Email marketing: Address check as factor of success

20. Aug 2007

If you find lots of invalid addresses in your mail list, you should quickly update them. Because so-called bounces, which means an e-mail that is returned to you because the e-mail address is invalid or wrong, often cause your mails to be blocked with certain Internet Service Providers. This is because Providers assume that only spammer don’t lookup their mail list. And therefore messages with a high percentage of invalid email addresses are blocked. Only an updated mail list can guarantee that your messages will be received by as many recipients as possible.

Some tips for a good distribution list:
- send emails only to persons who gave you the approval for the sending of newsletter
- delete hard bounces (mails continously returning due to invalid address) from your address list
- work on complaints immediately in order to avoid that they unsubscribe
- offer the possibility to contact the sender and to unsubscribe
- check regularly the account where such unsubscriptions are collected
- don’t send mails randomly to your complete addresses, pay special attention to the target group when sending special mails