Email list cleaning is getting more popular as the years go by. The more email marketers share data, the larger the suppression lists of protestors, threats and litigators there are. Marketers call these threats, however, consumers find marketers the real threat. According to a survey by Fluent, out of 1,900 consumers age 18 and older who live in the United States, “…only 15% of Americans say the emails they receive from marketers are frequently or always useful. Some 7% of respondents say the marketing emails they receive are always useful, and 8% say they are frequently useful. In addition, 29% of respondents say marketing emails are sometimes useful, 33% say they are rarely useful, and 24% say they are never useful…”

That means 85% of consumers find that email advertisements are worthless and will most likely ignore or report you. Many large email service providers consider a .01% complaint rate to be the threshold. This means 100 complaints out of 1 million records. Any bulk email marketer will look at these stats and most certainly find better alternatives to ESP’s. Especially if their lists are not confirmed optin. MTA’s are easy to find but IP’s are not. In order to set up your own ESP, you will need to learn all about traffic thresholds into all of the internet service providers and have consistent feedback loops, compliance regulations and real contact information.

Email service providers now are tracking all of their clientele data. This means, all records being sent, blocked, bounced and complained about are known. Large ESP’s are doing billions monthly, so it’s safe to say they know if your list has bounces or not right after you upload it. Some ESP’s will assign you worse performing IP’s if they suspect you are uploading an old list, just to make a few bucks at first. That is why email list cleaning is even more paramount than ever before. Even if your list is optin, yet is a few months old, you will be most likely wondering why your deliverability is so low. It’s because your list is not clean.

Email list verification now belongs in the white listed space. For years, many just did it on their own and mostly got away with it, but inexperienced emailers will more than likely quit the industry because they will not get the deliverability they want and will be a threat to ESP’s and the list itself. If you use your company name and domain for email marketing and send to a list from your CRM, LinkedIn and prospecting list, you may be blacklisted due to spam and never be able to work with that ESP again. Or worse, if you end up getting your domain blacklisted, you are now on the spam fighting radar and although you may get delisted, they are monitoring you. Good luck finding email list verification free because it’s a high commodity.