Turn Your List into a Strategic Asset – List hygiene best practices

Author: Mike Connolly

If you had followed the recently concluded DMA2013 conference in Chicago, then it would be easy for you to spot out the tending topic in most of the session – DATA.

Quoting Nancy Wilde, Chief creative officer, Wilde Agency: “With access to data we can make communications and messaging that’s more relevant, more timely, and more effective.”

In today’s marketing, data is the most important connector that helps companies build, connect and nurture business relationships. Given the priority of data, it’s important to practice data quality and list hygiene best practices through a data audit process.

These are the common errors related to data:

• Storing duplicate contact details – This results in duplicate mails and it annoys recepients
• Invalid email address – Incomplete email address ( missing “@”, “.”, etc)
• Junk contacts entered by subscribers – ( [email protected])
• Wrong domain spelling (“gmial” instead of “gmail”)
• Generic emails or harvested addresses (“customercare@”, “support@”, etc.)
• Incorrect foreign addresses

So, keeping in mind the importance of quality email address, here’re few practical ways to keep your list squeaky clean. 

1. Clean, validate your list in regular intervals
2. Scrub your contacts and remove emails with bad domains
3. Remove junk entries
4. Remove honey-pot email addresses.
5. Remove dead or inactive addresses
6. Screen new data using data checkers.