Email Deliverability: Maintaining a High-Quality List

There are multiple factors that contribute to good email delivery, and one of them is maintaining a high-quality subscriber list.  To keep such a list, one must pay attention to complaints, inactive users, unknown users and spam traps.

Keeping low complaint rates isn’t something new.  This is one of the most crucial parts to maintaining a positive reputation and high delivery rates.  As a mailer, you know that someone hitting the junk/spam button is far worse than simply hitting delete.  Doing this announces to the email provider that your emails are unwanted, and if enough people announce this to them, then your delivery starts to diminish.

Another part of maintaining a high-quality list is Spam traps.  Spam traps are exactly that, email addresses that are used to trap non-compliant or poor list quality mailers.  Falling into one of these traps means the sender is sending to lists they haven’t cleaned or lists they shouldn’t have in the first place.  Spam traps aren’t a big issue in the legal part of mailing, but they are a big part of the delivery portion, and if you don’t have a healthy delivery, you don’t have a healthy ROI.

Unknown users are email addresses that don’t exist.  They were either, terminated by the email service provider, completely forgotten about by the user, or never existed to begin with.  Running into one of these will trigger a hard bounce by the email service provider, resulting in raised red flags.  These are also important as they can hurt reputation and decrease deliverability.

Last but not least, you have inactive users.  These are email addresses that haven’t opened or clicked anything in a while.  You want to remove these quickly, as they can cause more inactivity with the rest of your list by causing your future mailings to hit the junk box, resulting in the end users never seeing them and become inactive as well.  Inactive email addresses bring down response rates, which negatively impact your reputation as well, ultimately causing your delivery to go down.

If you would like more information on what it takes to maintain a high-quality email list and ensure that your emails are deliverable, contact the madrivo team!