Q&A: Why has my email marketing service suspended my account?
Email marketing services, like MailChimp and Constant Contact, are beholden to certain guidelines to avoid running afoul of anti-spam laws, regulations and protections. As a result, they monitor and enforce certain thresholds in spam complaints, email bounces and unsubscribe rates. If you consistently exceed these thresholds, they can suspend or cancel your account. (You agreed to all of this when you confirmed their Terms of Service). But what does this mean, how do you fix it when it happens, and what can you do to ensure it doesn’t happen in the first place?
What’s going on?
A bounced email means the message isn’t reaching its intended recipient. For example: a person adds her corporate email address to your list while she’s working at Company A, but then she leaves to work at Company B. Naturally, Company A deactivates or cancels her old corporate email. The result: a bad email that’s guaranteed to generate a bounce.
Another example: you require an email sign-up for a visitor to get access to a certain offer or promotion. He isn’t really interested in being on your email list, but he wants that offer. So he uses a temporary email address that will expire or be closed once he’s taken advantage of the promo. The result: another bad email.
Mail services will tolerate a certain number of bounces because these kind of situations are going to happen. But when the bounces exceed a certain threshold, and/or if the high bounce rate keeps happening with every email, it causes the email service to question your entire list. It makes them wonder if you’re spamming, and they’ll suspend your account until they’re satisfied you’re not.
Assuming you’re not a spammer, the real problem is undoubtedly bad data, probably stale.
How do I fix it?
You can take your list to an email cleanup service. They’ll help you identify the bad emails and strip them out of your list, so when you send an official email, the bounces will remain low. This isn’t always 100% effective, though. Another option sometimes recommended (and sometimes required) by the email service is to remove all data of a certain age (say, older than 6 months). The assumption is that fresher data will be likelier to be good.
Also, consider where you got your email list in the first place. Some sources are more questionable and thus more likely to contain errors. Purchased lists are always riskier than organically generated lists (that is, emails collected on your website). Emails collected for purposes OTHER than purposefully subscribing to an email list (like in our second example above) will make the list riskier. Single opt-in lists are riskier than double opt-in (more on this in the next section).
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Most companies generate their email lists with a single opt-in step. The visitor on their site fills out a form with their email address, which includes a check box (usually pre-checked) which says, “I agree to subscribe to your email list.”
By contrast, a double opt-in requires a second, active step to confirm that the person actually, really, truly wants to be on your email list. For example, after they enter their email address, you send them an email that contains a link they must then click to actually, really, truly subscribe.
A double opt-in will almost certainly eradicate problems with your email list.
But yes, this means a lot more work, and you’ll have a lower subscribe rate, which is why so many companies don’t use it. And admittedly, it’s not always necessary. But if your account has been suspended due to a lot of bounces or unsubscribes, or you’re worried about the email addresses you’re collecting, it may be time to implement the double opt-in as a preventive measure.
