At the core of every email campaign – even more important than the campaign itself – is the list of contacts it’s being sent to. If your list is badly targeted, or full of bad data, your campaigns could do worse than flop. You could end up blacklisted.
That, of course, is something you want to avoid, which means you need to take care to follow cold email best practices from top to bottom. The first place to start is your contact list.
What’s a “Valid” Contact List?
Email marketing is a tried-and-true, classic channel that’s been a pillar of digital marketing for decades. However, if your campaigns get diverted from inboxes into spam folders, it doesn’t matter how awesome your email content is, because nobody will see it.
There’s hardly a point to sending, say, a hundred thousand emails that do nothing but languish in junk boxes. The key difference is having a list that’s full of only real B2B addresses that have been verified and validated, so you’re avoiding sending to irrelevant contacts, bad addresses, spam traps and honeypots.
If you buy a contact list, even from a reputable data provider, you must run it through a list verification tool before sending. Otherwise, you’re risking sending to all kinds of bad contacts, and that can be a costly mistake!
Why Valid Lists are Critical
Simply put, if you send to a bad list once, your “sender reputation” will take a hit. Send to that list repeatedly, and your reputation will plummet and your future campaigns will automatically get the heavy-handed spam filter treatment. Which can very well be a death sentence for your email marketing.
“Sender reputation” isn’t just a nebulous metaphor – it’s a concrete score from 1-100 that spam appliances use to judge how trustworthy a given sender is, and it can be impacted by a wide range of factors. Many of those risks can be mitigated or removed altogether by giving your list a thorough scrubbing prior to use.
Here’s an example: If you send a campaign to a 100k-strong contact list, but some of those contacts hard-bounce because the address no longer exists, or (even worse) it’s been repurposed as a spam trap, that looks a bit suspicious. Especially if it’s a large portion of the contacts you sent to. Bounce rate is a major factor in your sender reputation!
If you send to that list again, without having cleaned out those bad contacts, you’re basically telling spam filters “I’m not particularly fussy about the quality of my contacts, I don’t even bother removing the ones that don’t exist”, which is a big red flag for spam.
And then your sender reputation goes down. Too far down, and your campaigns won’t see the light of day (or inboxes).
Are There Exceptions?
Short answer: nope. Not when it comes to cold B2B email campaigns. Let’s say that hypothetical 100k-contacts list you’ve got came from a top-notch provider and you’re super confident in their data. You should absolutely still be independently checking the list, for the simple reason that even the best quality lists decay over time.
It makes sense: people change or leave jobs or email addresses, sometimes addresses get repurposed as spam traps (email addresses that exist specifically to identify spam messages). Typos can always sneak in, too. A little housecleaning is never a bad idea, and in this case it’s not optional anyway (if you want to succeed).
How to Get Your List Validated
Okay, so the importance of list cleaning is crystal clear. The question now is: how do you do it?
In general, list cleaning is a third-party service you can hunt down a vendor for. They’ll clean your list for you for a fee.
However, if you’re using Clickback’s Email Lead Generation platform, it’s included in the tool and gets performed automatically for you (only one of the many ways it’s optimized for cold email success).
Every time you upload a list, Clickback automatically runs that list through a robust series of filters, hygiene checks and validation processes to strip out any bad data, so you don’t need to worry about it.
