
• Have a very low amount or no complaints
• Have a very low amount or no spam traps