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To make your email marketing campaigns a success you’ve got to spend time, effort, and money keeping your data clean. Otherwise, the inevitable will happen and  it will vanish over time.

Keeping your data clean means your business will ultimately achieve reduced marketing costs and greatly improved response rates through better data management, and at the same time ensure compliance.

If you think about it, the cost to cleanse your existing lists may be significantly lower than acquiring a new customer or prospect. Is having a clean, deliverable database of contacts who have maintained a relationship with your company worth the investment?

…of course there’s only one answer to that question - ‘Yes!’

Keeping your data clean is an ongoing process and not something that needs to be done every now and then. Invest the time and you’ll get the rewards. Start with some basic things like these

• Opt-out ‘Hard Bounces’ that repeatedly fail to be delivered
• Correct obvious typos like adi.toal@yahoo.xom or toaly@hotmial.com
• Get rid of junk email addresses like kjhdfjhdfsd@yahoo.com
• Remove things like abuse@hotmail.com and postmaster@yahoo.com

Our solution has configurable automated cleansing that will opt-out users that repeatedly bounce and if you have features like this available to you then make use them.

Don’t think it’s a bad thing to get rid of invalid data. Yes, your lists may reduce in size but the quality will increase massively.

After each of your campaigns you should be making use of the delivery statistics to work out whether there is any post-send cleansing you can do.

When an email is sent to a mail server it always responds with a ‘Yes, thats been accepted’ or a fail response if the message can’t be delivered. Looking at the fail responses, which are categorised into ‘Soft’ and ‘Hard’ bounces, provide you with a very valuable source of information to help with data cleansing.

Mail server responses will also help you identify other problems such as blocking, content errors and a range of other things. Again, all useful info and if you spend the time looking into this side of things you’ll see improvements in each of your future campaigns and you’ll start to capitalise on your investment into data cleansing.

Data cleansing is a critical element of your email marketing campaigns and if you want us to help you get your lists into shape then get in touch by calling 0870 41 777 41 or email hello@neteffekt.co.uk