How Copyhackers Keeps a Clean Email List with ZeroBounce

Joanna Wiebe of Copyhackers talks to ZeroBounce about cleaning her email list with us and how that’s helping her and her team get the most out of every email they send.

You don’t have to get a high email bounce rate to decide that you need an email verifier. In fact, the best way to build good email deliverability is to clean your email list regularly.

Joanna Wiebe, the original conversion copywriter and founder of Copyhackers, is well aware of this.

It’s easier to prevent any damage ahead of time instead of dealing with the consequences after the fact. So, whenever she and her team switched email marketing platforms, they used ZeroBounce’s email validator. They also use it before big launches, where email is a primary sales channel. It's how they make sure they communicate with real people – not bots, toxic emails or long-abandoned accounts.

In this case study, Joanna tells us more about her experience with ZeroBounce and how we help her send emails confidently.

About Copyhackers

The basecamp for the world’s copywriters, Copyhackers is where you become the most profitable person in the room. That happens with on-demand training in all things copywriting and messaging as well as ebooks, intensives and events. Find them at copyhackers.com and conversioncopywriting.com

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  Founded: 2011
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  Location: Remote, but with HQ in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
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  Number of employees: 12 (on the training side of the business, not the agency)
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  Mainly serving: SaaS marketers and all copywriters
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  Email service provider: ActiveCampaign and Customer.io
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  Types of emails Copyhackers sends: Newsletters, marketing emails (nurturing, sales), transactional, win-back, upgrade, abandoned cart.

Why Copyhackers follows email list cleaning best practices

A high email bounce rate is usually what brings customers to us. That wasn’t the case with Joanna Wiebe and her team at Copyhackers.

“We’ve switched email marketing platforms a couple of times, dragging our old list along with us as we’ve gone and then adding new subscribers into the mix,” Joanna says.

Despite available automations that save marketers a lot of time, migrating data onto a new platform isn’t as easy as it sounds.

“Tags and lists get messed up. People who wanted to unsubscribe from the whole list only unsubscribe from one of the lists they’re on. And of course, engagement over time simply dwindles, for most personas.”

Aware of these potential mishaps, Joanna and her team decided on a more preventive approach.

“We were coming up on a big, important launch for our business, and we wanted to ensure we were only sending emails to legit addresses with real people on the other side of them. We couldn’t afford spam complaints, and we didn’t want to negatively impact deliverability in any way. So we used ZeroBounce to clean up our email list,” the copywriter explains.

What Copyhackers was looking for in an email list cleaning service

Choosing the right email list cleaner can take time. But the team at Copyhackers had already found the right tool.

“We’d used it with clients in the past so we already trusted it,” she says about ZeroBounce. In fact, Wiebe has been cleaning email lists with us for so long that, she adds, “I can’t recall the first time we ever used ZeroBounce.”

When it was time for Copyhackers to scrub its email lists, the team just went to www.zerobounce.net “For this most recent time – for our own business – we were convinced by past good experiences with the brand and product.”

Was there a specific feature you were looking for in an email list cleaning tool?

Joanna Wiebe, Copyhackers: What we most wanted was to get the bad email addresses off our list without negatively impacting the good ones and without affecting tags, lists, all the things that flesh out our contacts.

Our goal was to just drop a list of something like 90,000 contacts into ZeroBounce and get a report re: the ones to keep vs drop.

Let’s see the results: how many bad emails did ZeroBounce find

All email lists degrade, but with a little love and care with your email hygiene, you can keep yours in tip-top shape.

“We were surprised to find that our list was pretty clean, actually,” Joanna shares. “I think maybe 2% of our addresses were worth scrubbing away.”

The Copyhackers email list was well-maintained, indeed. ZeroBounce deemed only 6% of the contacts risky:

• Most of them were catch-all emails, which are prone to bouncing – but can be further validated using our email scoring service.
• Some fell under the “Do Not Mail” category. That means they were valid, but were either toxic, disposable, role-based and a potential risk to email deliverability.
• Only 64 of Copyhackers’ leads were abuse emails – accounts belonging to people inclined to hit the “Mark as Spam” button.

It’s worth noting that the Copyhackers email list contained no spam traps at all. That’s a testimony to the company’s excellent email gathering practices. Since spam traps can’t sign up for emails, it shows that the Copyhackers team doesn’t add contacts to their lists without permission.

Since their email list was already in good shape, Copyhackers saw only a minor decrease in bounces. ZeroBounce removed 128 invalid email addresses.

What’s the biggest benefit of using ZeroBounce?

Joanna Wiebe, Copyhackers: You feel more confident as an email marketer when you know you’re sending emails to legit addresses. To put it more accurately: you know you’re emailing to people who actually want what you’re sending. So aside from fewer concerns about bounce rates, the biggest benefit of using ZeroBounce is sending more confidently.

Are you cleaning your email list often enough?

It’s a common question we get at ZeroBounce: how often should I clean my email list?

Let’s look at the available data to determine that.

Bounces are bound to occur. And when you get more than 2%, that leaves a mark on your sender reputation. Emails start going to the junk folder. You miss opportunities. Email revenue plummets.

Maintenance is the mother of prevention. Just because you haven’t had a cavity in a year doesn’t mean you stop going to the dentist.

So, clean your email list at least quarterly. Some of our customers, whose databases grow rapidly, validate them even more often. If you’re about to send an important campaign, make sure to clean your email list again – even if you checked it a month ago.

There’s no better place for your emails to be other than the inbox of your customers.