Emarketing and marketing automation are an effective and cost-efficient way to generate new leads for your business. However, using old contact details or unscrubbed distribution lists can hurt your future marketing efforts in unexpected ways. Here are the top five reasons to maintain good distribution list hygiene for emarketing:

1. Maintaining sender reputation: Your sender reputation, also known as IP reputation or IP score, is what email providers like Gmail evaluate when they filter email to deliver it to the spam or main inbox. By cleaning your list, you’re actually affecting your email sender reputation, a score affecting all your other email metrics.

2. Improving bounce rate: When emailing, you can see a rough estimate of your list’s health by looking at the bounce rate. This metric shows how many of your emails never found the address they were sent to. Most Email Service Providers will suspend or cancel accounts with a sustained bounce rate of 5% or higher.

3. Better engagement metrics: When scrubbing your lists, you remove unsafe and unengaged subscribers and potential spam traps.

4. Fewer spam complaints and bounces: With a squeaky-clean email list, you know that the remaining subscribers actually exist and want you to email them.

5. Reduced cost, better ROI: Bad emails on your email subscription lists cost money. With email list scrubbing, your ROI increases as you make room for high-quality subscribers.

In summary, a clean email list helps marketers keep their email deliverability and sender reputation high, decrease the bounce rate of campaigns, and improve customer engagement. So why do so many businesses NOT scrub their distribution lists before using them? Simple, it takes a lot of time and effort. Thankfully for Act! users there is an easy and inexpensive solution called Link2list.

Link2list is part of the Linktivity Suite of products, and it integrates with BriteVerify.com to help check each of the email addresses in your Act! database quickly & easily. During the Link2list scanning process, each email in your distribution list will be classified as either valid, invalid, accept all, or unknown, and then your database will be updated accordingly.

The process is super fast and requires no technical expertise to run. Enter your BriteVerify API key into Link2list, tell it which group in Act! to scan, and then start scanning. Within minutes you'll have hundreds, if not thousands of email addresses verified as "safe to send", with no manual data entry in Act! whatsoever.