Email list hygiene is one of the most important factors for your email deliverability. Sending information to the right users after washing out the uninterested contacts is highly beneficial for more sales and conversions.
In email marketing, the experts always suggest going with quality instead of quantity. What will be the use of sending your email campaign to 1000 users where only 700 feel themselves engaging? Therefore, you need to eliminate those passive users before sending your campaigns, it will increase your deliverability, as well as the sender reputation.
Email Service Providers (ESPs) have become sophisticated over time, and calculate engagement stats including open, clicks, inactivity, etc. It is your responsibility to keep checking your email list performance.
It is not enough to add contacts to the list and then keep sending the email campaigns without noticing the results. Many users, over time, lose interest in what you feed to them, and they gradually become inactive. Cleaning up these contacts will increase your email deliverability when interested users come across them.
According to a study, one out of every five emails never make its way to the inbox ending in the spam folder or blocked by the email service provider.
In this article, we shall discuss email list hygiene, why is it important, and how to perform it. Keep reading for the details.
Table of Contents
- What is email list hygiene?
- Importance of email list cleaning?
- How to measure if your list needs a cleanup?
- Low open and click-through rate
- High bounce rate
- Increased unsubscribe rate
- Poor deliverability
- Email list hygiene best practices
- Remove inactive emails
- Use a professional email address
- Define your email list cleanup frequency
- Segment your email list
- Delete role accounts
- Avoid landing in the spam folder
- Use Mumara for your email list management
- In a nutshell
What Is Email List Hygiene?
Email list hygiene is the process of eliminating inactive users to maintain your email list healthy. Keeping a large email list with many subscribers won’t work effectively for your business growth when there are many users with inactive statuses.
These users not only proved to be damaging to your marketing process but also impact negatively on sender reputation. Email list hygiene is about removing invalid email addresses from the list and sending messages to valid and interested subscribers.
ESPs have become smarter and they feed users with the information that they feel is appropriate for them. That is why the irrelevant content is automatically directed to the spam/junk folder to remain there for many days.
People do not pay attention to the emails that they find in the spam folder, and most of the time deleted them without even opening them up. This practice is highly damaging to your reputation, and deliverability suffers a lot.
If there are some email addresses in your list that don’t exist actually, or subscribers report you as spam or do not open the emails frequently, the email service provider will not take you as a credible sender. If you don’t want to harm your sender or brand reputation, keep your email list hygienic to avoid any issues with your email marketing strategy.
Importance of Email List Cleaning
Hygiene of your email list is exceedingly important and effective for your email marketing.
You need to keep your email list clean for the undermentioned reasons:
- It helps you increase your return on investment because bad email lists bring poor conversion rates.
- A hygienic email list speeds up the email delivery process.
- Sending your email campaigns to interested users increase your email deliverability.
- When you send your emails right to the mailbox, it enhances your online reputation as a sender.
- Remove the subscribers from the list when you receive spam complaints.
- When you use a purchased email list, you will send your messages in the dark without knowing and assessing the outcomes.
- Email list hygiene will help you avoid spam traps.
How to Measure if Your List Needs a Cleanup?
There are no hard and fast rules to measure whether your email list needs to be cleaned or not. There are only hints that you must keep an eye on them to work on to avoid any damage.
Read them one by one:
Low Open and Click-Through Rate
First of all, when you send an email campaign, never ignore the stats. In order to design an email campaign, send it, and get the right results, you need to select a reliable email marketing automation tool such as Mumara.
Mumara provides you with HTML Editor and Drag & Drop Builder for designing your email campaigns. It further allows you to send those campaigns instantly or schedule them to send later according to the pre-defined time. After sending the emails, you will be able to see the real-time results including, open, click-through, bounced, spam complaints, etc.
If you are getting low clicks on your campaign, it means there are some users are no longer interested to hear from you. Those users need to be washed out instantly before they impact negatively the whole marketing process.
High Bounce Rate
Bounced emails are those emails that are not delivered to the users due to certain reasons. For example, if you get hard bounces, it means the email address where you intended to send your email doesn’t exist in actuality.
On the other hand, if you receive a soft bounce, it is a temporary problem when there is any issue with the recipient’s servers, his mailbox is full, or any other technical problem. In both cases, either it is a soft bounce or a hard bounce, do not wait for a second to remove them before your next campaign.
Keep checking the performance of your email campaign while using Mumara, and if you get a high percentage of bad email addresses in your mailing list, eliminate them at the first sight.
Increased Unsubscribe Rate
The people who unsubscribe from your email list are those who are no longer want to receive your content. If you notice unsubscribes from your list, this is time to clean your email list. Seeing people unsubscribing from your list is pretty normal, and do not get panic.
All you need is to check what unsubscribe rate are you getting. The average unsubscribes rate ranges from 0.2% to 0.5%. If you are getting an unsubscribe rate below 0.5 percent, there is nothing to be worried about.
On the other hand, if the unsubscribe rate increases more than 0.5 percent, then you need to worry about it. At that point, clean your email list, to bring back the normal range of unsubscribe rates.
Poor Deliverability
Email delivery and email deliverability are two different things. Email delivery means sending your emails to the users without noticing where they end, i.e., inbox or spam folder.
On the contrary, email deliverability means placing your emails right in the mailbox, and that is more important. Whenever you see poor deliverability, or hygiene your email list at the earliest.
Email List Hygiene Best Practices
As of now, we have had enough of cleaning up the email list. Now is the time to learn about email hygiene best practices. Maintaining a healthy email list is important, and you need to implement a framework.
Here are some of the best practices you need to follow to clean your email list:
Remove Inactive Emails
Remove inactive users consistently so that your message may reach the active, and interested users. Sometimes users subscribe to your email list, but they do not get attracted by your emails due to various reasons.
Sometimes, they subscribe unintentionally, or over time they do not get useful content from your side. These users need to drop from the list before your next campaign. Along with it, remove the duplicate email addresses from your list also.
While sending your email list, add an unsubscribe link in the header or footer so that the user may find it easy to leave your email list. If you do not add an unsubscribe link, and keep sending the content they do not like, it will increase the chances that the users will report your emails as spam.
Use a Professional Email Address
Using a professional email address always leaves a positive impact on the recipients instead of using personal accounts such as [email protected], [email protected], etc. Using an email address that represents your company will give a more professional look to your message, i.e., [email protected], etc.
Not only this, follow the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conference (DMRAC). It ensures that the message is coming from the right sender, and is not misleading. If you do not implement DMRAC, someone else can use your domain to send fraudulent and suspicious content.
It will land you in trouble because your emails will be sent to the spam folder, and your sender and brand reputation will be damaged to the great extent.
Define Your Email List Cleanup Frequency
Defining your email list cleanup frequency will eliminate various ambiguities. It will help you work in a certain timeframe to keep you reminded that the time for cleanup has come.
For example, if you set your frequency for three months, you need to worry about the next three months. And when the time comes, you just need to clean up your list to eliminate the subscribers with certain issues.
Larger email lists are of no use when there are many users with inactive, bounced, or complaint statuses. Moreover, the larger email lists need more maintenance, so you need to clean these lists more frequently.
No matter what frequency you pick, just stick to it and keep your list up to date to increase deliverability.
Segment Your Email List
Instead of deleting contacts from the mailing list, you can create a segment of inactive users. After creating a segment, you need to reduce the email sending and send also send re-engagement emails.
During this time, watch the performance of your email campaign closely to see the activity of the inactive users. If you find some active users, shift them back to your active users’ list, and if there is no engagement, clean these users up to make your email list hygienic.
Delete Role Accounts
Sometimes users sign up with an email address that is presented to be a voice of a group of people i.e., publication, support, info, etc. These emails are not linked with a specific person, rather, it represents a company, firm, or brand.
Individuals sign up through these email addresses to get specific information. More often, emails sent to these addresses do not get due attention and engagement. So, you need to remove these role accounts to increase the effectiveness of your email marketing.
Avoid Landing in the Spam Folder
Before hitting the send button for your campaign, make sure that you have worked well on certain things to avoid the spam folder. It is your responsibility to land in the mailbox of the recipient and then hope for the engagement.
What if you land in the spam folder when it is obvious that most of the users don’t open them up? First of all, you need to craft your subject line in a way that your email heads toward the inbox.
Using spammy words, or ALL CAPS that sound like yelling, many exclamatory marks, and grammatical mistakes will probably end your email in the junk folder. Along with it, email personalization is also important, sending personalized content instead of “Hey there!” sounds more relevant for the success of your email.
Not only this but while sending your campaign, beware of your targeted audience. For example, if you are sending email content written in English to users who only understand Spanish or Chinese, the recipients will mark it as spam.
Without taking care of the above-mentioned factors before you send an email campaign, you will harm your company’s reputation.
Use Mumara for Your Email List Management
Mumara is an intelligent email marketing software with all the features you can imagine to manage your email list. From creating an email list, and adding contacts to it manually or importing a file, to creating segments, you have all the autonomy to perform everything you need to do.
Sending your email campaign to the targeted audience brings the best results for you shown in the stats. We suggest you start using it today for your email marketing process.
In a Nutshell
To conclude, we can say that email list hygiene is categorically important to increase your conversion rate and deliverability. When more people will see your emails in the mailbox, you will get more engagement and clicks.
Although it is tricky, you can follow the above practices to keep your list hygienic. If are unaware of the list of hygiene, or don’t know how to do it, we are sure this article will help you out.
Additionally, we suggest you sign up for Mumara to get a hundred percent of your email marketing efforts.
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