The following blog post originally appeared on September 29 and comes to us from Listrak client AddThis. Stay tuned for more!

How We Increased Our Email Deliverability from 50% to 99%

Email is an essential part of how we, at AddThis, communicate value to our community. One of the most difficult challenges we were facing was that over half of our emails were not being delivered to our subscribers. Among many things we did, one of the most important steps we took was cleaning our list—a practice you should consider doing regularly.

Cleaning Our List is a Must

I knew list hygiene was important, but I didn’t know how important. In one sense, repeatedly sending emails to invalid addresses or (even worse) spamtraps can hurt your IP’s reputation, which can lead to a worsened reputation and deliverability lowering. In the end, your emails may not be reaching as many inboxes as you wish.

Deliverability is a big game, especially as your email list grows. The bigger your list gets, the more you have to pay attention to these details to keep your deliverability high. Not all the emails you send will necessarily arrive in the individual’s inbox.

Over a year ago, we had an approximate 50% deliverability rate—yep, that means about half of our emails weren’t making it to the inbox. And that sucked. What’s worse is if you’re using a third party (which most people do), you’re paying for the emails sent—not the ones being delivered. I’ll let you do the math on that one.

So I can’t stress enough how important it is to keep your list nice and tidy. To start, we hired an independent company to clean up our list, ridding it of any obvious invalid addresses and hard bounces, without having to experiment under our own IP.

We also knew that doing this every so often would be a nightmare, and not cost-effective, so it was important to have an email service provider that has the ability to keep lists clean as a basic feature for all customers. This means it automatically unsubscribes hard bounces, soft bounces (after a set amount of time), and those who manually unsubscribe from the list.

We’re not in the perfect state yet; we’re still learning how to best maximize our campaign sends and messaging. But as we learn interesting nuggets, we’ll be sharing them with you to help you in your own campaigns.

Are there any other tips you’ve learned in your own email campaigns?