At the core of a good email marketing campaign is good, clean data.

And, speaking from experience, the hard part of this is finding good, clean data.

If you have access to your marketing database or CRM, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The lead who filled out the form a little too quickly (John Doe at jon.doe@email.com) or the employee who uploaded a CSV file from an event without opening to see that everyone’s first name was typed with caps lock on.

Going beyond the annoyance (seriously, please stop sending me emails with Dear LISA), not having proper email addresses could seriously hurt your email marketing efforts.

A company’s email deliverability is determined by your email reputation, not the content in it. The reputation depends on the number of bounces and spam complaints your campaigns receive – so the goal is to keep these low!

However, this is easier said than done and has much to do with your email list.

Subscribers go inactive for different reasons – maybe they left the company or they just keep deleting your messages. Keeping them on your list in hopes that one day they’ll open up an email can actually do more harm than good – they can keep other subscribes, even engaged ones, from seeing your message.

While the best defense is to have an upkeep process in place and continuously monitor each email’s deliverability, bounce rates and unsubscribes, sometimes you find yourself in the position where the damage is already done. So what’s a marketer to do?

Hire Someone to Do It for You

Luckily for you, email marketing is a big business so you have many different companies that will do it for you. Return Path’s Reputation Monitor will help you understand your sender reputation and BriteVerify, Email Answers and EmailInspector, just to name a few, help you remove invalid emails from your campaigns.

Roll Up Your Sleeves

If you have a smaller list or are up for a challenge (or just love data), dive into your database and email analytics and see what’s really going on. Are emails being sent to sales@company.com? Delete that contact. You want to market to people, not generic email addresses. Jane Smith hasn’t opened an email since 2009? It’s not worth crossing your fingers that 2015 is her year. A good overhaul is definitely time consuming, but it will give you a good view of who your customers are and what’s working, plus will increase email deliverability for future emails.

Take a moment to look at your email addresses and you email’s bounce rate. It might be time to do something about it – starting with your current data.

About the Author

PCG Digital Marketing is an award winning digital agency headquartered in Eatontown, NJ. We help our clients get found online through innovative search, social and online advertising campaigns.