In email marketing, maintaining a clean list is so important, yet many marketers underestimate just HOW important—until it’s too late.
At PlusThis, we recently learned this the hard way. Our team faced a major setback with our email broadcasts because of an unclean email list.
In this post, we’ll walk through our experience and share tips to help you avoid the same mistakes.
So…what Happened to Us?
Our team prides itself on being diligent with email marketing. We monitor engagement closely, track our list performance, and ensure we send valuable content to our subscribers.
However, despite all our efforts, we were notified by our email platform that we could no longer send broadcast emails.
The reason?
Our emails were going to unengaged contacts, leading to a high number of bounces and spam complaints.
Confused, we initially thought there was a mistake. We weren’t spamming people or purchasing leads—we were following best practices, or so we thought.
But as it turns out, we hadn’t been as careful as we believed.
To fix it, we had to go through a tedious and time-consuming process of cleaning our list. We hired a third-party list validation company, which took over a week just to get started. We had to download, upload, and re-upload our lists, and tag our contacts based on their engagement. Even though our team is tech-savvy, it was still a manual, error-prone, time sucking process.
After cleaning the list, we started our email broadcasts back up, only to be shut down again weeks later.
No joke.
The reason?
We had mistagged some unengaged contacts and continued sending emails to people who hadn’t engaged with our content for years.
This small mistake cost us more time, effort, and frustration.
Want to hear Dave explain our experience firsthand? Check out the video below for the full story!
Here are three pieces of advice to prevent this from happening:
- Regularly Clean Your List – No matter how engaged your list seems, unengaged contacts will eventually harm your email reputation. Make it a habit to clean your list every few months to avoid sending emails to people who no longer interact with your content.
- Monitor Engagement Closely – Define what “unengaged” means for your list—whether it’s 90, 180, or 365 days without an open or click—and segment those contacts out. Continuing to send to inactive subscribers can damage your sender reputation and cause your emails to bounce or end up in spam folders.
- Use an Automated Tool – Manual list cleaning is prone to errors. Instead of going through the painful manual process, consider using a tool that automates the validation and cleaning of your email list.
At PlusThis, we’ve turned our experience into a solution: ListDefender, our upcoming automated list cleaning tool. ListDefender takes the hassle out of managing your email lists, ensuring you’re only sending to engaged, valid contacts—automatically.
Want to keep your list clean and avoid the mistakes we made? Sign up for the waitlist for ListDefender today and be the first to know when it launches!
Join the ListDefender Waitlist Now: https://listdefender.com/
By taking action now, you’ll save time, protect your sender reputation, and ensure your email marketing campaigns reach the right audience.
