How do I recover email deliverability after sending to a purchased list?

Key findings

• Immediate cessation: The first and most critical step is to immediately stop all email sends to the purchased list. Continuing to send will only worsen the damage to your sender reputation, making recovery more difficult and prolonged.
• Data cleansing: A high hard bounce rate (e.g., 13%) indicates a significant number of invalid or non-existent email addresses. These must be promptly removed and ideally, the entire purchased list should be discarded to prevent hitting spam traps, which are email addresses specifically set up to identify senders of unsolicited mail (spam).
• Reputation impact: Sending to a non-permissioned list severely degrades your sender reputation, leading to emails landing in spam folders or being outright blocked. Recovering your domain and IP reputation is essential for future inbox placement.
• Permission-based lists: Long-term deliverability hinges on building a healthy, opt-in email list. This means collecting explicit consent from subscribers who genuinely want to receive your emails, which is crucial for a positive email sending reputation.

Key considerations

• Timeframe for recovery: Recovering deliverability and sender reputation is not instantaneous. It requires consistent effort and patience, often taking weeks or even months depending on the severity of the damage. For specific guidance, you can refer to information on what to do if Gmail blocks your email.
• Internal policy enforcement: Implement strict internal policies to prevent future purchases or use of non-permissioned lists. Educate sales teams and other stakeholders on the severe negative consequences of such practices.
• Email authentication: Ensure your email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are correctly configured. These are fundamental for proving your legitimacy as a sender and are crucial for improving trust with ISPs.
• Gradual re-engagement: Once initial damage control is in place, begin sending only to your most engaged and properly permissioned contacts. Gradually expand your sending volume as your reputation improves, monitoring engagement rates closely.

Key opinions

• List elimination: The consensus among marketers is to completely abandon and delete purchased lists due to their inherent risks and the high likelihood of damaging sender reputation.
• Suppression vs. deletion: There are differing views on whether to delete hard bounces entirely or keep them on a suppression list within the platform to prevent accidental re-mailing. Both aim to avoid future contact with invalid addresses, although deletion is often seen as the safer approach to prevent re-sending to fake or invalid email addresses.
• Internal safeguards: Implementing technical barriers and clear internal processes is crucial to prevent sales or other teams from using non-compliant lists in the future.
• Focus on engaged users: To rebuild reputation, marketers advocate for narrowing focus to a highly engaged segment of the existing list and gradually expanding, rather than attempting to re-engage stale subscribers too soon.

Key considerations

• Education and compliance: It is vital to educate sales and other internal teams on the severe consequences of using purchased lists and the importance of permission-based marketing for sustainable growth.
• Long-term strategy: Marketers must shift focus from immediate lead generation via purchased lists to building a healthy, engaged email list through ethical means, which is more effective in the long run. As Kickbox highlights, avoiding purchased lists is crucial for deliverability.
• Preventative measures: Beyond simply stopping current sends, proactively establishing system settings and protocols to prevent future incidents is essential for safeguarding your email program.
• Patience and persistence: Recovering deliverability takes time and consistent adherence to best practices, including regular monitoring of metrics and adjusting sending strategies.

Key opinions

• Absolute list destruction: The primary recommendation is to completely 'burn' or destroy the purchased list, as it poses an ongoing threat to deliverability due to high bounce rates and spam traps. Continuing to use it guarantees further harm.
• Return to core audience: Experts advise pulling back sending volume to only recently engaged and properly permissioned email addresses. This is a critical step to allow the sender's reputation to rebound.
• Financial and reputational loss: Sending to purchased lists is viewed as a net loss, costing money, hindering legitimate outreach, and damaging relationships with actual prospects and customers. This highlights why focusing on recovering from a bad sender reputation is paramount.
• No quick fixes: There is no fast track to recovery. It demands a significant shift in strategy, prioritizing ethical lead generation and sustained good sending behavior over time.

Key considerations

• Internal accountability: Establish clear guidelines and consequences for anyone attempting to use non-compliant lists, ensuring that all teams understand the deliverability risks involved.
• Spam trap avoidance: Purchased lists are notorious for containing spam traps. Hitting these traps can lead to immediate blacklisting and severe damage to your IP and domain reputation, making a 'burn the list' strategy even more critical.
• Reputation rebuilding: Understand that rebuilding a damaged domain reputation takes time and consistent positive sending behavior, gradually increasing engagement and trust with ISPs.
• Strategic shift: The focus must pivot to generating leads through legitimate, opt-in methods, such as content marketing, organic search, and social media, to ensure the long-term health of the email program. This is how you rescue a bad email sending reputation.

Key findings

• Policy violations: Most legitimate ESPs and ISPs explicitly prohibit sending to purchased, rented, or third-party lists in their terms of service. Violations can lead to account suspension or termination.
• Guaranteed low engagement: Documentation confirms that recipients on purchased lists have not opted in to receive your communications, leading to very low engagement rates, high bounce rates, and elevated spam complaints.
• Spam trap exposure: Purchased lists are commonly seeded with spam traps by blocklist operators and ISPs. Hitting these traps immediately triggers alerts and can result in your domain or IP being added to a blacklist or blocklist.
• Reputational degradation: Sending to non-permissioned lists erodes your sender reputation, making it difficult for even legitimate emails to reach the inbox. This directly affects overall email sender reputation.

Key considerations

• Legal compliance: Relying on explicit consent is essential for compliance with various anti-spam laws and regulations globally (e.g., CAN-SPAM, GDPR). Purchased lists inherently lack this consent.
• Authentication importance: Robust email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) is a foundational element emphasized in documentation for all legitimate senders. It helps ISPs verify that your emails are truly from you. You can learn more in our simple guide to DMARC, SPF, and DKIM.
• Consequences of blocklisting: Documentation often outlines that being on an email blacklist or blocklist means a significant portion of your emails will not reach the inbox, severely impacting marketing and communication efforts.
• Focus on engagement: Building engaged lists through ethical means is consistently highlighted as the path to higher inbox placement rates and long-term email marketing success.