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Email List Cleaning

An engaged email list is a profitable one. When subscribers open, click and share your emails, they are not only more aware of your product, but they’re more likely to buy from you. What’s the secret to creating an engaged email list? An engaged list is achieved through a variety of tactics that work in concert to keep subscribers active and engaged.

No one wants to lose subscribers, but unengaged recipients can hurt your email reputation. If many recipients delete your emails without opening them or, even worse, mark them as spam, this could signal to inbox providers that you’re sending unwanted content. This, in turn, could impact your deliverability.

That’s why email list cleaning is vital because engaged subscribers are important to your bottom line. This article will explain how to keep your email lists as clean as a whistle.

What is email list cleaning?

Email list cleaning, also known as scrubbing, is the process of removing inactive, unengaged email addresses and/or bounced emails from your list. This ensures that you only send emails to people who want to read them. Proper email list cleaning will help you:

  • Boost your engagement rates
  • Improve your sender reputation
  • Reduce the chances of landing in the spam folder

You may see your email subscriber list shrink, but it’s better to have slightly fewer subscribers than to have unengaged recipients.

How to clean your email lists

Here are five ways to keep your lists fresh.

1. Define how often you need to clean up your list.

How frequently you scrub your email list will depend on certain aspects of your regime. Generally, we recommend cleaning your list every six months.

By regularly reviewing your engagement metrics, you will get a clear picture of how healthy your list is overall, and this can help you decide how often you need to address list cleaning.

A good rule of thumb is to stick to your email cleaning cadence revisiting it  each year and determine if you need to change your approach.

2. Don’t purchase lists from third-party . vendors or anybody ever. While you may reap some immediate, short-term benefits, the majority of the addresses on these lists won’t earn you much value. In addition to that, you also won’t be qualified contacts.   This in turn will affect your enegagement rate which won’t be high as a result.

It’s much better to take the time to create your own lists from scratch. Study has shown that email beats every other form of online marketing in terms of RIO.

All of the above things will affect your sender repution which can have a very negative impact on your overall reputation as well as brand awareness.

3. Remove bounced and invalid emails.

Bounces refer to emails that don’t get delivered because the email address is invalid. This could be because the recipient typed it incorrectly when they subscribed to the email list or it’s a company email address that no longer exists.

You don’t want to send emails to invalid addresses because this can negatively impact your metrics, especially your delivery rates. Experts recommend that you keep your bounce rate under 0.5%. Anything above that could hurt your sender reputation.

Most email service providers (ESPs) automatically remove hard bounces after two failed attempts to deliver emails. But in some cases, invalid email addresses are harder to identify.

4. Address unengaged recipients

Try a reengagement campaign to gauge their interest in receiving your communications. This type of campaign gives recipients the opportunity to update their email preferences. In the best case scenario, the recipient says they still want to hear from, but maybe less frequently. Or maybe they decide to unsubscribe. Either way, it will help your email list.

5. Confirm email subscriptions

There are several ways to confirm email addresses upon signup. We recommend providing a double opt-in method because it’s the best way to ensure that the subscriber truly wants your emails.

Double opt-in signup requires the subscriber to enter their email address on your signup form and then to confirm that they meant to do so, usually through a confirmation email containing a link that they need to follow to finish registration.

This method demands a little more work on the user’s end, but it’s worth it for both the sender and recipient because it helps keep invalid email addresses off your list and reduces the chances of the recipient getting unwanted emails.

Cleaning your email lists on a regular basis will improve your engagement metrics, sender reputation, and deliverability rates.

I hope you enjoyed reading this post. 

About The Author

Marcia Turley is the founder and chief content creator of Macventure Agency. She is passionate about promoting efficient B2B lead generation channels and executing on data-driven strategies for her clients.
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