How email list cleaning services can increase delivery rates

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How email list cleaning services can increase
delivery rates
To understand delivery rates and how email list
cleaning services can help make a bigger
difference in delivery, you first need to know
what category of email marketing hat you fall
into.
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There are three categories of email marketers
White hat Gray hat Black hat
I think its important to write about each
category so marketers can understand where they
fit in and how they can make important changes to
their habits in order to be successful in
delivery.
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Black Hat Email Marketing
This is the most dangerous form of email
marketing with all kinds of risks. Black Hat
email marketers do not play by any rules and
manipulate people, graphics, text, servers and
software in order for their message to be
delivered. Not only that, black hat marketers rip
emails (harvesting or spidering) off of the web
and send their advertisements directly to them
spam traps or not and without proper unsubscribes.
Most black hat email marketers are not concerned
with delivery rates, rather concerned about the
volume. Their philosophy is the more you mail,
the more money you make. This type of email
marketing is dying because of spam fighting
technology. Black hat email marketers hide behind
masks and hacks in order to get their best
results. Consider repenting if you fall into this
mess. If one spam fighter finds out who you are,
you will be subject to internet trolling and
ridicule.
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Black Hat Email Marketing
Years ago, black hat spammers would not clean
their lists. They didnt need to. Now, they all
have to clean their lists because their traffic
has decreased substantially and they have to
avoid every pitfall they can. This type of email
marketing is a waste of time, frowned upon and
can put you in serious legality confrontations.
There are too many risks and the costs are
substantial. Email List cleaning services do help
in the black hat world, but the risks are not
worth it.
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Gray Hat Email Marketing
Spam fighters and Internet Service Providers
frown upon gray hat emailers, but unfortunately,
its the most common type of email marketing that
exists today. Gray hat emailers buy, rent, lease
and/or trade email marketing lists. They append
the emails with other lists to get optin
information (date/time stamps and IPs) and
purchase list cleaning services to validate and
verify the emails before they send. Some go
through more than one hygiene company at a time
just to make sure they remove as many threats as
possible.
This type of gorilla style marketing is the
fastest way to grow a business without doing it
the hard way getting subscribers one by one.
Buy a list, scrub it and start emailing. Sounds
easy right? Well, its not. Gray hat email
marketing is setup to fail long term. Just
because a company uses a list hygiene company
doesnt mean they have the right to send
unsolicited bulk email. During a conversation
with Spamhaus a few months ago, I was informed
that a client of mine emailed to a spamtrap of
theirs. The client told Spamhaus it was ok
because they scrubbed through me. No, this is not
ok and we severed the business relationship right
away. If you purchase, rent, lease or trade any
list that was not generated by your own efforts,
you are putting your company and mine at risk by
sending unsolicited bulk email messages to it.
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Gray Hat Email Marketing
So what constitutes a correct way to email
market? I contacted Spamhaus recently and asked
what would be ok to mail to and not ok to mail
when it comes to email marketing lists. Their
response was, If people are contacting you
directly, there should be no problem mailing them
yourself or using an ESP. So, if you mail to
someone who doesnt know you, you are setting
yourself up for confrontation and ultimate
failure.
List cleaning services like mine can help with
delivery for gray hat but it will never be able
to remove all of the threats. Most emailers
recognize this and take the risks anyway. A lot
of spam fighters are not even using spamtraps
anymore rather they are setting their systems to
look for clues in domains and IPs that are
requesting passage. You are at the mercy of ISPs
and their firewalls for deliverability so gray
listed email marketing will only work with non
top level domains and if you are mailing to
consumers, you are again setup for long term
failure because most of them have top level
domain email service providers.
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White Hat Email Marketing
You would think that by having your own
subscriber base you would never amount to any
trouble in deliverability because you are doing
everything correctly and by the book. Spam
fighters have no issues with email marketers who
send advertisements to consumers that requested
the information (they contacted you). If your
subscribers know who you are and what you are
sending, there should be no issues, right? Well,
not exactly.
The larger the list gets, the more complications
you run into. Sometimes consumers or businesses
forget they signed up for a newsletter or an ad
network after a few short months. Daily life,
projects and stress get in the way and ultimately
can lead to complaints on your list. Some hygiene
companies actually have a list of complainers (we
call them protestors) and by removing them, you
can really help with your delivery rate.
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White Hat Email Marketing
Larger lists also come with more bounces. Every
day, email service providers monitor your bounce
rate. If it goes over a certain threshold, they
could move you to a more risky set of IPs and
could really hurt your delivery. Scrubbing out
the bounces before you send can truly raise
delivery rates and keep your account on white
listed IPs.
The older the list, the more complaints and
bounces you will receive as well. Most email
marketers rarely let their list sit for more than
a month. One of the most common clientele we
receive are ones who stopped email marketing for
a while and are coming back with an old list.
Their ESP put their account on suspension because
of the bounces, return paths and complainers.
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White Hat Email Marketing
Return paths can play a roll in deliverability.
Summer time, we have all kinds of clients coming
to us to remove their return paths (temporarily)
in order to not run into complications. Return
paths are like a bounce, but instead of the mail
server telling the deliverer that the mailbox
doesnt exist, it tells other things like
vacation or paternity leave or mailbox
full. The ESP can sometimes read these as
bounces if they do not have their system
updated on regular return path signatures. Return
paths can harm your deliverability.
Do white listed emailers have to clean their
lists? The smart ones do. Bounces, return paths
and complainers (complainers can turn into traps)
can lower your sending score and affect your
placement in the ESP IP rotation. Bounces can
also turn into spamtraps. In example, since some
spam fighters purchase (or activate) expired
domains, you could easily email an out of
business domain and trigger a false positive
trap. These are quickly resolved, but the damage
could set you back days if not weeks, so
scrubbing parked domains is essential for white
hat emailers. And return paths can turn into
bounces. In example, a return path could be a
leaving the company message.
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Thank You
For visiting our Presentation
About Ehygienics
EHygienics is a professional email list hygiene
company located in beautiful downtown Bend, OR.
Since 2003, eHygienics have been removing
bounces, threats, protestors, litigators and all
other perceivable threats from subscriber and old
databases. eHygienics coveted platforms offer
their clients the ability to self scrub, team
scrub and programmatically connect to several
real time API servers which are used daily by
subscribers worldwide.
Contact US
869 NE Wall Street, Suite 200, Bend, OR 97701,
USA email ehygienics_at_gmail.com Phone
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