It's yours email engagement moving away recently? You may think your content is the culprit, but consider this: your emails could be in it spam folder. Major email service providers (ESPs), such as Google and Yahoo, are implementing stricter rules for sending emails. So if your campaigns aren't working, it's time to reevaluate your practices.

A good place to start is your email list. As you add more contacts to it, remember this more than 25% of your customers they break every year. Overlooking yours inflation rate and the rate of spam complaints will destroy your reputation with ESPs and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) – and cause your messages to go to spam.

Shorten these risky email addresses to increase deliverability

The health of your email database is vital to your email deliverabilitymeaning the rate at which your emails reach customers' inboxes. But how do you make sure your email list is healthy? Here are five types of email addresses you should remove from your database today.

Related: 6 Ways to Manage Your Email List Like a Pro

Invalid email address

A bounce rate above 2% indicates that your list has degraded and needs pruning. A high bounce rate affects the deliverability of your email, so never email a contact who has bounced back. Instead, remove these invalid email addresses immediately to help your campaigns land in the inbox. To prevent delivery issuesconsider cleaning your database regularly, especially before sending a mass email.

Email abuse

Report Spam is a handy button in our inboxes. This allows us to show our ESP when someone is emailing us without consent or with malicious intent. But many people hit the “report spam” button even when they opted in to receive the emails they're reporting. These types of accounts are called “email abuse.”

With Google and Yahoo requiring spam complaint rates to stay within 0.3%, you can never be too careful about spam complaints. Using email validation software that can detect abuse emails—and remove them from your list—is an extra step you can take to help your campaigns land in the inbox.

Contacts available

Have you ever created a digital content offering — like an ebook or white paper — to grow your email list? These types of lead magnets are still effective, but the problem is that not every person who downloads them uses a real email address. Sometimes, people use temporary contacts to get a free ebook or a discount without being added to a marketing list.

Temporary email addresses are deactivated within minutes or days, leading to bounces. They have no place on your list, so remove them before your next campaign.

Related: 5 Simple Fixes for Better Email Delivery

Spam traps

In 2023, spam emails were created more than 46% of the world's email traffic. While this percentage has been declining in recent years, ISPs and email blocklist providers are always working to combat spam. Spam traps are just one of the methods they use to catch and block spammers.

Spam traps look like real email addresses, but they are not. ISPs strategically place these traps on the Internet, often in places where only spammers would find them and add them to their lists. When an email is sent to a spam trap, it signals to ISPs that the sender is likely engaging in poor email practices, such as scraping addresses from the web or buying email lists. That sender will then be reported as a potential spam sender.

Hitting a spam trap can seriously damage your reputation with ISPs, so avoid buying a database or adding random email addresses to your list.

Passive subscribers

In general engagement Your emails also matter to your reputation. So if a segment of your email list is inactive, it's detrimental to your offering. Do you have subscribers who haven't clicked on any of your emails in over six months? Cut them so you can keep metrics high and allow your emails to reach your active audience.

In addition to skewing your engagement metrics, passive email addresses can also opt out of EPSs. If these accounts become invalid over time, it can increase your bounce rate and further sabotage your email marketing. Removing these subscribers means you can focus your resources on engaged contacts who are more likely to respond to your offers – and convert.

Bonus tip: Check email addresses in real time

Running your database through email verification software several times a year ensures that you can remove invalid, temporary, abuse and spam emails before they do any harm. But did you know that you can also check email addresses ahead adding them to your list?

A real-time email checker flags dangerous emails immediately and rejects them from your registration forms. It's a proactive measure against bounces, spam complaints, and other incidents that affect your sender reputation and opportunity.

The best part is that most email verification companies offer a certain number of free monthly verifications. If your list is growing slowly, you can take advantage of these offers and verify your subscriber contacts to keep your data in shape.