You Really Don’t Have A Choice: Clean Your Cold Email List

Best practices when it comes to cold email outreach are changing all the time. There are elements to the outreach process that are important nowadays, that have few articles written about it. Cold email list cleaning seems to be one of those things. 

Let me put it out there: cleaning your cold email list should be mandatory any time you send a new campaign. With the volatility in the marketplace, some lists may only be good for 6 months. And that is taking into account that you built that list yourself. 

By cleaning your lists you are doing two important things: you are increasing the chances that you will get a response and you are decreasing the probability that your email will bounce. There are some very simple (and fast) steps that you can do to make sure you have a clean email list. 

• Change the case of names and businesses
• Make sure the company names are in a format that you would use normally
• Email addresses are only business addresses and there are no duplicates
• Verify the emails

Some of these may seem quite challenging, but for the most part, can be done in a matter of minutes. I promise you, if you follow none of my other advice on this site, by just scrubbing up a list a bit you will get the biggest impact on your campaign. #lowhangingfruit

Change the case

If you get an email that starts off: Hi STEVE, you know right away that this should be in spam. In fact, spam filters are getting to the point that they can tell when the recipient’s name is in all caps that it is flicked straight to spam.

You never see it. 

They know that it is garbage and it is not worth your time. So don’t go through the effort of putting together a campaign just to end up in the spam folder. Plus it hurts your overall deliverability and the email service providers stick you on a blacklist.

Especially of how easy of a fix this is. 

As we are well connected into the Google Ecosystem here at Pretty Good Cold Emails, it means that we use Google Sheets. Grab the ChangeCase Add-on by Alec Tutin. It is easy to find and really the only thing like it in the market. Plus it’s free. 

See the video below with some fake names that were all in a bit of a strange format, either in all caps or all lowercase. Within seconds the names are changed to a case where the first letter of each word is capitalized. 

This little trick will make sure that all your custom fields look natural, helping you come across like someone who can help and not in their spam folders.

Reason this is important: increases response probability

Use regular sounding company names

I think we can all understand quickly why we want to make people’s names seem natural. It works the same way with using the company’s name: you want to make sure it sounds like you are talking to them and not just scraping their data from websites (even if that is what you are doing). 

Again, we want to use the ChangeCase feature to make sure we aren’t getting all caps. Plus we also want to use some judgment on how we refer to their company. Truncate the ending words that usually demarcate the type of company it is. Think Limited or Pty. 

Think of it like this: most professionals have heard of the company Deloitte. But did you know that their name is actually Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited? It is ok if you didn’t. In all likelihood, they don’t want you to know that as they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars rebranding over the years. 

It is ok to refer to businesses as they are colloquially known in most cases. 

In Australia, McDonald’s is lovingly referred to as Maccas Would I call them that in a cold email? Maybe, since they refer to themselves as that, but use best judgment and you will be ok. Plus it is much better than sticking to Maccas than MCDONALD’S AUSTRALIA HOLDINGS PTY LIMITED in a cold email. 

Once again, these changes can easily be done right within your spreadsheet. 

Reason this is important: increases response probability

Email address clean up

Honestly, this is not the most important tip that I am going to give you. However, it is worth checking so you don’t make your prospect mad, and in turn less likely to do business with you. A quick check of the email addresses that you have will help make sure you have a clean list.

The first thing to watch out for is that you are not sending the same message to the same email twice. Double messages look bad so remove duplicates. Once again, easy fix right in Google Sheets.

Just highlight the email address column, go up to the Data tab, and towards the bottom of the list, you will see Remove duplicates. Click that and follow the prompts and the duplicates are gone. 

Another quick check is to make sure that all the email addresses are actually business accounts and not personal mail. Getting business mail in my personal email is a pain and I completely zone out. This can hurt both your company’s reputation, but also your sending reputation.

But sometimes when we are collecting data and building email lists, personal email addresses get lumped in and collected. The easiest way to check to make sure that you don’t have these is to hit Control + F and search for the most common personal email inboxes. 

Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail. Within seconds, you can find and highlight any occurrence. You can then easily remove these contacts from your list. There may be another common term where you plan on sending the mail, so add that to your search. 

The goal is to get these emails to your target’s business inbox, and only once. 

Reason this is important: increases response probability

The scary, scary email verification

The first three things I recommended can be done right in a spreadsheet. This next suggestion will elevate your cold email outreach game 10-fold, but it takes a bit more effort. 

Email validation, or verification, is a way to make sure your emails don’t bounce. There are a few different types of bounces: soft bounces are when there could be an issue on the receiver’s side, such as a full inbox or your email is too large. It could be as simple as their server is down for scheduled maintenance. 

On the flip side, a hard bounce is something that is more permanent. This is when the domain can’t be found (this happens often when you mistype the domain) or that individual mailbox couldn’t be found. You would get a hard bounce if you are trying to email someone who has left the company and a forwarding inbox hadn’t been set up. 

In the time of Covid, you had to validate your emails almost weekly due to the high number of people unemployed.

What is email verification

It is a process of checking to see if there is actually a mailbox at the address you are trying to send mail to. An email verifier will send a ping to the mailbox and wait to see what information it gets back. 

Think of it as a laser pointer at the end of a gun. You want to know what you are aiming at and if there is something there to hit. 

It is hard to get validation on an entire list, so sometimes the validator will come back with a percentage that is verified, a percentage that is confident, a percentage that is a guess, and the remaining that they feel are incorrect. 

Based on what you think is the right amount of risk to take when sending out emails and your tolerance to sender reputation, you will choose which emails you want to send out.  

How do you verify emails

There are tons of good to great email validators out there, most of them are quite cheap as well. One model is that you buy a bulk number of email checks, say 10,000, and you come back and use their system until you have checked 10,000 emails, at which point you can buy more credit. 

There are others out there that have a monthly fee and you get so many monthly checks.  

I use a few different ones, to be honest, and actually run my lists through at least two checks before an email campaign. There are actually some providers that have an extension that allows you to verify directly in Google Sheets. 

(I will do a comparison of some of these providers in the future so you can see how effective each of them are)

Usually, you will take your spreadsheet and download it as a .CSV document. You will then upload it to an email verification provider. From there it will ask you to confirm the column of the emails you are trying to verify. Then away it goes. Within a few minutes, the program will give you a new document that lays out which emails were able to be verified and which ones were not. 

What you do with the output is up to you. But if the program says that there is an invalid email address, I would recommend double-checking that you had the address correct (that it is @netflix.com and not mistyped nteflix.com). 

If that isn’t the problem, remove it from your list so that your entire campaign is not ruined by a high number of bounces. As a rule of thumb, you should have a bounce rate of less than 1% and it should be lower if you can get it there. 

Reason this is important: decrease the bounce rate

Spend the time

A few bad email addresses and an ALL CAPS MISTAKE are not going to scuttle your entire email outreach campaign. 

But it is worth getting into the habit of spending a few minutes cleaning your email list. Also, this is something that you can do yourself. You don’t need to go to a list cleaning service. This can just be part of your email marketing strategy.

Good luck on your list cleaning adventures, your bounce rates and deliverability rates will thank us later. 

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We have a lot more advice over at Pretty Good Cold Emails if you are interested in learning more or if you need help with your next cold email campaign.