Why I am writing about email marketing today
February 2026 reality check: small businesses are seeing more deliverability issues than they did a few years ago, even when they are not doing anything shady.
- Mailbox providers are stricter about bounces, spam complaints, and engagement.
- Privacy features make open rates less trustworthy, so you need other signals.
- Purchased lists are still a fast path to trouble, and even “old customer lists” can rot quietly.
The pain point: “We did one campaign and Gmail started throttling us”
- A small retail shop emails 8,000 “customers” collected over 10 years.
- They send a seasonal promo and see 700 bounces, some angry replies, and a sudden drop in inbox placement.
- Next campaign gets worse – fewer opens, more bounces, more “why am I on this list?”
What is usually happening
- Your list contains old addresses, typos, and role accounts (info@, sales@) that bounce or complain.
- You have duplicates and formatting issues that inflate your send size without adding reach.
- You treat every address as equal, instead of separating “recent customers” from “2016 trade show bowl.”
- You rely on open rate as your truth, when it is noisy now.
The workflow I use: clean, verify, segment, then send in controlled batches
- Goal: lower bounces and complaints before you send, then learn from bounces after you send.
- Mindset: list hygiene is not a one-time spring cleaning – it is a loop.
Step 1 – Export everything and freeze your “source of truth”
- Export from your CRM, POS, or ecommerce platform into CSV.
- Include at least: email, first name, last purchase date (or last interaction), customer tag/source, and consent status if you have it.
- Make a copy you will not edit, so you can always trace where an address came from.
customers_export_2026-02-03.csv - email - first_name - last_name - last_purchase_date - source (checkout, event, website, manual) - consent (yes/no/unknown)
Step 2 – Do a blunt cleanup pass before any “verification”
- Remove obvious garbage early. Verification tools are useful, but do not waste time verifying “bob@@gmail”.
- Normalize casing and whitespace so duplicates become visible.
- Drop these immediately:
- Missing @ sign, double @, spaces inside an email, trailing punctuation.
- Emails from internal staff accounts that should not be marketed to.
- Known suppressions: anyone who opted out, complained, or asked to be removed.
Where Maxprog fits here
- MaxBulk Mailer is handy for importing a CSV, de-duplicating, filtering, and splitting lists into sensible segments before you send.
Step 3 – Verify addresses, but understand what “verify” really means
- Email verification is not magic. It is risk reduction.
- Some domains accept-all, meaning they claim every address is valid. That does not mean the inbox exists.
- Some mail servers temporarily fail (greylisting), which can look like “unknown” if you treat it as final.
- What you want from verification:
- Catch typos and non-existent domains.
- Identify likely-undeliverable addresses before you send.
- Flag risky categories (disposable emails, role accounts) so you can decide how to treat them.
- Tool fit: eMail Verifier is the right kind of tool when you want to validate a list you already have before you run a campaign.
My rule of thumb after verification: - Good: OK to mail - Bad: remove - Unknown / accept-all: do not blast - test in small batches
Step 4 – Segment by “recency and relationship,” not by wishful thinking
- Most small businesses segment by product interest, which is fine, but it misses the bigger lever: relationship temperature.
- Mailbox providers pay attention to engagement signals. Your recent customers are more likely to engage – and less likely to complain.
- Segments I actually use:
- Hot: purchased or interacted in last 90 days.
- Warm: 91-365 days.
- Cold: 1-3 years.
- Frozen: older than 3 years, unknown consent, or risky verification results.
- Send your normal campaigns to Hot and Warm first.
- Use a dedicated re-permission message for Cold.
- For Frozen, consider not mailing at all unless you have strong consent evidence.
Step 5 – Design a re-permission email that is honest and low friction
- The worst re-engagement approach is pretending nothing happened and sending a 30% off coupon to a list that has not heard from you since 2019.
- A better approach is simple: remind them who you are, why they are on the list, and give a one-click “stay subscribed” path.
Subject: Still want updates from [Business Name]? Hi [Name], You are getting this because you purchased from us or signed up in the past. We are cleaning up our list so we only email people who still want updates. If you want to keep hearing from us, click here: [YES - keep me subscribed] If not, you can ignore this email and you will be removed. Thanks, [Real person name]
- Why this works:
- It reduces surprise, which reduces complaints.
- It sets expectations and filters out dead weight.
- It gives you a defensible consent signal going forward.
Step 6 – Send in controlled batches and watch bounce types
- When your list health is uncertain, sending to everyone at once is like flooring the gas pedal in a car that has been sitting for three years.
- Start with Hot. Then Warm. Then Cold re-permission. Only then consider broader sends.
- What I watch:
- Hard bounces (non-existent mailbox, invalid domain): remove immediately.
- Soft bounces (mailbox full, temporary issue): track and retry a limited number of times.
- Complaints: treat as permanent suppression, no debates.
- Tool fit: eMail Bounce Handler helps process bounce reports so you can update your list and suppress bad addresses systematically instead of guessing.
Step 7 – Keep a suppression list that nothing can override
- Small businesses often keep opt-outs inside a single platform, then accidentally re-import an old CSV and re-add unsubscribed contacts.
- A suppression list is your seatbelt. It should be easy to apply and hard to ignore.
- What goes into suppression:
- Unsubscribes.
- Spam complaints.
- Repeated hard bounces.
- People who personally asked to stop receiving emails.
Step 8 – Stop using “open rate” as your main success metric
- Open tracking has been increasingly distorted by privacy features and preloading.
- It is still directionally useful sometimes, but it is not a clean truth source.
- Use these instead:
- Click-throughs to specific offers or pages.
- Replies (for service businesses, replies are often the best signal).
- Conversions you can tie to a campaign window.
- Unsubscribes and complaints (a high unsubscribe rate is not always bad, but complaints are).
A real-world example: shrinking a list on purpose to make more money
- A local service business had 12,400 addresses.
- After cleanup and verification, they removed 1,900 obvious bad addresses and suppressed 600 prior opt-outs that had been re-imported.
- They segmented by recency and only mailed Hot and Warm for two months.
- Net result: fewer sends, fewer bounces, higher click rate, and more bookings – because the list was composed of real, reachable people.
- Why it worked:
- Deliverability improved because bounce rate dropped.
- Engagement improved because the audience actually recognized the sender.
- The business stopped paying attention to vanity list size and started paying attention to response.
Where people get stuck (and what I do instead)
- Stuck on perfection: “We need the perfect segmentation model.”
- Do instead: recency-based segments first. It is blunt but effective.
- Stuck on fear: “If we email less, we will disappear.”
- Do instead: email the people most likely to care, more consistently. You do not need to shout at everyone.
- Stuck on tools: “Which platform is best?”
- Do instead: get your data and hygiene under control. Tools matter less than list quality and disciplined sending.
One internal resource if you want to go deeper
Checklist
- Export a full list with last purchase/interaction date and source fields.
- Remove obvious formatting errors, duplicates, staff emails, and known opt-outs.
- Verify addresses and separate Good from Bad and Unknown.
- Segment by recency: Hot, Warm, Cold, Frozen.
- Send to Hot and Warm first, then run a re-permission email for Cold.
- Process bounces and complaints, and update a suppression list that always applies.
- Track clicks, replies, conversions, and complaints – not just opens.
Exactly 3 Actionable Takeaways
- Plan to make your list smaller: removing bad and unresponsive addresses is often the fastest route to better deliverability.
- Use recency as your default segmentation until you have a strong reason to do something more complex.
- Treat suppression as a permanent asset: once someone opts out or complains, make it impossible to re-add them by accident.