This is a guest post by Corina Leslie, PR Manager at ZeroBounce.
You’ve tested the email countless times. It renders well on all devices, the visuals are spectacular, the links are working, and the copy is flawless. It's ready to go.
You hit send, thinking that the engagement rate will be through the roof.
But as you refresh your reports to see your open rates, something else catches your attention: the frightening number of bounces. How could so many of your contacts be invalid?
Here’s the thing: email lists deteriorate pretty fast. MarketingSherpa found that 2.1% of your B2B contacts become obsolete every month. With the pandemic causing millions of job losses, your B2B database may have degraded even more in 2020.
Why should you care?
First, no company wants to spend hard-earned dollars to send emails that go nowhere. Every bounce you get not only wastes a good chunk of your email marketing budget, but it also damages your sender reputation and causes your valid subscribers to miss out on your emails.
As a result, more of your campaigns will be landing in spam folders, and after a while of this, they may not even reach your audiences' mailboxes at all.
In a nutshell, poor delivery rates lead to even poorer inbox placement, which results in low open rates and low conversions.
So while the content of your email may be spectacular, you have to make sure your list is in great shape, too. Here are five tips to help you improve your email list hygiene and land more emails in the inbox.
ProTip 1: Invalid contacts cause bounces. Weed them out.
When it comes to bounce rates, the accepted industry benchmark is 2%. Allow them to exceed that, and your deliverability is at risk.
You can either remove invalid email addresses in bulk or in real-time by using an email validation API. Make the most of the ZeroBounce – Zoho CRM integration. With just a few clicks, you can activate it and start checking all your new email contacts instantly.
Benefit: When you know your email database is clean, you won’t be worried about your bounce rate. Instead, you’ll be able to focus on creating quality content that will lead to higher open rates than ever before.
ProTip 2: Avoid the risk of being marked as spam by removing abuse emails.
Apart from bounces, there’s another type of email address that can tarnish your sender reputation and cause your emails to go to spam. Abuse emails belong to known complainers—people who’ve made a habit out of marking emails as spam.
Benefit: A good email verification service can detect these emails so you can prune them out of your list. What’s more, by using the ZeroBounce extension on Zoho CRM, you can prevent abuse emails from getting on your list in the first place. The email verification API rejects them automatically, so you can avoid being marked as spam and maintain a good sender reputation.
ProTip 3: Spam traps are deceiving and risky, get rid of them.
A high-performing email list is a list free of spam traps. That may be hard to accomplish for many marketers due to the very nature of these email addresses. Designed to catch spammers, spam traps don’t belong to real people, and emailing them is a sure way to destroy your reputation.
Benefit: While not all spam traps can be detected, some of them can and it’s worth running your list through an email verifier. Once you validate it and remove risky contacts, you’ll have a much healthier database and a higher chance of reaching your customers.
ProTip 4: It's best to prune role-based emails, too.
Email addresses that start with phrases like office@ or contact@ are easy to gather online, so you’ll find them in many lists. However, their marketing and sales value is low. First, these mailboxes tend to receive a lot of emails, so they’re prone to soft bounces. Also, if you manage to reach a role-based inbox, your email will most likely be ignored, if not deleted right away.
Benefit: By removing role-based emails, you’re not spending resources sending messages to people who won’t see them. Usually, these inboxes are checked by a team of people who have a habit of deleting emails in bulk. It’s best to avoid them and focus your efforts on high-value contacts and leads.
ProTip 5: Temporary emails are harmful to your reputation. Get them off your list.
Let’s say you wrote an ebook, and you’re excited to share it with your audience. You place it behind a gated form, and people have to submit their email address to download your resource.
While content offers are an effective way to build your list, not everyone who downloads them wants to be on your list. Some people use temporary emails for these transactions—emails that last just a few days or even a few minutes. By the time you email them, they’re no longer in use and bounce, hurting your reputation.
Benefit: Good email verifiers can spot temporary (or disposable) emails a mile away. Furthermore, when someone tries to subscribe to your emails using a disposable address, an email verification API will automatically reject it. This way, you’ll keep your bounce rate under control and set yourself up for the best inbox placement.
Have you tried the ZeroBounce – Zoho CRM extension?
Being diligent about your email hygiene pays—quite literally. Whether you’re sending marketing emails or are about to close a sale, you need the peace of mind that a solid, verified contact gives you.
If you use Zoho CRM, validating your list is easy as pie. Just activate the ZeroBounce extension and it will start verifying every new email you add to your CRM.
Keep your list healthy, and you’ll reap the rewards!
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