Data Health Checks

If you’re using email marketing as a key component of your digital marketing strategy then your subscriber and customer email lists are essential in being able to market effectively via email. A good, healthy email list can help ensure that your campaigns will be as successful as possible. Of course, you have to make sure each and every aspect of your campaign is a good as can be, but it is a very good idea to start with your data before creating and sending your campaigns.

When you start using our digital marketing suite we’ll run a data health check on your email lists to ensure that you’ll get maximum results from your campaigns with us. A poorly kept list can attribute to poorly performing email and digital campaigns.

With any direct marketing campaign in the UK comes a number of criteria set out by the ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office) that you must comply with. Failure to do so is can affect not only your sender reputation from an email point of view, but also the reputation of your company or business as a whole.

If you’ve obtained your subscribers’ email addresses by way of permission marketing (they have ‘opted in’ and agreed to receive communications from you) then you should have no issues. However, if you have bought your data then you may run into some problems.

Buying email lists is a bad idea for many reasons. You could be purchasing out-of-date contact information, addresses that have been made up, or even worse, a list where the contacts contained within haven’t given their express permission to be contacted by a third party.

If you do purchase a list, ensure the broker can provide details of when and how the individual gave permission for their data to be used by a third party. Otherwise, Pure360 and many other ESPs will not let you use those lists to send campaigns. We do this because

Another negative about buying email data is that the quality of the email addresses that you’re going to receive is not going to be high at all. These lists will have been sold many times, and as a result the owners of these email addresses will have been sent many unsolicited campaigns before yours. You may also find that a large number of emails send to these addresses bounce due to the fact that they may be dormant.

We can advise on how you can cleanse your email data lists and improve them before you use them for your email and digital marketing campaigns. This includes looking for typos in email addresses, competition bot entries, temporary mailboxes, generic addresses, and a whole load of other nasties that can have a negative impact on your deliverability and your results.

Our account management and support teams can advise you further on this, and we highly recommend that you do this before sending your first campaign with Pure360. It’s worth ensuring that you get everything set up properly at the start, this way you avoid any nasty surprises or issues further down the line.

A buzz word in the email marketing word that you’ll get used to very quickly is deliverability. This essentially means how likely the emails you send are going to land in the inboxes of your recipients, and not their spam inboxes. If recipients of your marketing emails consistently mark your communications as spam, or perform a specific action, such as deleting your email without opening it, this will affect your deliverability.

There is plenty of information out there about deliverability, and it is something we have covered on our blog and our Customer Support Site. A good place to start is our Complete Guide to Email Deliverability, and our look at Return Path’s Deliverability Benchmark Report from last year.