Your marketing efforts could be 100% opt-in and your outbound e-mail could still end up being blocked as spam. The problem: list poisoning.
It has been happening for years, but many marketers who use e-mail are unaware of it, according to George Bilbrey, vice president and general manager of Return Path’s Delivery Assurance division.
To poison a marketer’s list, someone — possibly a competitor, or just someone with too much time on his hands — writes a small computer program that dumps a bunch of bad addresses into a company’s sign-up form and hits the submit button.
List poisoning can result in a marketer’s outbound e-mail being labeled as spam and blocked by inbox providers — and this can happen even to marketers who collect addresses on an opt-in basis. It is the second-most common cause of an opt-in marketer’s e-mail getting blocked, Bilbrey says. The first is using a sloppy third-party data source.
List poisoning doesn’t happen every day, but when it does, forget about trying to catch whoever did the deed, says Bilbrey. You need to protect yourself before they strike.
One way is by using so-called closed-loop permission practices when collecting e-mail addresses. In closed loop — also known as double opt-in — the person who signs up for a marketer’s e-mail gets a confirmation message, to which he or she must respond in order to remain on the list. The tactic prevents list poisoning by requiring a human to verify the request.
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