Robly is intended to be an opt-in email marketing service. We allow lists of opted-in subscribers (we will not require you to have them re-opt-in when you switch), and actual customers from the last 12 months.
For examples of good and bad lists, click here.
Old, unengaged lists cause most of the problems we have with our customers. It’s difficult to pass up on potential customers, but we assure you, sending to old lists will just lead to headaches. Your deliverability will suffer, and we may lock (and even suspend) your account if it’s bad enough.
The worse your list metrics are (bounce, SPAM, and unsubscribe) compared to everyone else in our system, the worse IP you’ll be assigned to in our system. This is how we protect our own customer base and deliverability. By leaving old addresses on your list, you are inhibiting the new, engaged subscribers from receiving mail.
If your SPAM complaints are greater than 1 in 1,000, we’ll lock your account. If they are far greater than that, we’ll suspend your account.
Why exactly do old lists perform so poorly?
Spam traps: Old email addresses or domains that have been abandoned for more than two years can be recycled into SPAM traps. An address that has been abandoned for two years definitely didn’t opt-in to get your newsletter. Therefore, if it gets your newsletter, the ISP knows you’re sending unsolicited mail.
Bounces: Old email addresses that aren’t yet SPAM traps will result in a bounce. If your bounce rates exceed our thresholds, we will be forced to lock your account.
SPAM complaints: SPAM complaints will hurt your deliverability within our system, and if the complaints are more than 1 in 1,000, we won’t be able to send to the list through Robly. Sometimes people hit the SPAM button to clean out their inbox, but generally speaking, 1 in 1,000 is the magic number.
To protect our customers’ deliverability reputation as a whole, each time one of our new customers uploads a list of contacts into our system, we slowly send to a tiny portion of the list from our lowest-reputation set of IPs, and wait for bounces and SPAM complaints to come back. If our thresholds are exceeded, we lock the account. If our thresholds are wildly exceeded, we will suspend the account. This causes a huge headache for you and for us.
What can you do?
- Remove addresses that have not engaged in more than six months.
- Keep in contact: send at least one newsletter a month, with engaging content.
Robly automatically cleans hard bounces off your lists to Do Not Mail. We will attempt to send to a soft bounce for 72 hours, then clean them to Do Not Mail.