There are 5 common mistakes emailers do when email list cleaning. Cleaning and maintaining your list is so important and beginners have to learn the hard way, unfortunately. The smart ones find articles like mine 😉

 

Delimiters

 

Large databases with multi-columns have all kinds of data. Sometimes, inside one cell is an address with a comma added to separate an apartment number or whatever the case is. Using commas as delimiters is the preferred, but how can you make sure you don’t drag your cells to the right when you have extra delimiters? Even a semi-colon is added to separate certain data types so there really is no way to find the perfect delimiter. Most hygiene companies use delimiter and semi-colon as their denominator so the trick is to open up and scan your file to fix these mistakes before you upload your data and ruin your perfect format.

 

Size of the list

 

The larger the list, the more mistakes. When a code goes from algorithm to completeness, some programmers do not take into effect of the extreme amount of data that goes through the databases. Matching against all different types of parameters within milliseconds can slow down the program if the machines can’t keep up. Many programmers will create ghost scripts that either skips certain parameters or bypass less needed processes in order to speed things up. Unless you are a program manager and can see what they are doing, you are at the mercy of the engineers if you are impatient.

 

Two email columns

 

Sometimes data comes with an extra email field. Unless the schematics incorporated the likelihood of this, it could break the script and cause false positives and/or confuse the process altogether. It’s best to never have any other emails in other cells besides one column. This is an easy fix.

 

Formatting

 

Any time you come into possession of a list, you really should open it up to find formatting errors and the above to fix the list properly before scrubbing it. Engineers may have programmed their email list cleaning system to recognize certain file formatting as in DOS, Unicode or TXT. Unless the system can recognize all formatting, you should dumb down the list so it is recognized by all server operating systems.

 

Price

 

In the email list cleaner free world, you truly get what you pay for. The more you spend, the better the quality and you should be prepared for that.

 

Buying from a salesman instead of quality

 

Just because you think the salesperson is a good guy and fun to hang out with doesn’t mean he or she represents a good product. Be wise and smart and not conned. Especially if they ask you for email list cleaning free.