The Agency Risk That Most Don't Think About
When an agency sends a campaign from a client's sending domain, the agency's reputation is tied to the client's email list quality. A high bounce rate damages the client's sender reputation — which damages every future campaign the agency runs for them.
Protecting the client's list health is part of the service.
Why Client Email Lists Are Often Dirty
Clients collect emails through many channels with varying data quality standards:
- Event registrations with typos
- Webinar signups from years ago that were never cleaned
- Trade show badge scans that capture business cards indiscriminately
- Purchased lists (which should be an immediate red flag)
- CRM exports that include unsubscribes not synced to the ESP
Sohovi finds gaps, duplicates, and format errors in your CRM data — so your team is working from records they can trust.
By the time a list reaches an agency for a campaign send, it may have significant problems the client doesn't know about.
The Agency Pre-Send Audit Protocol
Step 1: Request the list in CSV format
Never send from a list you haven't reviewed. Ask for the raw CSV before it's uploaded to the ESP.
Step 2: Check list metadata
How many records? What's the oldest opt-in date? What's the source of each segment? Ask the client these questions — they reveal list quality quickly.
Step 3: Run basic format checks
Sohovi lets you set up validation rules for any column and instantly see which rows fall outside them — no code or SQL required.
- Every record has an email address (no blanks)
- All emails follow the basic pattern (something@something.something)
- No obvious typo domains (gmial, yhaoo, hotmal)
- No role addresses (info@, admin@) if this is a promotional send
Step 4: Deduplication
Sort by email address. Remove duplicates. A customer on the list twice will receive the email twice — generating potential double unsubscribes and spam complaints.
Sohovi automatically finds every duplicate in your dataset — including near-matches — and shows you exactly which rows are affected.
Step 5: Suppression check
Confirm the list has been suppressed against:
- Previous hard bounces
- Previous unsubscribes
- Any suppression lists the client maintains (competitors, employees)
Step 6: Verification for lists not recently sent
For any list or segment that hasn't been emailed in 6+ months, run it through an email verification service before sending. The cost ($10–50 for most lists) is trivial compared to the deliverability damage from a high bounce rate.
Documenting the Audit
Keep a record of every audit: list size, issues found, actions taken, final clean list size. This documentation protects the agency if a deliverability problem is later blamed on "the list the agency used."
