Email is one of the oldest digital marketing channels and is still one of the most effective. But the success of your email marketing campaigns depends on the quality of your email list. Around 30% of B2B contact database goes obsolete every year, resulting in inaccurate email lists. As a result, your email campaigns suffer from high bounce rates and poor engagement. But you can avoid such issues with email list cleaning.
Read further for your email list cleaning 101.
What Is Email List Cleaning?
Email list cleaning is the process of updating your marketing email list by removing inactive and outdated contacts. Cleaning your email lists regularly ensures that only recipients interested in your emails receive them and that your emails avoid being marked as spam.
However, you must not confuse email list cleaning with email list verification, even though they sound similar. Email list verification services only help marketers determine if emails in their list are valid, but they do not clean the list.
Additional Read: How To Build A Massive Email List?
Why Should You Clean Your Email List?
There are serious upsides for marketers who maintain mailing list hygiene. Some of them are as follows:
1. Low Bounce Rate
Emails sent to invalid email addresses result in higher bounce back. But after cleaning your list, you only have authentic subscribers who look forward to reading your emails, thus reducing bounce rates.
2. Increase Engagement Rate
A clean email list contains addresses of subscribers who are genuinely interested in your product/service. They are more likely to open your emails, go through the content, and maybe click that CTA.
3.Strengthen Sender Reputation
When you send emails in bulk, high bounce rates, undelivered emails, and low engagement signal Email Service Providers (ESP) to mark your emails as spam. A clean list allows you to deliver emails to genuine email addresses and subscribers. It builds a positive reputation with ESPs, ensuring your emails reach all the inboxes.
What Best Practices to Follow for Email List Cleaning?
Now let us go through some best practices you must follow to maintain mailing list hygiene.
1. Get The Basics Right
Start email list cleaning by looking for duplicate entries and merging them.
The next step is to look for spelling mistakes. It may be difficult to recognize spellings of names, but typos in the host domain name, misplaced full stops, and unrecognized characters are easy to find and correct.
Then remove spam email addresses. These email addresses are generic and contain random letters and digits that make no sense, and it is safe to go ahead and delete them.
2. Use Double Opt-In
Double opt-in is the same as when you register for a service, and it sends you a mail with a link to verify your email. You can also use the same technique to create a clean email list.
When you get a recipient’s email address, send the verification email. If the email is delivered, you have the correct address. At the same time, recipients know they have permitted you to send them emails.
3. Renew Opt-In Or Provide the Choice to Opt-Down
Double opt-in works well for new subscribers. But what about old subscribers who do not engage with your emails but are yet to unsubscribe? For email list cleaning, give them two choices – renew opt-in or option to opt-out.
As the name suggests, opt-in renewal is sending disengaged subscribers a reminder that they had subscribed to your emails, but there has been a lack of engagement on their end. Ask them to re-subscribe to your emails if they still want to receive your emails.
Or, you can give them a choice to opt-down, i.e., fewer emails than before. Not all subscribers want to read every newsletter or promotional email; reducing the frequency of emails for such subscribers can bring their engagement back on track.
4. Start A Re-Engagement Campaign
Unengaged subscribers do not always signify that they want to opt-out of receiving your emails, and chances are they may not like the content you offer them with your emails. So, before you mark them red for email list cleaning, try to win them back with re-engagement emails.
Some time-tested ways to reengage your inactive subscribers are:
- Exclusive content
- Discounts and coupons
- Special perks and gifts
According to research, turning an inactive subscriber into a customer is 5 times cheaper than acquiring a new customer. So, the above re-engagement email strategies are worth trying before you clean your emailing list.
5. Make It Easy for Subscribers To Opt-Out
Marketers spend countless hours and dollars acquiring new emails, verifying them, and cleaning their lists before they send their email campaigns. So, letting their subscribers opt-out of emails does not go well with many, and some companies make it difficult for subscribers to opt-out on purpose.
Consequences? Recipients mark emails as spam or block the sender. Not to mention the negative impact on their reputation with ISPs.
Instead of trying to keep your subscribers on your list by any means possible, it is better to let them unsubscribe. Include an unsubscribe button in your emails that is easy to find so uninterested subscribers can easily opt-out.
6. Invest in Marketing Automation
Manually scrubbing your email list is challenging and leaves you prone to errors. But marketing automation makes email list cleaning an easy task. You must set rules to remove emails from your list automatically, and the email list cleaning service will ensure the rest.
These rules can be based on bounce rates, engagement metrics, or time limits. Every time an email breaks any of the thresholds, it gets pruned automatically. Marketing automation also provides you insights to optimize your email marketing strategy.
Final Words
That is all you need to know about cleaning your email list. A clean email list will help you create targeted email campaigns that actually engage your audiences and drive sales. So, perform email list cleaning regularly to get rid of obsolete and spam addresses before they can affect your engagement and increase bounce rates.