Sender reputation is a key element in getting your e-mails in the inbox of your recipients. Another important aspect, that is closely related with sender reputation, is the quality of your e-mail list.

Having too many bounces and not regularly removing e-mail addresses that no longer exist may be interpreted as spam-like behaviour. On top of that, ISPs are more and more looking at the interaction with your mailings as a parameter to define your sender reputation. It’s obvious that there will not be a lot of interactions if your e-mail list is not cleaned, updated and maintained.

You want a healthy and active subscriber list. There are several ways to keep your file clean and perform what is known as ‘list hygiene’.

One of them is bounce management, a way to track and respond to all possible error and bounce messages that you get when you send an e-mail.

When you have a good bounce management system it is easy to improve list hygiene. 

Managing bounces and acting upon bounce messages

A bounce management system is good when it enables you to automatically process and categorize bounce codes and enables you to find the causes of the bounces, error messages and other ‘delivery failure’ messages.

Of course tracking, processing and categorizing is not enough. You also have to check all this information and act upon it.

This can be done manually but for many messages you will do it automatically. 

In order to avoid too many e-mail addresses that are obsolete (people do change jobs and e-mail addresses), bounce management can also, in a way, be performed  pro-actively. 

Always offer your subscribers various mechanisms to change their e-mail address. 

What is it worth gaining back a subscriber?

If  people switch e-mail address (for instance, because they started working for another company) you might want to check your customer database, ask sales, check LinkedIn or whatever source you find to ask people if they still want to receive your e-mails.

Often, when people have left a company, you will receive a message with the data of the new person(s) to contact.

This is not done for you. It is done for the customers of the specific company where your former subscriber used to work.

However, you can send a friendly mail to ask if this person (who often has the same function) wishes to receive your e-mails and, even if he or she knows the address of your former subscriber to check if he or she still wants to receive your e-mails.

Of course this is a tough job if you have a big consumer e-mail list with many webmail addresses but for B2B companies that send e-mails to their customers, for instance, this should be easier to do. 

Do the math: what is a/that subscriber worth for you and how much time or which tools do you want to invest to gain him back?