Email direct marketing is simple on the surface. But the further you delve into the requirements, it can seem complex. One task that confuses some small business email marketers is list hygiene and general email list management.

To ensure a clean and honorable reputation, many in-house permission email marketing administrators remove all bounces that arrive. But there is a difference between a hard bounce and a soft bounce.

Because 20 to 35 percent of all email addresses change every year, opt-in email marketing administrators are faced with the task of managing bounced email messages after each delivery. A hard bounce is an email message returned because the recipient's email is no longer valid or because a network problem has occurred on their side. A soft bounce is an email direct marketing message that never gets to your recipient's inbox, usually due to full mailboxes at free email services like Hotmail or Yahoo! which limit email storage.

Before removing bounced email from your customer service email list, a smart email strategy is checking first for typographical errors. Was it sent to joe@ gmali.com, john456 [at] aolcom, bob [at] hotmall.com, jill [at] alo.com, or fred [at] msn.net? These are common email marketing campaign errors that can be corrected to improve deliverability. You may resend soft opt-in email marketing bounces periodically until the situation is rectified.

"We're proud to offer email marketing campaign bounce management services for our customers," states Ross Kramer, CEO of Listrak. "As part of this email service, we let customers set their own hard bounce grace period. We also resend soft html email marketing bounces for up to 14 days to ensure emails are never missed because of a temporarily full mailbox. Once a customer's email deliverability grace period is reached, email addresses are automatically purged from their targeted email marketing distribution lists."

Listrak's targeted email direct marketing solution helps email marketers manage list hygiene. To learn more about the Listrak bulk email service, read email direct marketing articles, white papers and customer newsletter archives, visit listrak.com.

About Listrak
Listrak is a leading provider of hosted email marketing software that allows permission-based marketers to manage, send, track and grow their email marketing investment. Listrak services clients such as Daimler Chrysler, Motorola, L'Oreal and the Islands of the Bahamas from its Lititz, PA headquarters. Listrak was named the 2006 Small Business Technological Excellence Award winner by the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, the Emerging Business of the Year 2006 by the Central Penn Business Journal, a Top Fifty Fastest Growing Company in 2006 and 2005 by the Central Penn Business Journal, and the 2005 Growth Company of the Year by the Technology Council of Central PA. Http://www.listrak.com.