Yes, this is certainly the time of year for spreading good cheer, but before you email out holiday greetings to all your customers, have you asked yourself if your email list is up to the task?

Good tidings do not necessarily yield good results, especially when using an old, unengaged email list. In fact, according to Act!, the average distribution list suffers around 25% decay each year, meaning that a quarter of the emails sent to those lists will bounce. Over time that decay will worsen and contribute to more bounces, which will hurt the sender's reputation, and cause more of their emails to be flagged as spam. As you might guess, the more spam and bounces an account gets, the more its overall deliverability rate plummets, leading to bad campaign results and possible blacklisting.

If that weren't bad enough, businesses should know that a sustained bounce rate of 5% or more could get their account suspended by their email service provider (including Act!), with repeat offenders possibly having their account terminated outright.

A cautionary tale to be sure, but not always a fair outcome. Businesses that email to bad lists are not necessarily Christmas Grinches, nor is it true that they can't be bothered to maintain a clean actionable database. Sometimes they just don't have the means to do better. Manually scrubbing distribution lists is incredibly time-consuming,  which is why most businesses tend not to do it. 

But what if businesses had an option to make this process fast and easy? What if they could simply log into an online service, pick the group in Act! they want to scan, and then have it scrub 1-3 contacts per second until it is done?

Well, you needn't look under the tree for this holiday miracle because it already exists, and it's the newly improved Link2list.

Link2list is a subscription service that updates your email list inside of Act!, and it's comprised of two parts. The first part is the integration service, which is $10/month, billed annually. This service saves Act! users from having to export their data to 3rd party services for scrubbing, and then importing the results back into their database. Each record scanned is updated inside of Act!, and this is done quickly & safely without overwiting any of your important contact data. 

The second part is the data portion of the verification service, which is the process by which emails are determined to be valid or not. For this process Link2list offers customers two choices - an internal process that we developed here at Keystroke that pings the email servers directly; and an external integration that cross references the scanned emails with the lists at BriteVerify.com. Both processes are super fast & accurate and will update each record in the selected Act! group with a new deliverability status - helping the users know which contacts are safe to email, and which are not. It's that simple. This verification stage is billed based on consumption, and are sold in blocks of 1K, 5K, and 25K scans that cost as little as half a penny per record, or $25 for a 5K block. BriteVerify costs around a penny per record. Simply buy what you need, and start scrubbing.

Scrub Stats:

• In recent tests, a group of 7,700 records took less than 70-minutes to verify, with 4,553 deemed deliverable (2278 Valid and 2275 Accept All). Such a scan would have cost less than $40 in scan blocks to complete
• This list would have otherwise produced a 41% bounce rate with 3147 records deemed invalid or unknown, and likely jeopardized our AMA account had we tried to include these contacts in one or more campaigns.
• To avoid API memory issues, we recommend scanning groups of 10,000 records or less

Imagine a holiday season with no more scary bounce rates, no more spammy reputations, and best of all, no more excuses. What's more, these scrubs can be done on-demand, or on schedule, meaning your distribution list will be safe for this holiday season, and for the seasons to come.

But wait, we've got one more holiday treat to make this season a little merrier.

To get those holiday emails out faster, we're going to include the first 500 scanned records free of charge with each new Link2list subscription. That's right, just sign up for Link2list, select the new native service, and the first 500 records you scrub are on us. Existing subscribers will find these free scans under the tree, as well!

Whichever service you choose, it's nice to know that Link2list allows all Act! users to quickly & easily clean up their distribution list, and help ensure their holiday greetings are not simply received, but warmly so.

Notice: The new Link2list is now available, and is the December 2023 product of the month with a 20% discount on all new subscriptions this month. Click the link below to save.