Did you know sending emails to users who may not be your preferred clients could perhaps hurt the reputation? Emails are undoubtedly fantastic medium to get in touch with the prospects to educate and gradually bring them to a conversion point. However, building relationship can take a back seat should you still use bloated lists with inactive and bad email addresses. It hints one thing ¬– spring clean. What most marketers fail to realize is that bad emails can weigh down your efforts by making every email you send vulnerable to bots and recipients who have not opted to receive any communication. When your delivery rate slumps, it triggers a chain reaction where your emails are likely to be reported by users or captured by spam traps. A possible outcome, which may not be favorable to your efforts, because your reputation can take a beating and can prevent future emails from reaching the relevant audiences. So, walk with me to understand the four types of email addresses that you typically encounter and how to stay immune from blacklisting
1. Lapsed Email Addresses
Invalid emails are nondescript. They serve no purpose entirely, and cannot be used for inbox placement of your emails. If you are wondering how you receive such emails, here is what you need to know. When site visitors submit an email address, it is possible they could be misspelled or otherwise fake. In such cases, the email can’t be used for returning a response. When marketers send emails to such unverified emails, they risk a hard bounce which is imminent. Every email provider follows a protocol that monitors the sender’s emails. If the hard bounce rate exceeds 2%, the future emails could be placed in junk mail folders or otherwise blocked. The most pragmatic approach is the use of email validation services. The outline of such efforts is to contain the damage by weeding out undeliverable emails. Analyze the emails at touchpoint to prevent any erroneous gathering of data. Implement verification during online form submission that collects email address from users. It performs a real-time verification and deters users from submitting bad emails
2. Spam Traps
Spam traps are email addresses like any, save for its true purpose which detects oblivious spammers who use harvesting software to send countless unsolicited emails. The email providers and organizations that monitor spam deploy Spam Traps to keep the system clean. Since it isn’t ethical to promulgate email addresses, it is a dead giveaway of senders intention when he or she send emails to such addresses. In particular cases, email providers can blacklist or block marketers if spam traps are found in an email list. Detecting spam traps due to its deceptive characteristics is hard. A spam trap email is identical to any other legitimate emails within the list. Should you have reasons to believe your email list having spam traps, the ideal measure is to attempt removal of other emails acquired during the time. Paying attention to your delivery rate will help to detect the presence of spam traps.
3. Departmental Email Addresses
It is a standard practice for companies to designate departmental email addresses for responding to a client inquiry. It is unsafe to send emails to such addresses because it is highly likely that multiple users could be the admin to a standard email address. In such cases, when user A has subscribed using this email and has not informed other users, then user B who may be oblivious could report spam if he or she were to find it irrelevant. Departmental email addresses are readily available from consumer pages. They are prominently found amongst spammer’s inventory. Thus, email providers have a distaste for people sending too many messages to such addresses. A safer recourse is to sift and remove such addresses before sending emails.
4. Unresponsive Subscribers
Email Providers can block or blacklist marketers whose messages do not gain any form of traction with the recipients. Emails that are left unengaged can quickly be the reason for a drastic decrease in reputation. Inactive subscribers do not negatively influence the marketing efforts because marketers can re-engage them. Inactive subscribers are two variants:
- Long Term Inactive: Recipients who open your email but never engage.
- Never active: Recipients who have never interacted with your emails.
Apart from the plethora of restrictions placed by email providers, if recipients ignore your emails consistently, then email providers starts blocking or blacklisting the sender’s email. To combat this issue, it is vital to send a one-time permission message to recipients who haven’t been responsive to your emails by asking if they wish to continue receiving emails. It is important to optimize the email by including a Call To Action button to obtain a quick response. If the message doesn’t elicit any further response, it is practical to remove them from the list.
However, dealing with long-term inactive can be slightly trickier. It isn’t practical to hold onto members who have been unresponsive for over 20 months. Consider that you are sending emails to your list many times a week, the recipients not responding for over a year could cut the deliverability rate and hurt your reputation. Skip the hassle by uniquely defining the threshold for every lapsed and current recipient. Re-engage your inactive customers by wooing them with discounts before the threshold duration expires. Should they still choose to be unresponsive, you can solicit them repeatedly to update subscription preference. To achieve success with email marketing campaign, it is important for marketers to be aware of the permission tactics that thoroughly monitor the behavior of recipients who will be receiving communication from you.
