Best Email List Hygiene Practice
Best Email List Hygiene Practice
In any marketing campaign, you want to achieve the highest possible customer engagement rates. However, that is still only the first step. One of the critical factors that contribute to engagement is successful email delivery. Through regular email list hygiene, you can improve your campaign’s deliverability and engagement.
A 2017 study on email deliverability revealed that one in five emails failed to reach the inbox and were either lost at the gateway or filtered as spam. So the next question is: How often does your company update its email list? If you don’t remember, it’s been too long!
The importance of maintaining fresh email lists
In order to better personalize emails, it is important to maintain email list hygiene and even re-categorize lists. Personalized messages that resonate and engage with the targeted audience are essential these days to get noticed among the clutter.
A general audience is no longer interested in mass emails! These days, email service providers’ (ESPs) complicated and ever-changing algorithms determine how, where and even whether an email will be delivered, as well as whether it will be opened, clicked, unsubscribed or registered to become inactive. Thus, making sure the list is fresh and clean is the first step to ensuring email delivery.
Consistently monitoring your prospects’ email activity and running a data hygiene check are equally important. Your company’s campaigns will be more successful if you follow these two simple steps.
Here are five best practices for keeping your email list clean:
1. Removing inactive customers
Most companies get rid of customers who do not open or click their emails, or who haven’t purchased for six months, a year, or two years. They do so after sending them a final email to help them retain some customers. Pruning an email list may result in higher deliverability rates and customer engagement, but you should consider this carefully. It was, after all, a previous customer!
2. Segment instead of deleting
Just like life purchasing habits follow cycles. Consider reducing the number of emails a previously active customer receives. Rather than sending weekly emails, you might want to send biweekly or monthly emails instead. Be sure to add enticing offers that are tailored to their interests and will attract their attention. That’s why it’s so important to personalize the message!
3. Don’t let the spam filter catch your messages:
After your subscribers or followers, sign up for your e-mails:
A.) Make sure your subject line is enticing.
Subject lines often indicate whether an email is worth reading for recipients. Grammar and spelling errors, as well as too many exclamation points, are common warning signs. Using ALL CAPS and “click here” may also cause your audience to turn off, at least if their spam filter doesn’t catch them first.
B.) Address properly
The way you’re addressed is a surefire way to identify spam.
How do they address you? It says “Hi” or “Hey there!”? I prefer emails without salutations to emails with generic openings.
Is your name spelled incorrectly in the message? I have, for example, filled out online forms too quickly and mistakenly entered my name incorrectly (oops!) and received an email later informing me of my spelling mistake.
C.) Correct audience targeting: Don’t get tagged as spam.
Rather than sending an email to the wrong audience, it is best not to send it. Incorrect targeting is not acceptable. A company’s valuable resources are being wasted in this irresponsible way. Certainly, the company’s reputation is at stake, and if they got their data from an outside vendor, so is theirs!
4. Purchase email lists from trustworthy providers
To ensure that you can reach your intended audience, ensure that the data you purchase from an outside provider is customized to the category you are targeting, not to mention that it is also current and accurate. Make sure that you can spot shady data providers.
5. Consult an outside expert when necessary
There is no need to worry when a company cannot or does not make financial sense to update their data in-house. There are many companies that offer affordable email list cleaning service and append services today, as well as sell email lists.
In addition to providing campaign management services, many of these same companies also handle creative, deployment, and analytic.
Campaigns are more effective with clean data!
In the end, regardless of whether you target B2B or B2C, cleaning and freshening your data simply means making your email list more thorough and accurate. Data-driven campaigns can increase campaigns’ effectiveness, sales, and return on investment.
Additionally, you’ll have an even better understanding of each customer (deliverability), which will result in a higher level of engagement with your brand’s messaging.
