You’ve finally finished growing your email list after months or perhaps years of hard work. Even when people unsubscribe from your list from time to time, it seems to be expanding. For email cleanliness, why would you voluntarily cleanse your list?
To avoid email bouncing and increase your open and click-through rates, it’s good to use email hygiene to ensure your messages get into recipients’ inboxes. Cleaning your email list serves several purposes, and we’ll go over four of the most important ones in this post.
You need to clean up your email list for what purpose?
People who have given your consent to contact them and whose email addresses are still active are on a clean email list. Email lists that aren’t clean are filled with incorrect or inactive email addresses, and those who didn’t opt in to receive your emails. This is the outcome of a clean email list:
- Bounce rate reductions
- Less likely to wind up in junk mail.
- Increased open rates
- Increased email engagement and conversions
Reduced re-engagement rates
An email can fail to reach its intended recipient for various reasons.
- Bounces are hard. Your email may “hard bounce” if you send it to incorrect or false email addresses, phony domains, or servers with strict filtering policies. In a hard bounce, your email will not be sent to the recipient.
- A “soft bounce” occurs when your recipient’s email service provider (ESP) has a server difficulty, the recipient’s mailbox is complete, or your message is too big. There is a chance that your email might still go through if you take action (e.g., deleting emails from an inbox, the server is rectified, or the message is trimmed down).
- Bounce rates influence your domain’s health, and the health of your domain has an impact on the deliverability of your emails. Keeping your email list tidy enables you to send good emails that reach their intended recipients.
Spam folders are less likely to get your emails.
Spammers aren’t the only people that send emails with obnoxious subject lines like “FREE SHIPPING” or “FREE SHIPPING OFFER.” It signifies one of three things if your emails are flagged as spam or spam complaints are filed against you:
You can never send an email to that individual from this domain again.
- Your domain has been flagged as “bad news” by their ESP.
- If you are caught in a spam trap or wind yourself on a blocklist, you may not be allowed to send emails to other subscribers, even those who gave you their email address.
- Consent-based email marketing is the safest bet for avoiding spam complaints and other legal issues.
Increased openness, engagement, and conversions
If you don’t have an accurate reporting system, you’ll never know what is working (or not), so you can send better emails with greater open, conversion, and engagement rates.
You’ll better understand how effective your email marketing is if you exclude the non-responders.
When and how to purge your email list
Consistency is the key to email list cleanliness, and it’s easy to get started. Remove inactive subscribers as the easiest method of doing this. Those who haven’t read your emails for more than 90 days are considered inactive subscribers.
Email subscribers are essential, but it’s more expensive to acquire new consumers than to maintain the ones you already have. Using re-engagement campaigns, you may bring back dormant subscribers and pique their interest by using an even more complex version of the email hygiene strategy.
