This article reviews what agencies and brokers need to do once they have created a list of opt-in destination prospects. List building is a separate topic from list maintenance, and is worthy of meaningful discussion. That being said, once agencies and brokers have created a list, they should quickly establish list maintenance best practices. Maintaining a clean insurance email list helps agencies and brokers improve their online reputation, increase deliverability, reduce complaints, and increase conversion rates. To have a clean list, you need to manage bounces, age your list, remove inactive users, and allow subscribers to update information. Here are four important best practices to follow related to health and insurance email marketing list maintenance:

Manage bounces: create a policy where you will delete an email after four or more soft bounces. You should also delete all emails after a hard bounce. Hard bounces are usually removed with any quality email marketing engine, but you should check your email database to make sure this is being done correctly. Soft bounce policies vary by provider, please watch those bounces as they affect deliverability and reputation.

no longer in: Over time, people change email addresses, leave a company, or lose interest in your organization. An increase in your bounce rate may indicate that you need to increase your list maintenance. You must remove employees who are no longer with your company or who have retired after each campaign.

Delete inactive users: Create a policy where you delete contacts if they don’t open emails or respond to calls to action after a specified period. Or, separate these users into multivariate test campaigns to see if you can induce engagement with a completely different approach.

Manage subscription: Give subscribers the opportunity to change the frequency of emails or update their information. This is often better than a simple opt-out, as recipients may want to limit the frequency rather than opt out of your campaigns entirely.

Sending information that subscribers no longer want can increase spam complaints. Sending emails to inactive email addresses can damage your reputation with ISPs. Improve delivery, open rates, click-through rates, and conversion with proper insurance email marketing list maintenance. Proper list maintenance also helps insurance agency marketers avoid honey pot traps. For those unfamiliar with cheating, let’s review this important aspect of list maintenance to better understand how it applies to insurance agency email marketing.

Suppose one of the domains your agency points to becomes inactive (the company was acquired or the division is no longer in business). After a period of about 6-12 months, many hosting companies will disable email for that domain. Any email sent to these defunct domains can then be automatically routed to blacklists. An example is spamhaus.com. As your domain continues to send to this defunct domain (which often does not return a hard bounce), your ISP’s reputation suffers and your domain may end up blacklisted.

Following the above best practices can help insurance web sellers maintain a cleaner and healthier listing. And it will help ensure that they avoid spam traps and honeypots.