Data hygiene is important to email marketers today because a dirty list will effect your reputation with ISP’s. Spammers harvest emails from the internet and send emails to these addresses whether they are legitimate addresses or not. Lists with a high number of hard bounces (unknown users) are one of the trademarks of spammers and also a flag to ISP’s that the sender is not practicing good data hygiene practices and doesn’t operate a good sign-up process.
ISP’s have become much cleverer in their attempts to catch spammers that harvest email addresses and senders that do not keep their lists clean. Spam traps are one of the measures the ISP’s have implemented to allow them to actively monitor this. There are two types, deliberate and dormant converted.
Deliberate spam traps:
ISP’s deliberately create spam trap email addresses and make it available for harvest. They can therefore monitor senders who use lists that have not correctly been permissioned.
Dormant converted:
Email addresses that have been dormant or not used for a long time can be converted to spam traps by ISP’s. ISP’s use this to track recency and whether senders do any list hygiene (removing old non responsive recipients).
The next question is “How can the marketer refrain from sending emails to spam traps, but also unknown users?” With regards to spam traps, the answer is simple:- filter out any records or recipients that have not interacted with any of your emails within the last 12 months.
When we look at limiting the unknown users you send to, we need to start at the beginning by looking at your sign-up process. Investigate your current sign-up process and check whether you are verifying the email address at any stage. Verification can be a simple email that is sent to the collected email address asking the recipient to simply verify their email address by clicking on a link (URL). This double opt-in process should also prevent spam traps from falling into your mailing lists in case anyone is deliberately signing up with a spam trap address.
There will still be some unknown users recorded even with the verification process in place, due to user accounts becoming inactive or accounts being disabled, but at least you are doing all you can to prevent “unknown users” and “spam trams” from affecting your reputation.
Profusion is fully equipped with the experience and tools to help you steer away from spam traps and unknown users, therefore contact us if you would like further advice.
