How To Prevent An Email List Disaster
(Read this if you want to avoid trashing your email list or an expensive and embarrassing data breach)

Automation is a core feature of most modern email marketing systems.

But it can also be a double edged sword.

All it takes is a small misconfiguration for an automation to trash your email list.

And very often, if that happens, your email marketing provider can’t help.

Here’s why.

The backups your provider makes are for “disaster recovery”.

In a catastrophe, they will grab the latest good backup… and spin up a new copy of their entire email marketing platform.

But here’s the problem

These disaster recovery backups are huge.

They hold thousands of customer accounts, plus all the software that makes up the platform itself.

So as much as your provider might want to help you fix problems in your account… it’s just too difficult and expensive to use these disaster recovery backups for anything other than a full platform restore.

It would be like restoring your entire computer to get a single file... and they are not going to do that unless the data loss was their fault or responsibility.

• So if you trash your email list by deleting the wrong segment …
  
  
• Or you upload the wrong CSV file…
  
  
• Or you misconfigure an app integration or automation…
  
  
• Or a disgruntled employee / hacker wipes your list deliberately…
  

You’re on your own

And it’s far more likely you’ll lose subscribers for those reasons than it is for your email marketing provider’s servers to get wiped out in a storm.

The risks skyrocket if you use third party lead generation or automation tools.

Or if other people can login to your account.

Blogging service, JournalSpace found this out the hard way in 2009.

A disgruntled employee wiped all their data… including their only backup.

And without a viable backup, it was game over for their business.

The bottom line is this

Even if you could persuade (or pay) your provider to help you recover lost or trashed subscribers, you still need to make your own backups.

That’s because, like “eggs in baskets”…

You should never keep all your data in one place.

Especially as accounts can and do get shut down without warning.

You see, email deliverability is an email marketing provider’s prime concern.

It’s the ‘golden goose’ they must protect at all costs.

All it takes is a badly received email to put you on the wrong side of policy…

And boom…

Your account could be shut down

If that happens, it could take weeks for them to give your list back (if at all).

Look, you don’t have to be a conspiracy-theorist or white nationalist to get booted from your email marketing provider. Regular, hardworking men and women who are running legitimate businesses, serving their audiences and providing for their families, get booted too.

Affiliate marketers, for example, are high on the hate list for many providers. 

If you don’t believe me, go check their Acceptable Use Policies.

And as the old saying goes…

“One Backup Is No Backup”

So if all the subscribers you’ve spent time and money building a relationship with suddenly vanished…. would you have an up-to-date backup?

If you’re like me… the answer is “probably not”.

It’s such a hassle remembering to login and export your lists, isn’t it?

Like me, you probably started out with good intentions, but with so many other things to take care of, enthusiasm fizzled out fast.

And pretty soon, the last backup you have is weeks or months old.

Thing is…

Using old backups is risky

At best, you might just annoy people who unsubscribed since you made the export.

That might lead to spam complaints and lower engagement, killing your deliverability.

Or you might hit a recycled spam trap and find yourself blacklisted. That’s when an email address gets abandoned by its owner and is recycled into a spam trap by the provider… and this can happen in as little as 30-90 days.

At worst, every CSV export file you store on your computer or cloud drive is…

A lawsuit waiting to happen

Especially if you aren’t carefully encrypting your export files before storing them.

All it takes is for one of your cloud drive connected devices to get lost or stolen, and your subscribers personal data could easily fall into the wrong hands.

A data breach will not only destroy all trust in your business, it can also result in a business-crippling fine… or expensive lawsuits from angry customers whose personal information got leaked on your watch.

That’s why I created ListLockr

It protects your email list by making a secure, encrypted backup of your key subscriber data.

Automatically… Every. Single. Day.

You just set it up once and it’s done.

You don’t have to think about it… or “do” anything.

The service encrypts all subscriber personal data, and enforces a 30 day data retention period… making it 100% compliant with GDPR and other privacy laws.

For added security, we don’t allow backups to be directly downloaded from your account. Not even by us. Instead, when you request a download, a special time-limited link is sent to you as the account holder.

It also has a flexible backup quota to help you control costs. This means that as your subscriber numbers grow, we’ll simply remove older backups to keep you within your chosen plan.

We’ll also send you weekly backup summaries and give you advanced warning as you start to outgrow your plan, giving you time to upgrade when the time is right for you.

I should probably wax on about all the other features, but the bottom line is

ListLockr can protect thousands of subscribers for less than it costs to replace one of them

Let’s do some quick math using industry averages.

At $0.50 cost-per-click to a landing page with a 10% opt-in rate, that’s an average of $5 per opt-in.

But not all opt-ins are equal.

Once you weed out the fake, mistyped and unconfirmed emails, and factor in 20% average email open rates, your cost per responsive subscriber is nearer $25.

So, replacing 1,000 responsive subscribers could cost you $25,000

Let that sink in for a moment.

ListLockr can protect 3,000 subscribers for just $99 a year.

That’s about $2 a week. Literally less than a latte at Starbucks.

And the more subscribers you have, the cheaper it gets.

You can see why our customers say it’s…

“A no-brainer insurance policy“

ListLockr is compatible with the following Email Marketing Providers:

What’s more, you can enjoy complete protection from day one secure in the knowledge you are protected by our triple guarantee, which means:

• Money Back – if you are not happy for any reason at all
• Price Lock – no sneaky price rises while your chosen plan is active
• Customer Support – we are fully committed to your success

So with all that said, I look forward to seeing you on the other side.

Yours sincerely,

Rob Woodgate
Founder of ListLockr

Ps – If you use some other provider, don’t panic. We’ll be integrating with more providers as time goes on, so simply click here and I’ll let you know when your provider is supported.