Is your Email List clean and update?

Shrewd marketers devote a great amount of attention to crafting their email messaging campaign. They scrutinize the subject line, fuss over the content, and carefully monitor the timing of delivery. Once the perfect message has been created, it is just as important to focus on its successful delivery to the intended recipients. Unfortunately, it is likely that your current email address list has a number of significant problems.

Your List Has Old Addresses

Unfortunately, people change their email addresses all the time – when they switch jobs, move, switch Internet service providers, etc.

As individuals change addresses and maintain multiple working email addresses for multiple purposes, it is unlikely that they will make a point of updating you. Recent studies indicate that nearly 35% of Internet users change their email addresses each year, and this does not account for the multiple working email addresses being added every day.

Ideally, you are aware of this problem, and monitoring the percentage of your database that is bouncing. Every bouncing address is an unread message. After repeated testing, you may determine that some addresses are truly "dead" (rather than being a short-term bounce) and be tempted to remove these from your list.

Your List Has Typos

No list is immune from the introduction of typos. These errors tend to be introduced through three different mechanisms:

• User Caused
• Internal Entry
• Data Manipulation and Corruption

Your List Has Duplicates

Duplicate email addresses can result in disgruntled customers and database management challenges for your company. Obviously, it is unprofessional to email your customer multiple copies of the same message. Even though many duplicate addresses are the result of double entries by your customers, these very same people often become so irritated by receiving multiple messages that they unsubscribe from your list altogether. These "obvious" duplicates are easy to catch and most database managers can quickly do a scan of your list. Ironically, not all companies catch these duplicates, especially if they maintain several lists and forget to de-dupe between them.

So what now?

Now that you know your list has inappropriate addresses, missing addresses, typos, duplicates, what can you do? You either

• Improve your email validation routines
• Switching to double opt in
• Manually review all the addresses for accuracy
• Use a service provider to cleanse and update your database

E Mail Appending (Cleansing) by using Six Channels

Six Channels is one of the few companies that truly execute the standardization and customer email append in-house. By controlling the entire email append process in-house, we endow our clients the rapid turnaround, quality control and accountability they entail.

Don't Wait

You customer database is one of your most invaluable assets. To let it waste or drain is not the wisest way to do business. You should begin to think about your database problems and resolve to take care of it as soon as possible. Six Channels can help you reconnect with customers lost to dead addresses immediately, and ensure that your well-crafted email messages earn you the maximum return on investment.