Music promotion email list hygiene

Mailbox providers judge you on how your recipients behave. A list full of dead addresses produces hard bounces, a list full of people who never asked to hear from you produces complaints, and both are charged to your sending domain. Once reputation drops, your good contacts stop receiving too, which is the part artists notice last and suffer most.

The counterintuitive consequence is that deleting contacts is a growth activity. If a segment has not produced a reply in three releases and its addresses are unverified, it is not an asset; it is a liability that drags down every future send. Keeping the useful two hundred and dropping the useless two thousand is how a small label or artist ends up with better results than a bigger one.

Export the send report, remove the hard bounces, mark the soft bounces, and add any complaint or opt-out to the suppression list before you do anything else. This takes minutes and is the highest-value maintenance in the whole workflow. Doing it "later" is how a dead address gets three more emails.

Record the send date against each contact. Without it, you cannot tell whether an address is current, and you will email the same person twice in a month — one of the fastest ways to generate a complaint from someone who would otherwise have replied.

Verify before a contact enters a campaign, and re-verify any address that has not been contacted in six to twelve months. Verification checks syntax, mail routing and known disposable domains; it cannot prove a mailbox is read by a human, and it cannot predict whether someone will complain. Treat a pass as permission to try, not as a guarantee.

On this platform the monthly verification allowance equals the monthly email allowance, which keeps the two in step: you cannot end up with more checks than sends or more sends than checks. That is a practical constraint rather than a philosophical one, and it is the reason the plan tiers list both numbers side by side.

Duplicates arrive from every direction: the same curator under two playlists, an old address and a new one, a label contact and a personal contact. Deduplicate on the address, then merge the context — outlet, playlist, genre, last contact — rather than deleting one row. If the same person appears twice with different roles, keep both roles in one record.

Once a quarter, review by segment: how many contacts, how many replied in the last year, how many are unverified, how many are suppressed. Retire segments with no replies and no recent verification. Then look at what remains and plan the next release around it. The tracking guide covers what to record from each campaign.

A manager inherits a list of 1,200 music contacts with no send dates and no verification status. First pass: dedupe on address, which removes 140 duplicates and merges 60 records. Second pass: verify everything, which flags 190 invalid or dead, leaving 870. Third pass: remove anyone who asked not to be contacted and anyone who complained in the last year, leaving 802.

The list is now smaller and usable. The next campaign sends to a 200-contact segment and gets 14 replies, because the addresses are current and the segment is targeted. The 802-person list is a real asset; the 1,200-person version was a deliverability risk disguised as scale.