Hello Litmus Community,

I am interested in hearing from follow email marketers about email address list hygiene best practices, when obtaining the list from external sources, A.K.A. our partners.

Here is my scenario:

My company is to receive a large list of up to 800,000 email addresses from a large partner. I want to validated every single email address before segmentation takes place and before they are entered into our ESP. However upper management wants to know why are we not trusting that data our partner is sending us is good.

Why should we do an additional hygiene?

The cost to validate the whole list minimal, around $1,000.

Upper management also want to know if we validate a random sample of only 10%, does this 10% justify that the entire list of 800,000 a good and clean email list?

Known Facts:

  • We know that rate of email address decay varies between 22% to 30%.
  • Our partner told us that we are being sent emails that have the most activity within their infrastructure.

My question for upper management is, would the 10% random sample of 8000,000 validation be justified, if we sent say 20% the list that may or may not contain 10% that were validated?

Thank you in advanced.
Jackson