Email list pruning

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide

The next step in maintaining list quality is pruning. Just like you lop of dead tree ranches to get the best fruitage, your list needs regular pruning.

When you send your email, you'll get a percentage (hopefully small) of bounceback. A soft bounceback means that the mailbox is temporarily inaccessible – it may be full. Have your system try again, but generally after three attempts within a couple of weeks they should be removed from the list. Hard bouncebacks indicate that the mail server has rejected the message. Most likely, the email address is no longer valid. Remove them immediately.

You may wonder why I recommend removing these addresses so quickly. After all, if the address is re-enabled in the near future, you'd have kept a subscriber! First of all, that's very unlikely to happen. Second, if it does happen, it's most likely been re-enable to become a 'honey pot'. This means that the mail server is using this once dead address to trap senders who clearly aren't pruning their lists, and must therefore be spam. So you're just asking to be blacklisted! Third, if you keep bad email addresses on your list, your percentage of undeliverable message per campaign will grow. A high undeliverable rate indicates spam to many ISPs, and your sender reputation will be very negatively affected. So, it's pretty clear why you should get undeliverable emails off your list as soon as possible!

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide