There has been a lot of discussion about list cleaning lately — with opinions coming out on all sides. We have recently been dragged back into the conversation with the announcement of our Clean-Send email cleansing service offering. As mentioned in a post last week, many of those with the philosophy that you should only use the email channel when people specifically ask you to email them, are totally against the idea of email data cleansing because they believe you will ultimately email people who don’t want to receive messages in their email Inboxes.
By the way, I say “dragged back into the conversation” not because we don’t like a good debate on a topic near and dear to our hearts — email marketing — but because we know that we aren’t going to change the minds of those that disagree with us. It is simply a difference in philosophy. Nobody’s right or wrong — people should do what they feel comfortable doing.
So, this week, when talking with a potential customer, the question was asked . . . is List Cleaning Allowed? I loved the way that Paula Chiocchi, our CEO, who has spent her career blazing the trail in email marketing, responded to the question. Here’s what she said:
Of course list cleaning is allowed! As a matter of fact, many of our Clients use services such as ours because they don’t always know the genesis of the data in their database — or may not completely trust that the list provider who they obtained the data from initially used best practices in terms of ensuring that the email data was valid prior to delivery.
Also, there are some unscrupulous characters in the marketplace who purposely don’t clean their database — simply because they want to sell more data. Instead of taking a chance of negatively impacting your sender or IP reputations, it is simply a best practice to use a cleansing service first to ensure you do not.”
This makes perfect sense when you think about it. List cleaning solutions can protect you against hitting spam traps, honey pots or other harmful email data. Additionally, they can do other things like correct typos in email addresses (not everyone types perfectly as you know) and ensure that syntax is correct, etc.
If you use the email channel frequently as part of your integrated channel marketing mix, it really makes sense to consider using a good email cleansing service on a consistent basis. Most services (like ours) are automated, reasonable in price and data can be returned in a very short time frame. Then, when you launch your campaign, you’ll see your delivery rates increase and your hard bounces diminish. This will, in turn, increase your campaign metrics — making everyone happy.
Obviously, we are in favor of using a solid data cleansing practice in your business!
Filed under: B2B email Best Practices, B2C Best Practices, email Data Quality, email Effectiveness, Email Marketing, Uncategorized Tagged: | Best practice, Data Cleansing, email, Email address, email marketing, Marketing
In addition to reaping the benefits of valid email data, safeguarding your reputation, and the protection of spam traps and the like, have there been any studies that show the potential dollars and cents advantage of list cleaning versus not cleaning the email database? Is there an example of a well known company that was harmed as a result of not opting for list cleaning?
Great Question!! Yes — there are many examples and I will make your question the feature of my next blog post so I can address it completely. You’ll see it today! Thanks for the comment!