Ask a Deliverability Expert: What Does My Email List Say About Me?

What are spam filters looking for? How do they know if I’m a good or bad sender? Can an inbox tell just from looking at who I send my emails to?

We often worry about growing our email lists or worry that cleaning our lists might keep us from connecting with a potential reader or customer, but we rarely discuss what our lists say about us. It is important to discuss how good or bad list management or practices can affect us as senders and how they can let spam filters know that we follow best practices… or that we don’t!

Our lists are precious to us as they allow us to sell, inform, and get people excited about our brand, but to ensure that readers remain happy to see our brand’s name in their inbox, it is very important that we follow certain best practices. Otherwise, spam filters will eventually penalize us. The inboxes are monitoring things beyond spam complaints — they are also looking at opens, clicks, and activity versus inactivity in order to decide inbox placement. Specific flags, like list hygiene, might affect their decision more than others. Lists affect deliverability because the inboxes and the spam filters are always learning more about what the recipients want to receive in their inbox, and they’re on the lookout for when senders are making certain mistakes that prove they aren’t following best practices.

I’ll say it again: Never buy an email list

The most important part of managing lists is having our subscribers’s consent. Every year, spam filters are getting better at detecting and differentiating good senders from bad ones, and your lists can be a telltale sign that you aren’t following best practices. Even if you are legally allowed to purchase a list in the country you live and do business in, inboxes and spam filters don’t like that kind of behavior and will penalize you for it. We tend to forget that the main client of an inbox is your subscribers. The inboxes want to ensure they keep their customers happy. And one easy way to do that is to reduce unwanted emails.

A list filled with subscribers that have given consent to receive emails from a brand will interact completely differently from one that has been bought, thus signaling to spam filters and inboxes that you are not following best practices. It can be very obvious in certain cases. People will barely engage after some time, they will ignore your emails or brand, or worst of all, users will report your emails as spam. These are clear red flags, and you will get penalized for them.

And just from looking at the data in your email service provider, you might not realize if you’re dealing with lots of spam complaints. Google, for example, will tell you the percentage of their clients that reported your email as spam on a particular day, but won’t tell you who marked you as spam. Spam complaints, how they work, and how they are calculated is a whole topic in itself, and I might even write a future Ask a Deliverability Expert about it, but the thing you need to know is that there’s a disconnect between the data your inbox has about a subscriber and what you or your ESP have access to. Most inboxes do not share complete spam complaint information, so you might be emailing complainers over and over again without anybody being able to tell you to stop. If a particular inbox doesn’t provide this information, your email marketing tool won’t be able to either.

This is one of the first reasons we should work on growing our lists organically instead of renting or purchasing them, because what do you think inboxes think of your sending practices if you don’t stop emailing those who keep saying that they don’t want your emails? Inboxes aren’t here to make our life as marketers easier — they are here to offer amazing inbox services to their customers, even if that means protecting them from our emails.

Beware of the spam trap

There are lots of tools out there, like Bouncer, that allow any email sender to clean out a purchased list. These tools can help you remove most invalid or fake email addresses that would usually hard bounce, but will never remove 100 percent of the email addresses that will negatively impact your business. Every list cleaner has its strengths and weaknesses. Some are better at detecting catch-all emails, others are better at detecting invalid email addresses coming from inbox providers in certain countries. But no list cleaner is good enough to make up for bad sender practices. You might not get in trouble right away if you use these tools, but the inbox will figure things out over time. Spam filters exist to protect inbox users and minimize any email that may be considered spam. And with the billions of emails being sent worldwide, spam filters are learning new tricks very quickly.

And here’s something else to think about: Spam traps. Inboxes want you to have permission and a relationship in order to email someone. How can they tell that you have a relationship with the human behind the inbox? By creating email addresses that have no humans using them, hiding those emails all over the internet, and hoping you’ll add these emails to your list. These are known as spam traps. Spam traps will always look like a real email address. They can even be an email address that used to exist but is no longer managed by its original owner. But spam traps do not belong to a specific person, so there would be no way for them to have subscribed to your emails unless you went and added that email yourself. When a spam trap is found in your list, that sends the signal that you’re sending to lots of other inboxes without their consent. 

Segmentation and reactivation opportunities

List hygiene goes beyond blindly deleting undesirable or inactive subscribers. It means taking a look at your entire list to separate active and engaged contacts from ones who aren’t engaging with your emails, which in turn will help you optimize your targeting. Your email strategy will produce better results if you focus on subscribers who are opening, clicking on emails, and performing the actions you want them to perform, such as buying your product, reading your content, or signing up for your next event.

Focus on ensuring that customers are receiving content that they find valuable and that you are helping customers engage positively with your content. Let’s say you’re an eCommerce company that sends lots of emails. Start with a goal in mind, and try segmenting based on factors like gender, age, interest, or purchase activity. If they’ve purchased already, for instance, you might try to convince them to make a second purchase. Or maybe they’re disengaging from your emails. In that case, focus on trying to win back their trust by showcasing products that you think will be relevant to them.

Here’s another tactic to try: Start by pulling a segment of your list that hasn’t opened or engaged with your emails in, say the previous three to six months. Then try to win them back. This type of campaign is often known as a reactivation or re-engagement campaign. The goal here is to get a reader’s attention and offer a specific reason to start reading your emails again. If they engage, then you’re free to continue to send emails to them.

Two other tactics you might want to consider: You can always move your inactive readers into a special segment where you only communicate with them a handful of times per year, typically when you’ve got big news or announcements to share. Or, if you’d prefer, you can unsubscribe them from all emails. Send one last campaign letting them know that you’re going to remove them from your list if they don’t click on a specific link you added in that email, and then unsubscribe everyone who doesn’t click.

Your list might shrink sometimes, and that’s OK

Why are we working so hard to grow our lists and then letting people drop off? It’s a lot of work to create an email and send it out, and it can be very discouraging when our subscribers don’t engage. But reducing the number of contacts from your list that you clean out every three to six months can even be a goal or KPI you measure. Clean your list today and mark the percentage of subscribers you had to remove or re-segment. Then try again later in the year, after you’ve made some improvements to your marketing and targeting. See if your re-engagement list is a bit smaller than before – that’d be a great sign!

Since your list says so much about you and your practices, a poorly-maintained list can be a dead giveaway that you’re not following best practices. You might be purchasing lists, you might be renting lists, you might be collecting email addresses on your site in shady ways. I understand that having more people on your list feels reassuring. Everyone wants to reach a big audience! But just because you’re reaching more people doesn’t mean they’re automatically going to pay attention to what you have to say. If you’re forcing somebody to listen to your message, you will get penalized. So focus instead on the people who love your brand, who engage with your messages, and who will ultimately read, click, purchase, or take the steps you’re looking for.

Have a question that you’d like Yanna-Torry to answer in a future edition of Ask a Deliverability Expert? Submit it here.

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