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Kathy Jameson

Kathy is the Senior Web Marketing Specialist at Experian Data Quality. She is focused on digital and inbound marketing efforts with a particular emphasis on SEO. Kathy enjoys a good split A/B test, traveling, and finding the best new restaurants Boston has to offer. 

The top 5 email list hygiene mistakes

Email is the most popular marketing communication channel. On the surface, email marketing seems relatively inexpensive and easy-to-do. However, there are many challenges to fully leveraging the channel.

A very deceiving area is the email marketing database. While it seems like you would just collect emails and then send to them, there are far more complications. Poor email list hygiene can lead to an inability to communicate with subscribers and a poor sender reputation. When this occurs, any investment in the email marketing channel is worthless and can seriously damage the effectiveness of an email marketing program.

In email list hygiene, there are several common mistakes, which include:

  1. Treating all subscribers the same
  2. Purchasing email lists
  3. Letting email addresses go stale and out-of-date
  4. Failing to collect email addresses on every channel
  5. Looking at the wrong metrics

Rinse, lather and repeat: Best practices for email hygiene

There is a correlation between data hygiene and email campaign performance. Why?

Poor list hygiene is a leading cause of email deliverability issues. Internet service providers use the way your list bounces or hits spam traps as a way to help determine if you are a spammer and therefore cause harm to their customers. As an email marketer, it is important to adopt best practices, because you never want to appear spammy and suffer from poor deliverability.

You may be having deliverability issues if you are seeing very high bounce rates or are hitting spam traps. In extremely cases, you may be put on a blacklist, preventing all mail you send from being delivered to any domain within a given internet service provider.

If you want to run a successful and legitimate email program, email hygiene must be top-of-mind.

The first way to enable having a good email list is to ensure you are collecting email addresses on a permission basis and are not acquiring lists. List acquisition is one of the top ways your sender reputation can be harmed because they are often riddled with outdated and invalid email addresses.

We’re moving: Introducing EDQ.com

We’re very excited to announce several major changes to Experian Data Quality’s website. You’ll see these changes will take effect in the coming weeks.

First, we are moving our website to EDQ.com (currently in beta mode). The decision to migrate QAS.com, our website for the past two decades, is part of our rebranding efforts.

We first announced in October 2013 that we were rebranding from Experian QAS to Experian Data Quality. The name change signifies our continually expanding portfolio of data quality software and services. Moving our website represents the last and final part of this rebranding initiative.

Beyond migrating to a brand new domain, we are also launching a newly designed web experience. We’ve redesigned our site with you in mind! We revised the site from the ground up with a simple and modern design.

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