Email marketing for your cleaning business
Find out more about why email marketing is a great channel to use to market your cleaning business.
Did you know that List Hygiene is crucial to the overall performance of your campaigns? If you’re unsure what it means and/or you’ve been prompted by the platform to clean your list, this article is for you.
What is list cleaning?
List cleaning is a process by which your list is scanned to identify and help you remove hidden threats like disposable, deactivated and spam-trap emails. This helps you to only include, deliverable, active and safe addresses to your list and improve your sender reputation and overall email marketing efforts.
Benefits of list cleaning:
- Cleaning your list will improve your overall email marketing performance as you’re more likely to only be sending to users who actively engage with your content.
- By improving the quality of your data you’re more likely to improve your overall sender reputation.
- Cleaning your lists (although at a fee) can reduce your ongoing costs. Bad data is always bad for your bottom line.
- List cleaning gives you a better chance of landing in your subscriber’s inboxes.
- When you have better data you’re able to create better strategies because you can make decisions based on more reliable data.
- It can assist in the migration process to get started on a better footing when you migrate from one ESP to another.
Things to note about list cleaning:
- It’s not a solution for bad data collection practices
- It doesn’t offer guarantees in performance
Why do we charge an additional fee for list cleaning?
For list cleaning to be effective a massive amount of data needs to be gathered and stored on an ongoing basis. This requires a lot of resources. To this end, as the data needs to be updated and managed at individual list level, we cannot absorb these costs into our fees.
How does it work?
Upon uploading your list, the platform will run a Health Check on your data. The Mail Blaze Health Check shows you the status of your list health based on various list criteria. This check is conducted periodically in the background as your list health can change over time. You’ll see the Health Check will give you an overview of the threats detected, the bounce estimate as well as the percentage of the list that has been cleaned. The most important section here is what the Health Check’s List Cleaning Recommendation is. In the example below you’ll see that this particular list does not require cleaning.
PLEASE NOTE: Health Checks are completely free and run automatically when you upload a list. They can take a few hours to complete (depending on the size of the data)
How to run a Free Health Check
You can run a Health Check on any list you have at any time by navigating to LISTS > LIST > Selecting the lists and then clicking on the LIST CLEANING menu and click on HEALTH CHECK > Then REQUEST HEALTH CHECK
What happens if my List requires cleaning?
You’ve uploaded your list and now you see that the Mail Blaze Health Check has recommended full list cleaning. How do you get it done?
Click on the CLEAN LIST button on the right hand side of the List Health Check Menu. The platform will automatically calculate the cost to clean your list for you.
Click on CLEAN LIST and the list cleaning process will start. PLEASE NOTE: the platform will bill you immediately for the list cleaning and no refunds will be processed.
Please allow the platform to complete the list cleaning process, this may take a few minutes or hours depending on the size of your list. The List Cleaning status will go from Processing to Processed when it’s done.
You’ll now see your list cleaning report menu which consists of the following tabs: Overview, Score, Providers, Deliverability, Threat Level and Reason.
Overview Tab
The overview tab shows you a high-level breakdown of what the list cleaning has done to your list.
*Subscribers Quarantined:* A subscriber that is quarantined won’t receive any emails sent to this list anymore because they have been removed by the cleaning process
*Safe to Send:* Email addresses that are deliverable and have low-to-no threats detected.
*Safe with Caution:* These email addresses are possibly deliverable or have an elevated threat level.
*Do Not Send:* Email addresses that are undeliverable or have a high threat level detected.
Score Tab
The score tab allows you to review the scores assigned to each individual subscriber on the list that has been cleaned. Below you will find a matrix of what each score means. The score gives you an indication of the level of threat a subscriber record holds. 10 represents a record that is deliverable and has no known threats, whereas 1 represents a record with the highest threat level that is malicious.
PLEASE NOTE:
- Any record scoring lower than 6 will be quarantined.
- You can dispute the scores with our team where you believe the system has made an error.
| SCORE | DELIVERABILITY | THREAT LEVEL | REASON |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | Deliverable | No known threats detected | |
| 9 | Deliverable | Low threat level detected | |
| 8 | Deliverable | Low threat level detected | Catch-all domain |
| 7 | Deliverable | Low-to-moderate threat level detected | |
| 6 | Possibly deliverable | Low threat level | Disposable domain, catch-all or unknown, mailbox full |
| 5 | Possibly deliverable | Moderate threat level | Disposable or catch-all, unknown or role-based |
| 4 | Possibly deliverable | High threat level | Disposable or catch-all, unknown or role-based |
| 3 | Undeliverable | Mailbox disabled | |
| 2 | Undeliverable | High threat level | Dangerous contact |
| 1 | Undeliverable | High threat level | Malicious contact |
Providers Tab:
The provider tab allows you to review the providers assigned to each individual subscriber on the list that has been cleaned. Essentially showing you the inbox service provider an individual subscriber uses.
Deliverability Tab:
The deliverability tab shows you whether your email records are deliverable or undeliverable. Any records with a score lower than 6 will not be delivered.
Threat Level Tab:
The threat level indicates the level of risk a record poses.
Reason Tab:
The Reason tab offers you more insight into why a record has been scored the way it has.
Here is an example of the screen:
| REASON | DESCRIPTION |
|---|---|
| ACCEPTED EMAIL | Email address was accepted by the SMTP server. |
| CATCH ALL | Some domains accept all emails you send to them, even if the email address is not valid. We classify these addresses as "catch_all". After an email is sent, the recipient mail server may silently discard the message or send a bounce message after the fact. In these cases, we cannot guarantee an email will be delivered to a user's inbox. Sending to an Accept All domain may increase your bounce rates and lower your open rates. Therefore, use a degree of caution when sending to catch-alls. |
| DISPOSABLE | Email addresses that point to domains like spamgourmet.com and mailinator.com are disposable email services. These services enable users to create one-time email addresses to receive initial communications from a service (such as an activation email or coupon) which are then discarded. It is highly recommended you do not mail to disposable email addresses. |
| INVALID EMAIL | Specified email is not a valid email address syntax. |
| INVALID DOMAIN | Domain name does not exist or is not configured to receive email. |
| REJECTED EMAIL | The email address was rejected by the SMTP server; the email address does not exist. |
| DNS ERROR | We could not resolve the DNS records, or the domain is misconfigured. |
| UNAVAILABLE SMTP | unavailable_smtp: The SMTP server was unavailable to process our request. |
| UNKNOWN | An unexpected error has occurred. |
| ROLE-BASED | role_based: A role email is an address that's typically associated with a function (postmaster, support, sales, etc.) instead of a person. In some instances, mailing to a role address can lead to a decreased open rate and is generally advised against while sending marketing emails. |
| MAILBOX DISABLED | Email address exists but is disabled and won't be able to receive email. |
| MAILBOX FULL | The inbox of this recipient is full, it might generate a soft bounce. |
| SUSPICIOUS | Email address appears to be system or non-human-generated bots. |
| DANGEROUS | Domain and address associated with consistent negative engagement. |
| MALICIOUS | Domain and address associated with elevated negative engagement. |
If you need more information about our list cleaning service, please don’t hesitate to reach out and speak to us.
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