Your email lead generation campaign is only as strong as your email list. And a strong email list consists of targeted contacts potentially interested in your product or service. But what does it mean when your emails start bouncing? There’s a chance your email list either has spam traps, honey pots or bad email addresses.  All of these types of email addresses can dirty your email list and ultimately hinder your email campaign and sending capabilities; running the risk of being blacklisted, ruining your sending reputation, wasting company time and money and decreasing your ROI. Clickback’s Email Lead Generation software helps you avoid these pitfalls. But first, we need to understand what these terms mean and how they directly affect you.

It’s A Trap

Over the years, spam traps have evolved much like the email industry itself. When cleaning your email list, it’s important to know what to look for – whether it is bad email addresses or spam traps. Let’s look at some examples of emails that can impact your deliverability:

• Spam traps are email addresses that are actively monitored by either the ISP, such as Gmail or Yahoo, or by an anti-spam organization but they do not actively engage with received emails.
• Recycled email addresses once belonged to an active user but have been closed or abandoned. At a later date they are reactivated and used as a spam trap by monitoring emails coming into the inbox.
• Bad email addresses are addresses that no longer exist.
• Honey pots are used to attract spammers. In fact, ISPs and anti-spam organizations create honey pot email addresses and spread them across websites waiting to be scrapped or harvested by subpar data providers.
• Typos are usually to blame for a malformed email address – a potential lead has either written down or typed in their email address incorrectly, generating a mail delivery issue notification.

But what does all this mean to you, as an email marketer?

ISPs generate these different types of spam traps to protect email users from receiving spam. So do these spam traps only catch the ‘bad apples’?  Not entirely – in 2013 22% of opted-in emails didn’t make it to the inbox. Even email marketers with the best sending reputation have the potential to end up in a trap; making it even more apparent that all email marketers should understand how these traps are created because just about anyone can land in a spam trap.

How it Affects You

Whether you have built an organic email list or purchased an email list from a data provider – all of these types of email addresses can affect your email campaign. Something as simple as a misspelled email address or a recycled email address can trigger a spam filter. And it only takes a few to negatively affect your email campaign. Sending to any spam trap will tarnish your sending reputation; your IP or domain can get blacklisted, meaning you will no longer be able to send messages to email users (source). If your IP or domain is blacklisted it is next to impossible to have it removed. And in the meantime, you’re unable to send any marketing emails. Not only are you falling behind on driving leads to your sales funnel but it’s costly to your company. Investing more time and money into a new IP address is counterproductive for your email campaign. You will also have to wait for your new IP address to warm up in order to begin resending your email campaign. Decreases in open rates, deliverability, click through rates and conversions can result in a low ROI, making it difficult to explain why email campaigns are an effective marketing tactic.

How ELG Can Save Your Email List

Sounds impossible to conquer? Not when you have our Email Lead Generation software. At Clickback, we’ve designed our software to combat spam traps in email lists. When you import a large-volume purchased list into our system, every email address goes through a variety of health and anti-spam risk checks. Meaning that all email addresses are reviewed and those that are identified as spam traps or have potential to cause an issue with spam filters are removed. By doing so, your bounce rate and deliverability rate significantly improves so your email gets to the inbox.  We also protect you. We understand the importance and value of your corporate IPs and domains. This is why we use our own to send your emails off of – we constantly monitor our pool of IPs to ensure each email for each of our clients is being sent off of clean IPs. So you don’t have to worry about being blacklisted with Clickback – let us handle the sending so you can focus on generating great email content to produce your company more quality leads.

Ready to get your email lead generation campaign started? Chat with one of our email experts via our online chat tool today!