Email list cleaning refers to regularly updating the email contact list by being responsive and removing outdated contacts. If you want tips, keep reading because we have listed 5 best practices for email list cleaning to ensure better engagement.
Always include an Unsubscribe button in your email newsletters
Having an email list that is expansive seems like the most desired thing at first glance. But if your email list contains too many inactive email addresses, or essentially ‘bad email addresses’, this can backfire instead.
The thing is, keeping a large email list costs a lot more money. Meanwhile, if your list is comprised of bad email addresses, you keep sending emails to people who don’t even engage with your content.
You could even be marked as spam by people who no longer wish to hear from you. With all of that being said, cleaning your email list becomes super important to maintain the health of your email list.
You could either do it yourself or let your subscribers exploit this leeway. Some marketers may try to prevent unsubscription by complicating the process.
But this is bad in the long run. Per an article on the Brevo website, having an unsubscribe link makes this task easy.
After all, preventing someone from leaving your online community could result in the website being reported to ISPs who’ll then limit and scrutinize your mails more.
One super easy and obvious way to help you maintain this is by including an Unsubscribe button. It needs to be clear and easy to reach so people can remove themselves from your mailing list.
See your list growth and decide how often you need to scrub the list
Now, although it is great when someone unsubscribes from your mailing list as this helps your clean-up, this isn’t always managed smoothly, right?
Not everybody bothers enough to unsubscribe from your mailing list; some people simply ignore and delete your constant email sends. Therefore, it is still part of good ’email list hygiene’ to do a regular clean-up.
How often should you do this? In most cases, once every 2 to 3 months is considered good enough.
But if you have the time, try to analyse your email list growth and see if you’re growing much faster than expected, or even much slower than expected. Depending on this, you can reduce or increase the frequency of your cleanup.
A list growth that is incredibly rapid may need regular cleaning once every month just to keep things on top.
Use automation to keep your list healthy
Having to do all the cleanup yourself can be quite a tedious demand. Running a cleanup every so often can take away a lot of your time that could instead be utilised for creating marketing plans.
However, at the same time, email list hygiene is crucial for its health, so you can’t just disregard doing it in the first place. What to do to save time though? Use email list automation.
Autoresponder tools and software often come with nifty designs to help you create rules for your email list health. You can automate your cleaning by creating ‘rules’ for emails that have not been opened by your recipients.
However, such software can only help you speed up cleaning and not determine why your emails aren’t opened.
You’ll have to determine why the mails aren’t opened. This is vital from the standoff of cost.
The heavier your email list, the more you pay to the ISPs. This is wasted expense, especially if you maintain a large proportion of non performing contacts.
Per an article on the Hubspot website, the more your emails get spammed, the more your deliverability rates suffer.
Therefore, don’t forget to study what strategies work and don’t work for your engagement in your email newsletters.
Utilise an email confirmation function
Cleaning up your email list is a good habit and must always be carried out with utmost seriousness. In fact, you should have a key person who is in charge of this aspect.
However, needing to constantly weed out bad email addresses can be quite taxing, right? So instead, you should reduce the likelihood of piling up unresponsive email addresses. One way to do this is by enabling two-step email confirmation.
When a new subscriber joins your mailing list, have them type in their email address, and then wait for a confirmation.
Through an email autoresponder, send them an email confirmation notification through which they can click a link to confirm their email address.
Doing this may be an extra step, but this protects you from keeping rubbish email addresses that your new subscribers aren’t even using that actively. It’s a smart way to avoid duplicate emails as well.
Have a consistent schedule for cleaning up
As mentioned before, you need to make an email list clean-up process an integral part of your email list health maintenance.
Some people may find this process cumbersome. Some people may not feel very excited about this part of email marketing. After all, it is more exciting to create content and get people to sign up.
But email list cleaning must be done if you want to cut costs and maximise revenue. Therefore, to cut out stress from your daily obligations, it would be wise to set aside a cleaning schedule that is run regularly.
Remember, cleaning your email list is a regular and consistent task that you must perform to retain high quality contacts.
As your email list grows, you could start by cleaning once a year then increase the frequency in tandem with this expansion.
Per an article on the Moo Send website, checking on your metrics such as open rates, would help you determine how often you perform this task.
To make sure your email list cleaning is always maintained, set up a cleaning schedule on your work calendar. This way, you already know when it’s coming and you can plan your working days ahead.
It would also be a good idea if you have a member of your team who can dedicate their time to enforce this task.
