Why are list hygiene services so important?
Why are list hygiene services so important, well, the email-marketing world has shifted to only accepting white listed IP’s. If an ISP does not recognize your IP’s, the chances of you getting your message delivered are second to none. Why? Because there are only so many IPv5 addresses thus they all have been used up. What does this mean?
ISP’s have worked with the smartest spam fighters ever since 1996, and some argue even earlier. Both used blocking techniques to filter spam. At first, they blocked content and domains but that only worked for a short period of time. Quickly, it became paramount to block whole IP ranges and start collecting and targeting.
To understand why blocking IP’s means you must need a Email Hygiene service, let’s first understand what IPv4 and IPv5 are. According to Wikipedia, “Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is the fourth version in the development of the Internet Protocol (IP or name of a computer). It is one of the core protocols of standards-based internetworking methods in the Internet, and was the first version deployed for production in the ARPANET in 1983 … IP Version 5 (IPv5) was a IP-layer protocol that provides end-to-end guaranteed service across a network. That is, it was compatible with IP at the network layer but was built to provide a Quality of Service for streaming services.”
From 1983 to 2009, both IPv4/5 were enough numbers to distribute for the masses but they eventually ran out of numbers (names). Consumers and businesses started buying more computers than expected and a rush for IPv6 was created to compensate for the so-called “running out of numbers”.
Most if not all of the ESP’s that send your advertisements are still using IPv5. There are only a certain amount of those IPs left if not any at all and every ISP now tags the IP range and places them in their own category. This means that if you buy a range of IPs to email (becoming your own ESP), the chances of them already being used for email list hygiene and tagged in the major ISPs is extremely high. If they placed those IP’s anywhere near the spam category, you will most likely never get full deliverability as you would if you white listed them.
Buying a list, scrubbing it and uploading it into a major ESP like Constant Contact isn’t going to be easy. Their IPs have permission to send into most if not all ISPs. Even if you remove the traps and complainers, there will still be complaints if the recipient doesn’t recognize you. If you receive 4 complaints to abuse a week from a list of 10,000, you will lose your credibility and be blacklisted. You will run out of options fast because it’s pretty clear to them that you are spamming.
If you’re lucky (instead of booting you off), the ESP may place you inside more risky IPs just to keep your residual revenue, but you will lose deliverability. So get smart and figure out a way to get your mail through or at least re-optin your list so you can keep the complaints down to 0.
Look, money talks now. You can’t email anymore for a few hundred bucks and make thousands or millions. You need to be ready to spend thousands on mailing in order to bypass the red flags. Spam fighters are angry at many ISP’s that allow spam through their networks and are diligently changing the way the delivery methods work in order to control the flow and remove unwanted spam. You need to clean your lists monthly. You need list Hygiene Services that you can trust.
