When it comes to email marketing, the health of your list is everything. But when a spam trap winds up on your list, it can hurt your deliverability and even damage your entire sender reputation. To ensure you are sending to real people who want to receive your emails, you need to keep your email lists clean and regularly scrubbed of any bad data. This article discusses how to identify and remove spam traps from your email lists so that you can maximize your email marketing efforts.
Spam traps are legitimate email addresses that have been set up by mailbox providers to catch people who are trying to illegally sell their contact information or use their email ids to commit fraud. Mailbox providers use spam traps to improve their own deliverability by catching bad senders and penalizing them in their email delivery processes. Mailbox providers also consider the number of spam traps hit by a sender when assessing their IP and domain reputation, which is one of the major factors that determine whether an email will end up in the inbox or spam folder.
There are two types of spam traps – recycled and pristine. Recycled spam traps are email ids that have been abandoned by their owners and now repurposed as spam traps. They are the worst type of spam trap email list cleaning to hit because they will not only negatively impact your email deliverability but they will also harm your sender reputation. You can protect your list against this type of spam trap by implementing double opt-in on all your forms. This will stop people from entering typos and fake email addresses that may turn into a spam trap later.
Pristine spam traps are email ids set up by people who are using questionable collection practices to collect email addresses. They will not only sell the email addresses they have collected, but they will also set up spam traps to capture marketers. The best way to prevent pristine spam traps from getting into your list is by using double opt-in on all of your forms and making sure that you are always cleaning up your lists with an email verification service like Selzy.
Segmenting your subscribers based on their engagement can also help reduce the risk of hitting spam traps. By identifying segments of your list that are free of spam traps, you can re-engage those people with content that is more relevant to them.
The bottom line is that spam traps are a huge pain in the butt for any email marketer. They can seriously affect your email marketing efforts and can make it very difficult to reach the inbox. You can avoid them by using the tools that are available to you and keeping your lists clean and healthy with an email validation service and real time API verification. By following these simple steps, you will not only increase your chances of hitting the inbox but you will also be able to build an email marketing program that you can truly be proud of.