List Hygiene and the Consequences of Unclean Lists

It’s one of those things that like the email subject line, can be a bit of a second thought in your email campaign construction. But this can have damaging effects on your long-term email deliverability if not looked after.

I’ll quickly explain what exactly I mean by list hygiene. You’re sending out a newsletter to roughly 20,000 people. Some of these people have been signed up to your list since 2005. The only thing is, your email marketing lapsed for a little while and you haven’t sent out an email in 6 months. But you’ve decided that the Christmas period is a great opportunity to start again.

So your Christmas campaign starts to go out, but you haven’t set-up a proper email bouncing address. The email bounces for no longer valid email addresses flood into your inbox and instead of removing them from your mailing list, you just delete the notification email.

This is now leaving your list ‘unclean