An outdated email list could be one of the potential factors contributing to low open rates. Enhancing your email deliverability can be achieved by implementing an email list cleaning exercise to remove contacts who have lost interest or become disengaged.
If you haven’t reviewed your email in a while, now might be a good time to start as soon as possible.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at email hygiene and walk you through the nitty-gritty so you can have a sparkling new list that serves its purpose.
What Does Email List Cleaning Mean?
Email list cleaning – also called email scrubbing – is the practice of regularly analyzing, reviewing, and updating an email contact list by weeding out inactive and irrelevant contacts from the database. The resulting, cleaned email list is more responsive to subscriber preferences and generates more productive interactions with contacts.
For instance, depending on your business, you may prune your email list of recipients who haven’t interacted with any of your emails in the last 90 days. Also, you can draw out those subscribers who have decided to unsubscribe from your mailing list.
Email List Verification Vs. Email List Cleaning – Know the Difference
Email verification is the process of determining the validity of the email IDs on your list. It enables identifying possible spam traps and other email address inconsistencies before they get flagged by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or Email Service Providers (ESPs) and affect your reputation permanently.
Most of us are aware that a clean email list enhances deliverability. If a significant percentage of your emails are getting blocked or filtered to the spam folder, it affects your ability to reach customers’ inboxes. Email verification can help you identify those emails so you can decide what to do with them.
Removing them is a move that will actually enable you to prune your list of these invalid or unnecessary email addresses. Thus, it is an essential step after email verification that’ll help improve your sender reputation and your deliverability – by showing ISPs that you’re a responsible sender.
Why Should You Regularly Clean Your Email List?
In a 2020 survey, 46% of responding mobile users cited email as the preferred mode of business communication. Likewise, 70% of millennials expressed frustration with brands that irrelevant emails.
This data is significant for two reasons. Firstly, it trains the spotlight on the vast marketing and targeting potential of email marketing. Secondly, it also highlights the need for brands to be more attentive to their mailing list- especially for millennials, who comprise a potent target audience.
Apart from this data, here are some more critical reasons to consider email cleaning on a regular basis:
Manage Changes In Data:
Your emailing list quality depreciates significantly with every passing year due to various reasons. For instance, your contact may have changed jobs, switched mailbox service providers, and/or even abandoned their old email addresses.
Regularly cleaning your email list can help lower spam complaints, unsubscribes, and bounce rates. But on the other hand, it can improve your deliverability, click-through, and open rates.
Ensure Genuine Leads:
Email cleaning can ensure the leads are from genuine subscribers through your web forms, not bots, spam traps, or typos.
While you may have a solid team to cover your business’s cybersecurity, an unprotected input form can cause significant damage too. Email cleaning will help reduce the possibility of inaccurate or fraudulent data from attacking your forms while safeguarding your deliverability and sender reputation.
Drive Engagement And Enhance Overall Email Marketing KPIs:
Regularly cleaning your email list will facilitate a more specific list of contacts or subscribers who are interested in your product and engaging with your marketing emails. The targeted lists will also enable you to craft content that appeals to them and addresses their needs and interests.
Even better, with regular email list clean-ups, your email open, click-through, and conversion rates will improve. An engaged community in ecommerce implies customer satisfaction and leads to revenue growth.
Lower Costs And Enhances ROI:
Most email service providers charge based on the number of emails being sent and/or the number of subscribers you have. So when sending your emails to people the unengaged subscribers on your list who don’t want them, it eats into your marketing budgets.
Email list cleaning lets you send your list to relevant, engaged subscribers, thus enhancing your overall marketing return on investment (ROI).
Boost Email Deliverability And Your Sender Reputation:
Disengaged, outdated lists lead to poor email deliverability and negatively impact your sender reputation.
For instance, Gmail and other Management Service Providers (MSPs) can penalize marketers for poor list hygiene if they send irrelevant messages to disengaged recipients or those who have not opted to receive the emails.
Address Spam Complaints And Spam Traps:
When recipients get hassled by your constant emails and cannot locate the unsubscribe button, the next best step will likely be to might report you as spam. Unfortunately, this will result in inbox service providers (ISPs) treating your email marketing as spam. Consequently, your emails will get delivered to your subscribers’ spam folders rather than inboxes.
Keeping an updated mailing list will reduce the number of uninterested subscribers. This will bring down the number of spam complaints as well as the deliverability problems you’re facing.
Likewise, spam traps act like real email addresses. Cleaning your mailing lists will help you identify spam traps, which are otherwise not easy to see.
Manage Inherited Lists:
Where you’ve taken up a new job, you’ll likely get an email list in the handover. At the same time, you may not know much about the list, for example, how old it is, when it was last cleaned, whether it is a bulk mailing list, or other similar concerns.
A practical solution would be to deep clean your email list, identifying whom to send emails and whom to remove.
Avoid Being Blocklisted:
Emails can get blocked, and the sender is delisted if a major blocklist notices spam originating from your IP or domain. While delisting typically takes a few days or weeks, your IP or domain will remain blocked until the process is satisfactorily resolved.
Improved Reporting:
Finally, bloated email lists, filled with unengaged subscribers, can make it challenging to understand the outcomes of the email marketing strategy. This is because inactivity and spam complaints by subscribers will throw your stats off balance.
On the other hand, for a smaller list with an interested and engaged audience, the reporting of email marketing statistics will be more reliable and accurate. And the data can be safely used to help you make informed decisions about your future marketing efforts.
How Often Should I Clean My Email List
It is advisable to clean your lists as often as possible or at least every 3-4 months.
If your email list is extensive and you have never cleaned it before, and/or if you’ve started working at a new place and are unsure about the list, then now is an excellent time to implement email list cleaning.
Performing real-time verification for your web forms is another effective way to help safeguard your forms from fake addresses daily.
In addition to the routine cleaning schedule, here are some other significant occasions when you should implement list cleaning:
When You Purchase An Email List:
To begin with, in email marketing, a quality and well-targeted list will fetch you better outcomes than an extensive bulk list. For this reason, instead of buying an email list, you should always grow your list organically.
Nonetheless, if you have purchased a list or inherited one, you ought to clean it ASAP, or else it could hamper deliverability and your sender reputation. At worst, you may be permanently blocked.
When Conducting Data Transfer Between CRM Tools And Switching ESPs:
Bad CRM data can have a negative impact on the ROI of your email marketing campaigns.
Bad data refers to outdated, incorrect, poorly formatted, or incomplete data. It can affect sales productivity, and the result is wasting your precious dollars. According to Gartner, poor data quality annually costs organizations about $12.9 million.
It can help you prevent or minimize this dirty data from entering your CRM database. In addition, creating formatting standards and following a regular data maintenance schedule can help your lists stay clean, organized, and effective.
Clean data is critical for your email marketing strategy. Automating and outsourcing this task can help you conveniently optimize your lists.
Likewise, when switching from one external services provider (ESP) to another, you must clean your data, separating the active from inactive subscribers. In addition, it will enable you to create a reactivation campaign at your existing ESP.
When Acquiring New Emails or Trying To Re-Engage Customers:
Whenever you obtain new email addresses, ensure that they are legitimate. cleaning and verification can prevent any unpleasant surprises you may encounter in your email marketing journey.
Also, if you’re trying to reconnect with inactive subscribers with win-back marketing campaigns, remember to clean your list first and remove spam traps and other threats.
When implementing a re-engagement email drip campaign to bring your subscribers back, in the first email, enquire if the recipients want to continue receiving emails from you. Provide the option to click on a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ button to make the process easier and generate more meaningful outcomes.
While the ‘no’ gets removed, the ‘yes’ clicks should be encouraged to interact with your business. Leverage helpful guides and information, discounts, and other incentives to nurture this segment into the funnel in a way that will facilitate conversions.
When Adding Or Migrating To a New Customer Data Platform (CDP):
Before organizing your data with a CDP, you should ensure that your data is updated and accurate.
Whether you’re new and inheriting a collection of data sources that need organizing, or you’re planning to identify new segments, create models, and implement real-time personalization, it’s an appropriate time to clean your email marketing list.
Email List Cleaning Best Practices
You needn’t feel overwhelmed if you have never done a list cleaning before. Rest assured, as long as you’ve recognized the need, you’re already on the right track.
Clean Your Most Active Lists First:
When you get down to the process of list cleaning, always start with your most active lists – the ones in which you send out email messages the most frequently.
Where your lists are well-segmented, you will likely have several different lists. In such scenarios, work systematically, one list at a time.
Remove Duplicates And Spammy Email Id’d:
Subscribers sometimes forget they’ve opted in for an email list and then resubscribe when revisiting the website.
Removing duplicates prevents double message sends and keeps your list trim and precise. Similarly, enhancing the efficiency of your email list can be achieved by eliminating email addresses that appear spammy or fake.
Facilitate An Interactive Environment:
Low engagement could be a reflection of uninteresting or irrelevant content. You could motivate engagement by incorporating surveys or feedback forms on recent initiatives such as a new product launch.
Similarly, using multi-list forms within emails to ask contacts about, for instance, the preferred frequency for newsletters or subject interests, will help motivate responses to your emails.
Likewise, offering incentives or providing giveaways to follow you on social media can promote engagement with your email. Based on the feedback, you can remove the inactive and segment the engaged audiences and deploy targeted campaigns in the future.
Leverage Re-engagement Campaigns:
Before writing off unengaged subscribers, think about the types of content that they might be more interested in. For example, win-back emails offering free gifts, discounts, exclusive deals, or content can sometimes nudge your inactive subscribers into activity.
Also, sometimes it could be a case of email fatigue preventing subscribers from engaging with email marketing, for instance, during the festive season. Therefore, add links to your social media handles for those preferring to connect with you there.
Seek Fresh Opt-Ins:
Often, disengaged subscribers don’t unsubscribe. Instead, they find it more convenient to delete such emails individually.
For such subscribers, it is advisable to send opt-in campaigns explaining you’ve noticed a lack of engagement and would prefer not to inconvenience them with further emails. Provide a clear CTA button for re-signing for future emails.
If they don’t respond within 7-10 days, use marketing automation to remove them.
Offer Easy Unsubscribes:
Some marketers purposefully make the unsubscribe process slightly challenging in a bid to hold onto subscribers. However, when your subscribers find it difficult to break away from your emails, they’ll simply mark them as spam. This would hit your sender reputation badly – the ISPs will erode the value of your emails and begin to block/filter your emails in other recipients’ inboxes too.
Diligently Remove Those Who Have Opted Out/Unsubscribed:
Where a recipient chooses to opt out of your email marketing messages, ensure you comply with their request without delay. If they report you as spam, you could be setting yourself up for new challenges.
Implement Automation:
Marketing automation is an excellent tool for list cleaning. It lets you set and automatically manage subscriber lists based on specific criteria.
For instance, delete the addresses of those who haven’t engaged for a pre-set time frame or emails that have bounced twice or more. The latter is often true for B2B businesses, where lists have shorter validity due to employee turnover.
At the onset, checking how your email provider manages bounces and automatic blacklisting will help you set rules and bridge gaps as needed.
Furthermore, marketing automation helps you determine your low-engagement subscribers. This data can use used to segment them into a new list and re-engage them with different marketing approaches.
Notably, in most countries, marketers are required mandatorily provide recipients an option to unsubscribe from a brand’s email communications. However, in the absence of clear-cut laws on how to implement it, different businesses handle this requirement differently.
Effective Ways to Manage Your Newly-Cleaned Email List
Once you’ve implemented a thorough email list cleaning, a proactive maintenance approach can glean you away from the spam terror!
Here are some practical ways to manage your newly cleaned list from now:
Implement Double Opt-Ins:
This will help ensure your subscribers that your recipients are real human beings. It’ll also help you reduce the amount of human error typos in your contact list.
Grow Organic Lists:
After cleaning your original lists, grow them organically. Though it may be time-consuming in the long term, it will facilitate higher engagement and help retain conversions.
However, in an extreme situation where you have no choice but to purchase a list, conduct thorough research on the data provider’s reputation.
Enhance Emails With Appealing Lead Magnets:
Generate a robust lead management strategy that includes implementing an attractive lead magnet to the headline with upbeat, exciting CTAs that inspire a response. This will help you engage exiting visitors who may want to hear from you later and will download your lead magnet.
Provide Subscribers An Option To Manage Their Preferences:
Instead of direct opt-outs, offering ‘opt downs’ will enable subscribers to stay engaged with the option to receive communications from you less frequently – for example, every month instead of every week.
Alternatively, they could opt for your email newsletters but not every product announcement. This will also enhance your list segmentation and facilitate more targeted email campaigns.
Focus On Subject Lines And Content Quality:
Craft emails with a compelling copy to get your readers’ attention and boost your brand image. Write well-constructed sentences while keeping your messages creative, simple, and easy to understand.
Likewise, captivating subject lines attract subscribers to open the email and can increase open rates. Run A/B test on different email subject lines by segmenting lists and evaluating open rates to see which option works better.
Leverage Re-Engage Campaigns Again:
If you observe a drop in interactions, try a re-engagement email campaign inviting recipients to engage once again. This will help you continue pruning your mailing list based on the responses.
Nurture New Leads:
Keep your cleaned list engaged by sending welcome emails to your subscribers. Adding an incentive will make them feel appreciated.
Similarly, funneling new subscribers into email drip campaigns focused on their position in the sales funnel can help you tailor your messages to meet their needs.
Continue Using Marketing Automation:
Consistently deploying marketing automation will help continue purging your email list of invalid or inactive email addresses. In addition, using the latest data validation tools will help reduce email bounce and boost your sender reputation.
Also, set your automation to resend email campaigns where it experiences soft bounces. As it’s often a temporary issue, you may still be able to reach the recipient’s inbox.
The Risks And Dangers Of Not Cleaning Your Email List
Some marketers neglect email list hygiene as they are put off by the added costs.
However, apart from the monetary aspect, not using a clean email list increases bounce rates that damage your sender’s reputation. It will also generate a high rate of unsubscribes and spam complaints.
In the long run, as damage increases, it can restrict your ability to reach your entire subscriber base, including those who engage with your emails.
Benefits of Using An Email List Cleaning Service
Email cleaning services are an excellent way to clean your list more quickly and accurately while you focus on your primary role, handling the core business.
If you’re ready to pick one, we’ve done a hands-on comparison of the 11 best email list cleaning services across accuracy, pricing, and use case — so you can choose the right fit without the guesswork
Some of the critical benefits of using an email list cleaning service include:
Email validation:
Your email cleaning service provider will validate the emails immediately when a subscriber signs up to ensure their validity and prevent fake or incorrect emails.
Fake or fraudulent email addresses add unnecessary bulk to email lists and affect the metrics. It also helps to identify and block such addresses from getting on your list.
Verification of Bulk Emails:
They can easily verify bulk emails. As their customers typically have the same set of subscribers, it increases the accuracy and efficiency of the process.
Fixing Common Typos:
It can also help you identify common typos and implement automatic corrections. This is specifically true in case of misspellings of familiar email clients, such as Yahoo!, Gmail, AOL, and Outlook.
Summary
Email list cleaning offers a number of benefits – from removing spam traps and protecting your sender reputation to cleansing your existing data, curating your lists, and facilitating relevant, responsive emails.
We hope this article has provided you with comprehensive insights on how to get started, and maintaining a hygienic list that boosts engagement among subscribers.
However, if you feel your business would benefit from a professional email list cleaning service, the InboxArmy team of experts can step. We’re an established, full-service email marketing agency with proven expertise.
