Maintaining Your Lists In Net-Results

Keeping your lists of contacts active and engaged is an important part of deliverability. If you are emailing contacts who are unengaged or inactive, overtime this could negatively impact your sending reputation and affect your deliverability stats.

Performing regular and thorough management of your existing contacts ensures not only that you are delivering to contacts who want to receive your emails, but that your emails are not getting sent to spam. 

We will cover best practices for list hygiene as well as traps that could harm your reputation and how to avoid them.

Best Practices for List Hygiene

Good list hygiene is a continuous process. The best lists are those with contacts who are active and engaged. The following best practices will help to ensure your lists are composed of these types of contacts.

Address Cleansing

This practice involves subjecting all new email addresses to a basic screening. Address cleansing will check validity to ensure the addresses are accurate and deliverable.

Sunsetting Policies

If a contact is unengaged or inactive, this does not mean you need to delete them entirely. Net-Results has made it simple to set up a Sunsetting Policy for unengaged Contacts which removes them from your mailing list but keeps their current data in the platform. You can find more information on how to create a Sunsetting Policy here.

Encourage Subscriber Email Change of Address

Include clear directions on your site for subscribers to change their email addresses if needed. 

• Large numbers of opt-outs are due to contacts trying to change their email address, but instead unsubscribe.

Spam Traps

Spam traps, also known as honeypots, are commonly used to detect poor practices in list management, list building and deployment behaviors . These traps are often used by anti-spam organizations, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and corporations to lure spammers. Emails that are sent to these email addresses do not get clicked on or opened. 

Even if you are not a spammer, you can get caught up in one of these traps. It is best to avoid these traps as much as possible to avoid your mail from being blocked or sent to spam. 

Two of the most common Spam Traps are Pristine Traps & Recycled Traps.

Pristine Traps

Pristine Traps use email addresses that have never been used by an individual. The addresses are used as decoys on sites, blogs, or forums. These addresses lure and expose spammers and list sellers who illegally scrape addresses off the internet to add to lists. 

• Oftentimes, when purchasing lists, marketers are unaware of the negative legal and ethical ramifications they could encounter by sending to these honeypot addresses. 
• We do not recommend purchasing lists.

If you are using legitimate lists, there are only two ways to get caught in a Pristine Spam Trap:

1. A mistyped email address from an individual subscribing to you list 
2. An individual using a fake address 

To avoid these traps, always monitor new addresses on your lists for activity and remove those that are inactive. Additionally, almost all Pristine Traps are often eliminated by using the process of confirmed opt-in.

Recycled Traps

Recycled Traps are email addresses that used to belong to a user, but have been abandoned or closed for long periods of time. These addresses are reactivated and recycled by the operator who then uses them to see who does not clean their lists or remove inactive addresses. 

• Recycled traps are often used by inbox providers. They use these traps to filter and deprioritized companies that continue to send to these addresses, causing inbox issues for the sender.