How to Spot a Bad Email List and Turn It Into a Good One~ By Lindsay Kolowich

Email is still one of the best ways to reach your target audience, contrary to what you may have heard. In fact, customer acquisition via email has increased by 4X in the last four years.

But it’s not the best way to reach people who don’t want to hear from you. Bad lists won’t just stall your marketing efforts, they’ll actually undermine your business. If you don’t regularly clean your email lists to ensure everyone you email has a valid email address and actually wants to receive your stuff, here’s what you can expect to happen: 

         

1. People will ignore, delete, or mark your emails as spam.
2. Your deliverability and sender score reputation will decline.
3. Your open and click-through rates will drop.
4. Your unsubscribe rate will rise.
5. You might get in trouble with the law.
6. Your boss won’t be happy to see your email marketing metrics start to tank.

Since you probably don’t want any of those things to happen, we’re here to give you info on turning your bad email lists around. In this post, I’ll go over what bad and good email lists looks like, and what steps you can take to transform your bad ones into good ones. By the end, you’ll be in much better email marketing shape.

What a Bad Email List Looks Like

It was bought, rented, or borrowed.

With aggressive goals on the horizon, it can be tempting to acquire email lists the quick and dirty way. But sending emails to people who don’t have a prior relationship with your business will severely hurt your reputation with your prospects, your internet service provider, and your email server.

First of all, any email list that’s for sale or rent is guaranteed to be low quality. Nobody with a good email list would give it up to somebody else because its value would decline as more and more irrelevant content is sent to it.

Secondly, people really don’t like being spammed. Recipients of your emails weren’t expecting to get an email from you -- and they likely didn’t want to get an email from you. Many of them will mark your message as spam, which hurts the Sender Score of the servers you send from. This taints your IP reputation and makes it harder for your future emails to get delivered. Many email service providers will cut off senders that violate certain limits because of the impact on IP reputation and delivery. You’ll also put your company in jeopardy because you’re all on the same IP address, and those can take months to recover.

Plus, you’ll be known as a spammy marketer -- and you’re better than that!

There are other options people can take besides hitting “spam” -- and they can hurt almost as much.  According to the 2014 Science of Email report, The most common responses to unwanted email are, in order: 1) ignore or delete, 2) unsubscribe, and 3) mark as spam. This isn’t good news: ignoring or deleting emails are also terrible for your reputation and can cause you to get caught in spam filters more often and will reduce your conversion rates.

It has steroidal growth.

The size of your list doesn't account for the quality of email addresses on it. Steroidal growth of email lists either means your team is buying or renting email lists, or there are bots filling out your forms. List quality suffers significantly either way.

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Lindsay Kolowich

Lindsay is an inbound marketing blogger at HubSpot. She's into business, marketing, the beach, and the Boston Red Sox.