What are the risks associated with an outdated mailing list?

An outdated mailing list has a series of associated risks that can lead to reputational problems for the company’s domain, caused by outdated or invalid data, such as difficulty or impossibility of communication, provider blockages and low conversion and sales rates.

We can define an outdated mailing list as a repository of data (which can be just email addresses or be part of a more complete and detailed set of data) that has not been properly maintained and has not undergone important and recurring updating steps over a long period of time, resulting in a very low-quality contact list.

Maintaining an up-to-date mailing list is indispensable for effective email marketing, just as maintaining and updating other data on business opportunities and customers is fundamental to marketing activities as a whole.

In other words, neglecting or ignoring data updating means damaging the company’s financial results, since its marketing and sales activities are largely supported by actions aimed at these contacts, whether to stimulate new sales or for repurchase and credit recovery activities.

Main Characteristics of an Outdated Email List

An outdated mailing list doesn’t just have to do with its expiration date or the fact that it’s old. In fact, as long as the right care is taken as part of the marketing routine, storage time is not a concern.

An outdated mailing list is actually made up of data that is, has been or has become incorrect, invalid, inactive, outdated and duplicated.This is why all the best practices in data collection, processing, storage and updating must be implemented by companies, in order to avoid the common problems that lists with bad data can represent.

So you need to keep an eye on your mailing list:

• Invalid e-mails: addresses that do not exist, have been deactivated or have been entered incorrectly.
• Incorrect or poorly formatted emails: addresses that are invalid due to typing errors or problems during data collection.
• Deactivated e-mails: email accounts that were once valid but have been closed or canceled and have therefore become invalid.
• Emails without engagement: email accounts that haven’t interacted for a long time.
• Temporary or disposable emails: often used by users to avoid spam, but which quickly become obsolete.
• Duplicate contacts:records of e-mail addresses repeatedly included in a list.

Impact on Email Marketing Metrics

Neglecting to take care of email lists, allowing them to become outdated and subject to the types of records that are detrimental to their performance, can cause a series of negative impacts in the results of Email Marketing metrics.

These impacts have a “snowball effect”, i.e. they are cumulative and tend to increase and become more damaging over time.For this reason, the important thing is not to allow small mistakes to appear, preventing them from becoming big problems.

Among the impacts that can be seen as a result of outdated mailing lists are the following:

• Increased bounce rate: the presence of invalid e-mails on e-mail lists inevitably leads to blocking by e-mail service providers (ESPs) and damages the sender’s reputation score, meaning that future e-mail marketing campaigns will also suffer at various providers.
• Decreased engagement rates: an outdated list, containing email addresses of people who are no longer active and interacting with the campaigns, also represents more than one loss for email marketing: firstly, because when engagement rates (opens and clicks) are low, the sender’s reputation is also reduced, causing more emails to be directed to the spam folder. Secondly, because with fewer emails being delivered to the inbox, there will be less priority viewing, further reducing engagement results.
• Drop in conversion and ROI: Email lists that don’t undergo frequent updating and cleaning, and are subject to high bounce rates, blockages, low inbox placement and falling engagement rates, end up not delivering satisfactory results for marketing teams, with a lower return on investment (ROI) than expected.

Risks to the Sender’s Reputation

Following on from the impacts generated by outdated email lists, in addition to those directly related to email marketing performance metrics, there are also those aspects that negatively influence the reputation of the sender of the campaigns.

• Blockages: outdated e-mail lists are subject to invalid e-mail addresses, which generate hard bounces. Increased rates of hard bounces lead to provider blockages.
• Lista negra: senders with poor quality lists, in addition to being blocked by an ISP, can be blacklisted. As a result, new blockings at various providers could occur in the future.
• Drop in IP scores and sending domains: as hard bounce rates, spamtraps and blacklisting increase, the reputation score of sending IPs and domains drops. In other words, even if the sender is able to clean up their mailing lists and leave the blacklists, the damage has already been done and can cause further complications.
• Spam folder: senders with a low reputation have more messages sent to the spam folder instead of the inbox.

High Operational Custody

Lack of care and organization with email lists leads to more problems than technical and reputational ones. There is also the increase in marketing operating costs related to these emails.

• Shipping tool costs: outdated lists have registrations (valid, inactive or invalid) that are just taking up space on the sending platforms, which charge by number of registrations.
• Custos com geração de leads: careless lead generation increases hard bounces. These wasted business opportunities increase the cost per lead. In other words, although it becomes more expensive to generate leads, a lot of them are lost due to poor quality.
• Database costs: managing large but inefficient lists can generate additional storage and processing costs.
• Reduced ROI: with almost all costs related to email marketing increasing and the exposure of email messages being less successful (due to blocks and low inbox placement), conversions will not be good. Fewer sales with more costs lead to a reduced ROI.

Risk Prevention and Mitigation

To avoid the damage caused by outdated mailing lists, we recommend some simple but indispensable precautions.

• Registration validation practices: adopt good contact capture practices, such as validating fields on registration forms, double opt-in processes and also installing a real-time email verification API to prevent invalid and temporary emails from being registered.
• Verification and validation of email lists: use tools such as SafetyMails to check email lists before sending email marketing campaigns.
• Current list cleaning practices: periodically clean up e-mail lists, removing duplicate e-mails, invalid or inactive records, to ensure that lists remain up to date.
• Engagement monitoring: identify email addresses that are not engaging and remove them from contact lists.

Other points to note

There are two more important points to note in order to avoid problems with mailing lists:

• Excessive dependence on purchased lists: the purchase of email lists brings with it various risks, such as invalid emails and spamtraps. Excessive reliance on these lists increases the risks involved. In addition, this practice may be in breach of data protection and privacy laws.
• Ignoring signs of disinterest: continually sending emails to contacts who are not engaging can damage the reputation and therefore the deliverability of email marketing campaigns. Remove unengaged email contacts.

Conclusion

An outdated mailing list is more than just a technical failure: it can directly damage financial results, the reputation of the domain and the effectiveness of a company’s marketing campaigns.

Keeping contact lists up to date and clean (free of invalid emails, temporary emails and spamtraps) is essential to ensure the success of email marketing and protect the domain from blockages, blacklists and high operating costs.

Investing in practices for checking and cleaning email lists on a regular basis is not just a recommendation, but a strategic necessity for any company that depends on direct digital marketing actions.

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