8 Email List Cleaning Best Practices
Learn the best practices for email list cleaning and why proper email hygiene is key to optimizing your campaigns and improving engagement rates
Let’s cut to the chase — not everyone on your email list is a valuable contact anymore. A Prospectify survey concluded that, out of 1,000 randomly selected contacts, only 4.5% were still valid after 28 days. Therefore, it’s imperative your company has a good email list cleaning best practices in place to ensure your messages are getting through.
With email list cleansing, you can increase your open and click-through rates while reducing costs associated with email subscriptions.
Building an email list takes time and effort. Collecting only valid and active addresses is essential to ensure your information stays accurate.
This article will discuss the 8 email list cleaning best practices companies can use to keep their email lists clean and up-to-date.
What is Email List Cleaning?
Email list cleaning is the process of removing invalid, duplicate, or inactive email addresses from an email list. This helps improve overall deliverability and ensure that only legitimate emails reach your contacts.
In addition, email list cleaning helps reduce costs associated with sending emails to invalid addresses and prevents spam complaints that could harm your reputation.
Maintaining a clean list of email subscribers is one of the most recommended strategies to optimize any email campaign. This process, also known as email list hygiene, can help eliminate inactive contacts and increase engagement rates.
By cleaning up your contact list regularly, you can dramatically reduce bounce rates and increase click-through rates to maximize the effectiveness of every email campaign.
Email List Hygiene: All The Major Benefits
The benefits of email list hygiene are evident. These are:
1. It Reduces Your Email Marketing Costs And Increases Your ROI
Sending emails to an extensive database is typically more expensive, so cleaning your list periodically is advantageous to save costs. For instance, you’ll be spending more for emailing 50,000 people than sending messages to just 4,000 subscribers.
By removing people who no longer engage with your emails, you will get an improved return on investment (ROI) and greater engagement rates because only interested subscribers are receiving your emails.
2. Getting A Good Email Reputation
When your emails are regularly marked as spam, it negatively impacts your reputation with email service providers or ESPs. This flagging could lead to a lowered deliverability rate. Plus, your open rates and ROI will consequently take a hit. By eliminating inactive and unresponsive subscribers from your email list, you can maintain a good sender reputation and experience higher open rates because your emails only reach their intended recipients.
3. Increasing Deliverability And Decreasing Bounce Rate
Keeping a clean list of subscribers is essential for successful email marketing campaigns. A well-maintained list ensures more people will open your emails, leading to higher deliverability rates. Meanwhile, an unclean or outdated email list can negatively impact your reputation with spam filters and bounces.
4. Better Data Accuracy
Monitoring and evaluating marketing metrics, such as open rates, engagement rates, and click-through rates, can be inaccurate when fake or inactive email addresses are included in your data. An unopened email means that the email address was either spam or invalid.
Therefore, it’s essential to periodically clean up your email lists by removing inactive emails or those that have marked you as spam. This will help ensure you’re gathering precise data that is helpful in targeted email marketing campaigns.
5. Boosting Your Email Marketing Performance
Cleaning your email list helps you focus on your most engaged subscribers. This can lead to more targeted campaigns, enhanced engagement rates, and better ROI.
Your email marketing campaigns will be more effective as you send personalized emails and content to those interested in your products or services. Therefore, it boosts the overall performance of your email campaigns.
You can also use the data collected through clean email lists to better segment your audience and create campaigns that are tailored to different customer needs. This means more effective communication, a higher return on investment, and improved customer retention.
Finally, having clean email lists helps protect you from potential penalties or legal action from spam laws since you will be
How Often Should You Clean Your Email Lists?
This depends on how frequently your contacts change. The cleaning frequency depends on your company and your list size. If you are collecting a lot of new email subscribers and already have inactive ones, it’s best to review your list every 3–6 months.
That said, if your emails are experiencing high bounce rates, it’s an obvious sign that it’s time to clean up the list. Therefore, cleaning your list can take place on either a monthly, quarterly, bi-annually or annual basis. But you must do it at least once a year.
This benefits the marketers by ensuring the contacts are up-to-date, and only active subscribers receive emails from them, and ROI can be maximized. Moreover, it helps to maintain a good reputation with ESPs and increase deliverability rates.
Email List Cleaning: The Best Practices You Should Know
These are the best practices to be followed while cleaning an email list:
1. Meeting Email Compliance
When cleaning your email list, it is important to abide by email compliance rules and regulations. So, constantly monitor the opt-in policies, GDPR, CASL, and CAN-SPAM Act.
Email compliance regulations have been established to safeguard individuals from online fraud, such as spamming, phishing, identity theft, and counterfeiting. Such laws are vital for preventing unscrupulous spammers who unlawfully gather people’s emails to deliver unsolicited messages.
Strict compliance with these legal frameworks is essential to launch email campaigns successfully.
Under the GDPR (EU) and CAN-SPAM Act (US), organizations must acquire opt-in permission from recipients before sending out promotional emails and retain a record of that authorization. The consent should include the recipient’s name, the date they allowed consent, and the method used to confirm this (e.g., web popup or cart checkout).
Additionally, both regulations stipulate an easy opt-out option for users to opt out whenever needed.
The CAN-SPAM Act is more relaxed than GDPR; however, violations can come with a hefty price tag — up to $42,530 for each email!
If you’re cleaning your email list, remember the GDPR and the CAN-SPAM Act rules, which are essential for keeping your email campaigns compliant.
In addition, since GDPR and CAN-SPAM Act have specific requirements for how organizations should protect user data, it’s also important to review your website security measures and
2. Use A Professional Group Email Address
Use a professional domain ending in @yourcompany.com for your email marketing campaign instead of personal email accounts like xxx@gmail.com. This creates an aura of authority with the receiver and complies with DMRAC policy.
In case you’re wondering what DMRAC means — DMRAC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance. It is a protocol that enables email senders to protect their name and brand identity, shielding them against malicious actors who attempt to deceive recipients in the name of their company.
To protect yourself from falling prey to unsolicited emails, remember these spammers will attempt to disguise their accounts by masking themselves as coming from another place.
For instance, let’s say your company is called XYZ. A spammer can never send emails from an address like @ABC.com. Instead, they may use something like XYZ@gmail.com.
With the DMRAC acting as a filter, Google and other ESPs often regard messages sent through personal email accounts as spam. As a result, your newsletters may end up in recipients’ junk folders instead of their inboxes.
By switching to a professional group email address and implementing DMRAC, you can ensure that your emails are not marked as spam, and there won’t be any confusion regarding the sender’s identity.
3. Effectively Segmenting And Targeting Your Audience
Segmenting your email list is important for email hygiene. By considering factors such as geographic location, interests, age group, and purchase history, you can ensure that only the right people receive your emails.
Without proper segmentation, there’s a high probability that your emails could compel your subscribers to unsubscribe or mark the emails as spam.
Tracking open and click-through rates is another approach to segmenting and targeting your audience. This way, you can know how many people are actually engaging with the emails resulting in higher engagement and conversion rates.
Optimizing your email lists by targeting the right audience is critical to higher ROI and decreasing the risks of your emails ending up in spam folders.
4. Sharing Only High-Quality And Valuable Content
Another important factor to consider regarding email hygiene is the quality of your content. You need to ensure that all emails sent out have high-quality and informative content and offer value to your subscribers.
For instance, your emails should inform your subscribers about new products or services, information about upcoming events, discounts, etc.
The point is only to deliver content that provides value and makes sense to your audience. Otherwise, be prepared for your subscribers to opt out from your subscription list or for your emails to be marked as spam.
People are triggered by intriguing subject lines and eye-catching visuals. So, take into account the importance of compelling copy and visuals. Also, remember to include an easy opt-out option for users to opt out whenever needed.
To truly measure the success of your campaigns, analyze open, click-through, and bounce rates. Doing so will allow you to recognize what content engages best with your followers and pinpoint potential flaws that require improvement.
5. Cleaning Duplicate Addresses And Inactive Subscribers
Remember what we said about maximizing your ROI? Then, start by getting rid of those pesky duplicate email addresses. This help prevents the annoying double messages which might push your contacts to unsubscribe. Plus, it will also trim down the size of your email list.
Having a massive subscriber base is an advantage, and sure, that might seem like it. But, it can also lead to low deliverability and engagement rates. That’s why you need to remove all the emails that are no longer active. This ensures that only those who remain interested benefit from the content you offer.
In addition, to duplicate email addresses and inactive subscribers, there are other reasons your emails aren’t hitting the engagement rates you deserve. These are:
- Irrelevant content
- Poor copywriting
- Broken or incorrect links
- Inadequate segmentation
- Limited mobile-friendliness
- Overspamming
- Poorly designed emails
- No personalization
- Lack of a captivating call-to-action (CTA) button
6. Going For Automatic Spam Folder Management
Going through your email lists by hand is tedious, even when it’s short. This is where automated spam management tools come in handy. An email list cleaning service can save you time and effort as these tools utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning to keep your emails compliant with ESPs, GDPR, and CAN-SPAM Act.
Most Email Service Providers (ESPs) offer automation tools to make the process easier. Automated workflows enable you to reach out with timely messages crafted specifically for your target audience.
These tools will help ensure your emails are seen and generate more engagement. In other words, these tools ensure your emails don’t end up in someone’s spam folder.
These tools can be used for email list cleaning, as bounced emails can be detected quickly and easily removed from your lists. Additionally, triggers/action sequences within the tool can help you organize your contacts list by creating segments of inactive subscribers or low-engagement people to ensure that only active users receive emails.
Email platforms like Simplelists have the necessary tools to help you keep your email lists organized and running smoothly. If you want to take advantage of this amazing tool, sign up for a Simplelists account or visit their blog for more information on how it works.
7. Personalizing Your Email List Strategy
Personalizing an email list strategy can make a huge difference in engagement rates. If you customize your emails to your subscribers’ interests and preferences, you can create highly engaging and targeted content that resonates with them.
A good personalized email will have custom templates, branding, subject lines, and images your contacts can relate to. Craft irresistible, well-balanced subject lines that will instantly pique the interest of your subscribers.
Doing this ensures each email you send is valuable and pertinent to them. Moreover, your emails will be less likely to get marked as spam while strengthening your brand identity and improving engagement rates.
Simplelists provides a range of personalization features that help brands build relationships with their customers and increase engagement rates. To know how Simplelists can help, check out their YouTube channel.
So, before you start cleaning inactive email addresses, ensure your reduced engagement rates aren’t caused by poorly composed subject lines, mediocre content, and poor visuals.
8. Building A Healthy Lead Generation Strategy
In any email marketing campaign, lead generation is crucial. To build an effective email list, focus on quality over quantity. This means focusing on tactics such as opt-in forms and newsletters, organizing webinars, and conducting surveys.
But the most important thing for effective lead generation is a strong value proposition so potential leads can see the value in signing up. So, focus on what differentiates your service or product from the competition and how it can benefit the customer.
Avoid deceptive subject lines, misleading content, and false promises, as they can damage your reputation.
Simplelists make it easy to capture leads by creating opt-in forms that can be embedded on any website or landing page with a few clicks.
To learn more about lead generation in email marketing, check out Hubspot’s blog here.
9. Relying On The Right Email List Management Tool
Finally, utilizing a reliable email list management tool is the key to optimizing your email lists. An email list management tool can help you with all aspects of email marketing, such as segmentation, email automation, personalization, and tracking the performance of email campaigns with detailed analytics.
Some other benefits of email list management tools include bulk email verifications, integrations with ESPs, improved email deliverability, and avoiding spam filters.
If you’re wondering which email list management tool to use, Simplelists provide all the tools you need to deliver your emails with minimum effort.
For instance, Simplelists sends you a message whenever anyone in your contacts list bounces emails. This tool also removes email addresses that punch emails repeatedly from the list.
Additionally, any list member who marks your emails as spam will be removed to ensure that unwanted duplicate emails never make it into someone’s inbox. This guarantees your delivery rate remains consistently high.
With Simplelists, you can:
- Add contacts to your email list in bulk from a spreadsheet or CSV file
- Decide whom to send emails from your list
- Limit the size of emails and remove attachments from emails
- Keep members’ names and email addresses seen or hidden
- Include HTML to customize your emails
- Personalize emails by adding names to each email
- Choose to add new members on not
- Add a subscription form to your website
- Integrate emails from your domain and more
If you want to know more about Simplelists, check out their YouTube channel to learn how Simplelists can help you manage your email lists.
Don’t miss this chance to sign up for a one-month free trial of Simplelists today and experience all its power at no cost or strings attached — you have nothing to lose!
Conclusion
Email list cleaning is essential for any business seeking to maximize email marketing efforts. Cleaning your mailing list regularly and personalizing your emails can go a long way in improving engagement rates. Additionally, relying on the right email list management tool is key for successful list management. Your email list is one of your most valuable assets, so invest in creating and managing it wisely.
