How To Maintain a Clean Email List? Here Is a Step-By-Step Guide
How To Maintain a Clean Email List? Here Is a Step-By-Step Guide
Keeping your email list healthy will dramatically reduce the possibility that your messages will be marked as spam. But how do organizations and big companies maintain a clean email list? Here are some tips on how you can:
- Scrub your email list first
- Purge any invalid or hard-bounced addresses
- Stay away from the most common mistakes of keeping a clean email list
- Build a sustainable and engaged list
What is email list cleaning, and why should you do it?
It is the act of updating or “cleaning,” your subscriber list. This is accomplished by removing out-of-date or unengaged contacts, along with acknowledging unsubscribe requests.
Cleaning email lists regularly helps prevent email from going to spam by addressing the following common problems:
- Emailing inactive addresses
- Poor deliverability rate. This one means emails won’t find their way to customers’ inboxes.
Let’s examine each of them in more detail.
1. A majority of email addresses become inactive after some time
Over time, email lists become less accurate. According to some studies, 4.5 percent of your subscribers will become dormant after 28 days.
You may also find spam traps (stale emails become these) and fake emails generated by bots in your list. This can quickly deteriorate and turn a lucrative email list into one that can’t be revived even by a marketing expert as Neil Patel.
2. A bad list management can ruin deliverability and sender reputation
A clean email list helps you maintain a good sender reputation.
Sender reputation and domain reputation are essential factors affecting deliverability. Your recipient’s Internet Service Provider (ISP) acts as a bouncer when sending emails from your domain. Its job is to accept relevant emails and reject the problematic ones.
When Is The Right Time To Scrub Email List?
Always perform an email list cleaning before switching email service providers (ESPs). The following reasons should convince you to do this:
- Bad contacts are not transferred.
- Your reputation is maintained.
- Your warm-up process will speed up.
- Active subscribers are the only ones you pay for, not bad or inactive ones.
You should clean your email subscriber list every three months, even if you consider switching email services. Alternatively, if your open rates suddenly drop, you can start using email list cleaning and verification services.
It is also a good idea to perform monthly checks. They are perfect when you want to increase your subscriber base rapidly.
In conclusion, keep these points in mind:
- Poor email hygiene will hurt your delivery rates, which means lost sales. Make sure you check your lists regularly.
- Consider email list cleaning before switching your ESP to protect your sender reputation.
- Verify your email list annually (once each quarter) and unsubscribe unresponsive subscribers who have not opened your emails in at least three months.
- Remove spam traps, out-of-date, spelled incorrectly emails, and otherwise outdated emails using email cleaning tools.
- Marketing automation and email segmentation will help you keep your email engagement high.
- Emails that go to junk can be a result of many reasons. Using quality email scrubbing software and following the best practices for email list cleaning described above is a reliable way to keep your emails spam-free.
Keep your lists clean and verify your email addresses to avoid most spam traps. Be sure your carefully written emails reach your subscribers!
