Email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your website. However, it can be a massive waste of money if you send emails to the wrong addresses. You might think that there is no harm in continuing to send them messages, but they will never open or click on an email from you again. This article will talk about why removing lousy email addresses from your database is so important to ensure you achieve your business goals.

What is a “bad email address”?

A bad email address is any email address that has not been opened, clicked on, or used to reply to your messages. This may be because the person is no longer using that particular email account, or there was a mistake in their name when adding them to your list. This can be due to a human error when someone manually adds an email address to your database; the person may have misspelled the email address. An email address also becomes invalid if the person who owned it no longer works for that company.

Other most common reasons why bad email addresses have ended up in your system include purchased email lists. The problem with buying email lists is that harvesting email addresses doesn’t always guarantee quality emails. Often, the ones building email lists for profit will make calculated guesses on contacts’ email addresses based on job title or name and the company’s email addresses domain name.

Another big reason you have wrong email addresses in your database is that the recipient or the email provider marks your email addresses as spam, and they never make it to the inbox. Surprisingly, wrong email addresses can also be caused by a hacker breaking into the system and adding them to the lists they’re targeting.

You might have duplicates in your database from an earlier email campaign. If someone replies to one marketing campaign but not the other, that email address will be validated as a good email address on one list. Once people respond to your email, they’re automatically put on a good list and removed from the bad list – so it’s crucial to remove duplicates from both lists before sending out campaigns.

Whatever the reason for bad email addresses, it’s important to identify them and remove them before sending out any more campaigns. Bad email addresses cost your company money because they’ll never see the campaign you send them to, affecting your deliverability rates, ROI, and marketing efforts. 

How do I remove bad email addresses from my system?

The best way to clean your database of bad email addresses is by using an email verification service. To ensure your email marketing campaigns are successful, the solution pings each email in your list to confirm the email address is still active to increase deliverability. An advanced solution can correct typos and illegal characters, which cause high bounce rates and poor deliverability rates. These services also help reduce fraud by confirming only valid emails and lessens the risk of fake emails entering your systems.

Runner EDQ’s Email Verification Service can remove up to 95% of bad email addresses to increase deliverability, avoid high bounce rates and blacklisting, and protect your valuable sender reputation. The service also helps maintain CAN-SPAM compliance with FCC mobile domain detection.