The Email Wars

As you march on across the battlefield of email marketing delivery, you need to pay attention to the health and hygene of your troops (or email lists). Making sure to continually enable a way for your customer to update their profile and even ask for a second email address if one goes bad, is a good practice. If you have the ability to add a second email field, like you can in the emailROI system (User Fields) you can get a back up email address if one goes MIA.

Chances are you spent a fair amount of effort and money to build your database. If those names performed well for you in the past, keep them clean. Doing so minimizes bounces and customer defections; Increases open and click-through rates; and minimizes chances of being blacklisted.

The NCOA process typically performs the following types of hygiene on your list:

Identify e-addresses that are no longer deliverable (“dead” addresses).

Identify and correct obvious typos, such as bfoley@hotmial.com or ssmith@yaho.com.

Identify test and prank records, such as asdf@yahoo.com and test@msn.com.

Find and remove records such as abuse@hotmail.com that somehow snuck into your database.

Remove duplicates (you’d be surprised how many there are!).

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