9 Must-Do’s to Keep Email List Hygiene More Effective
9 Must-Do’s to Keep Email List Hygiene More Effective
You would want the highest levels of engagement from your customers as an email marketer. In addition to email list hygiene, it is also important to ensure that emails are delivered.
Keep track of your email marketing metrics, and most importantly, make sure your email list is clean to ensure the effectiveness of your campaigns and to target the right people.
Your email deliverability and customer engagement metrics will definitely improve if you have a clean, healthy, and highly engaged email list.
According to a study published in 2017, about one out of five emails never makes it into the recipient’s inbox. Emails that trigger spam filters either get blocked or redirected to the junk folder.
Your deliverability rates further drop as a result of poor sender reputation. You should only keep email subscribers on your list who are interested in your business.
Email list best practices are thus crucial to keeping your list clean for email marketing!
What Is Email List Hygiene?
The purpose of email list hygiene is to remove inactive and unengaged subscribers from your list. Cleaning your email list allows you to stop sending emails to people who aren’t interested, increasing your subscriber engagement. You can save both time and money by doing this.
9 Best Practices For Email List Hygiene
Deleting inactive subscribers
When it comes to email list hygiene, cleansing is one of the essential steps.
If your list has a lot of inactive subscribers, let’s say, subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked any links in your emails, it may be time to let them go.
Send a re-engagement email before deleting your subscribers. In this way, they will remain on your mailing list if they remain interested but don’t have time to read your emails.
Use this tactic sparingly. People are often busy, and although they want to hear from you, they cannot find the time to do so. You will lose these customers if you remove them from the list without notice.
Furthermore, it would help if you investigated why email engagement has decreased.
Several reasons could be causing subscribers to become inactive:
- There is no value – You include promotional content in your emails, but this offers no value to your subscribers.
- Not relevant – You don’t provide readers with helpful content.
- Insufficient emails: You didn’t provide them with enough information.
- Emails fail to stand out – Your audience may have received plenty of messages from other companies, so yours may not have made an impression.
2. Segment your list of subscribers
You may want to segment your list instead of deleting inactive subscribers. In the case of inactive subscribers, you might want to move them to a segment where you send them only relevant offers.
Also, you might want to try sending fewer emails to inactive subscribers. Rather than sending one email every week, consider sending two or one emails a month to this segmented list.
Check whether engagement improves after trying it out for some time. After that, you can remove subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails and don’t open any of them.
3. Write your subject lines carefully
As soon as you have subscribers, it would be best to keep them interested in your content. Having great content is great, but what happens when your subscribers don’t open your emails at all?
This may be since your email subject lines are not compelling enough.
Make sure your email subject lines are short, clear, and intriguing but not too detailed.
Put more effort into the subject line of your emails to see if you get higher open rates.
4. Be specific with your audience
As you segment your email list, you need to ensure that you are sending the right emails to the right audience.
Whether you segment subscribers by location, past purchases, or interests, make sure you send each group the correct type of email.
A wrongly targeted email can turn your potential customers off and cause them to unsubscribe or report your emails as spam.
Rather than send the wrong email to the wrong segment of your list, it is better not to send one, so take your time to create an email campaign.
5. Use a professional email address
Using a domain ending in @yourcompany.com rather than personal accounts such as xxxxx@gmail.com or xxxxx@hotmail.com offers two advantages.
Firstly, it makes your emails appear more professional, and secondly, it conforms to DMRAC guidelines.
DMRAC is an acronym for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance. An email authentication protocol makes sure that other parties do not deceive people by using the name of the sender’s company in an email.
Spam emails often disguise themselves to appear to be from another location, so all you need to know is that they camouflage themselves. To avoid spammers having access to email accounts such as @ABC.com, spammers may name their email account ABC@gmail.com. Let’s say ABC is a company.
DMRAC might cause Google and other ESPs to perceive marketing messages sent through personal email accounts as scams. Therefore, your newsletters are likely to end up in spam folders.
6. Personalize with your email
When you send an email, you should make the recipient feel that the message is personal. By doing so, you will give them a reason to open the message.
Rather than writing ‘Dear Customer,’ it is best to write the customer’s name instead. Statistics show that emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened.
Personalized subject lines should not end there. Your message should contain relevant information as well. Send them content that will be useful and make sense to them based on the demographic of the audience.
7. Seek expert advice
Do not panic if you are just getting started with email marketing and do not have the right tools.
Many experts are available to help you do email marketing in the best possible way these days.
You can receive guidance from those who have already achieved the results you’re looking for in the field. By cutting costs and resources associated with email marketing, you can achieve minimal ROI (return on investment).
You could benefit from the services provided by companies that specialize in email list hygiene.
8. Avoid the spam filter
If you wish to avoid being caught by a spam filter, you should do everything to avoid it. If your subject line in all capital letters, packed with exclamation points, has grammar mistakes, you may risk losing the interest of your readers.
Thirdly, pay attention to the audience targeting so that you don’t end up in the spam folder. It is better not to send an email than to send it to the wrong audience. You end up wasting both your time and resources, as well as the reputation of your company.
9. Do not purchase lists.
You should never buy an email list. Because the recipients are not your target demographic, spam complaints are very likely to increase because of their poor hygiene and the fact that the recipients are not your target demographic.
Mailing lists can also hide spam traps. Generally speaking, spam traps are email addresses that were initially real or a ‘pure spam trap’ originating from an anti-spam entity or Internet Service Provider.
If you are tempted to purchase lists, stay away from them even if they reduce your deliverability rate by 98% to 25%.
Using a list with poor hygiene can be undone, but you would save time and money by not buying lists at all. Also, use spam trap removal service to eliminate these kind of email addresses.
