Is your email engagement dropping off lately? You may think your content is the culprit, but consider this: your emails could be landing in the spam folder. Large email service providers (ESPs), like Google and Yahoo, are enforcing tighter email-sending rules. So, if your campaigns aren’t performing, it’s time to reassess your practices.

A good place to start is your email list. As you add more contacts to it, remember that more than 25% of your leads decay yearly. Overlooking your bounce rate and spam complaint rate will ruin your reputation with ESPs and Internet service providers (ISPs) – and cause your messages to go to spam.

Prune these risky email addresses to boost deliverability

The health of your email database is vital to your email deliverability, meaning the rate at which your emails reach customers’ inboxes. But how do you ensure 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 addresses

A bounce rate over 2% indicates that your list has degraded and needs some pruning. A high bounce rate affects your email deliverability, so never email a contact that bounced again. Instead, remove these invalid email addresses right away to help your campaigns go to the inbox. To prevent deliverability issues, consider cleaning your database regularly, especially before you send a mass email.

Abuse emails

“Report spam” is a useful button in our inboxes. It allows us to tell our ESP when someone is emailing us without consent or has nefarious intentions. But many people hit the “report spam” button even when they subscribed to get those emails they’re reporting. These types of accounts are called “abuse emails.”

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

Disposable contacts

Have you ever created a digital content offer — like an ebook or whitepaper — to grow your email list? These kinds of lead magnets are still effective, but the problem is that not every person who downloads them uses their 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 deactivate within minutes or days, leading to bounces. They have no place on your list, so remove them before your next campaign.

Related: 5 Simple Tweaks for Better Email Deliverability

Spam traps

In 2023, spam emails made up more than 46% of the world’s email traffic. While this percentage has been decreasing in the past few 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 aren’t. ISPs strategically place these traps on the Internet, often in locations where only spammers would find 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 flagged as a potential spammer.

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

Passive subscribers

The overall engagement your emails get also matters to your reputation. So, if a segment of your email list is passive, it’s detrimental to your deliverability. Do you have subscribers who haven’t clicked on any of your emails in more than six months? Prune them out so you can maintain high metrics and allow your emails to reach your active audience.

Aside from skewing your engagement metrics, passive email addresses can also get deactivated by EPSs. If those accounts become invalid over time, that 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 a few times a year ensures you can remove invalid, temporary, abuse and spam-trap emails before they do any damage. But did you know you can also check email addresses before adding them to your list?

A real-time email verifier spots risky emails right away and rejects them from your sign-up forms. It’s a proactive measure against bounces, spam complaints, and other incidents that affect your sender reputation and deliverability.

The best part is that most email verification companies offer a certain number of free monthly checks. If your list grows slowly, you can make the most of these offers and verify your subscribers’ contacts to keep your data in shape.