How To Clean An Email List To Improve Deliverability

Email marketing is a very important tactic used to engage and to nurture your community and contacts. That is because email delivers better than any other channel. Therefore, a healthy email list is vital to any business because it is likely you will lose one-third of your contacts every year through attrition. You may lose your contacts over a specific period of time through unsubscribes, hard bounces, or undeliverable emails.

Internet service providers (ISPs), spam monitors, and email security services all set thresholds for what constitutes as "an acceptable email campaign". When your number of bounces, complaints, and spam trap hits exceeds the threshold, your messages can be sent to the spam folder or even blocked. Let’s discuss what we can do to maintain the hygiene of the foundation of an email marketing program – email list.

Review Undelivered Emails

An email list will constantly change. You never know when you might see an important contact in the undeliverable list with a typo. So, review and investigate from the undelivered mail’s report. If there were misspellings or typos, try to correct it. Remove the emails if the status returned failed permanently; you know that those emails are no longer exist.

Re-Engage Inactive Emails

There are a number of times your subscribers can become inactive after registering a new account. It is a wise step to monitor your inactive subscribers and try to win them back.

Plan for one more win-back campaign to engage your inactive subscribers before removing them permanently like sending out a “We Miss You” or “We Want You Back“ email with a special offer or new features announcement to entice them. Bear in mind, re-engaging your old customers could be a lot easier than acquiring a new customer and may help you turn them into customers.

Give A Proper Unsubscribe Link

Manage your inactive email addresses properly by providing a one-click unsubscribe email feature after a long period of inactivity. You can also add a simple survey or feedback form on your unsubscribe page to find out the reason they are leaving. Then, you will need to study their behavior to see how you can improve your emails and lists in the future. This will help you to keep your list clean and reduce the bounce rate.

Maintain A Clean Email List

Don’t forget to maintain a clean email list. People stay because they still show an interest in your services. There are some great tools to help you maintain a clean email list. Pay close attention to the open, click, and delivery rate as well so that you will know how to manage your clean list for the next campaign. Remember to gain insight on what interests your community to keep them engaged.

Email list cleaning improves your email reputation and increases email deliverability. If you wish to grow your businesses based on real-time business intelligence, focus on rules of email marketing and analyze the result of every marketing campaigns you have done.