Importing your email list into Braze
An important step in setting yourself as a successful email sender is ensuring that you have a high-quality email list. Proper email list management can improve your deliverability and give you more accurate and clean campaign results.
Considerations before importing
We urge customers to not send legally-required transactional emails to SMS gateways as there is a strong likelihood that those emails will not be delivered.
Although emails sent using a phone number plus the provider’s gateway domain (known as an MM3) can result in the email being received as an SMS (text) message, some of our email providers to not support this behavior. For example, sending an email to a T-mobile phone number (for example [email protected]) would send an SMS to whoever owns that phone number on the T-mobile network. Note any emails sent to these SMS gateways may not be delivered, although the sending of that email will still count towards your email billing. See here for the full list of gateway domain names that may not be supported.
Validate your email lists
Before importing your email list into Braze, validate that your list includes only genuine email addresses. A high bounce rate can damage your email sender reputation.
Email list cleaning services can do this for you by determining if the email address follows the correct syntax and has the physical properties of an email address, verifying the email domain, and connecting to the email server to authenticate if the email address exists there.
Identify your engaged users
In order to identify your most engaged users, first remove deeply lapsed users. It’s a best practice to not email users who have not engaged with an email in over six months as this can damage your email sender reputation. When importing your email list, make sure to only include users who have opened an email from you within the last six months.
In the long term, you should also consider implementing a sunset policy.
Avoid suppression lists
If you are transitioning off an existing email provider, make certain that you do not import users from a suppression list. Suppression lists feature email addresses that have either unsubscribed, marked your emails as spam, or hard bounced.
Methods for importing
Once you have your email list prepared, there are several ways to import users into Braze, such as via the Braze REST API or CSV files. Read more at our dedicated User Import article.