The Importance of Email List Hygiene and How to Keep Your List Clean

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How to make your email marketing efforts more efficient? And how to avoid that spam folder?

The answer lies in the hygiene of your email list.

80% of marketers think that email marketing has a direct effect on their customer retention rates. Yes, indeed!

Email continues to be one of the most powerful communication channels. With a good HTML email builder, great newsletters, and the right list, you will surely get a whopping 400% ROI! You need to remove inaccurate or unresponsive addresses from your list to make it work for you.

Therefore, it is crucial to find out why maintaining a clean email list is essential and learn how to implement proper email database hygiene measures.

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Importance of Email List Hygiene: Top 3 Reasons to Keep Your Lists Clean

1Improve Your Deliverability

Many marketers know that a clean email list means improved deliverability. A list with poor hygiene has a huge negative impact on your ability to get into your customers’ inboxes. Email verification helps you find those dead emails. Then, you decide how to proceed with them. It’s a good idea to eliminate them from your list as they affect your sender reputation and deliverability since an ISP views you as a trustworthy sender.

2 Protect Your Data

Cleaning your list also enhances the quality of customer information in your database. It is important to make sure that your database is up to date as the email address is increasingly reliable for identifying customers through various channels.

3 Improve Your Email Metrics

Email hygiene has a direct impact on your campaign metrics. The delivery rate is a great way to measure the quality of your email list. Clean up your email list to improve various metrics, including

  • Opens,
  • Bounces,
  • Clicks,
  • Conversions,
  • Unsubscribes
  • Complaints,
  • Along with campaign-specific measures like new orders, average order value, and revenue per email.

Plus, it will give you a more accurate insight into your list quality, subscriber value, and email engagement.

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Email List Hygiene Best Practices

1 Remove bounced, incorrect, and invalid email addresses

Incorrect, bounced, or invalid emails have a severe negative impact on your email ROI and deliverability.

Here are the most common reasons for bounced emails:
. Full mailboxes
. Non-existent email addresses
. Incorrect email addresses
. Emails that are rejected because of spam

To ensure your emails are delivered to your users’ inboxes, it is important to track bounce rates and maintain a good reputation with mailbox providers.

2 Check for Spam Filters

You’ll want to delete any subscribers who label your emails as spam. Spam filters harm the deliverability of your emails and damage your reputation. You don’t want to keep people on your list if they no longer find your emails useful or consider them spam. It’s one of the email hygiene best practices to remove them from your email list right away.

3 Use a Double Opt-In

This is a great way to make sure people want to get emails from you. Here’s the process. After a person fills out a form on your website, they receive an email to verify their subscription.

This accomplishes several tasks. It creates a habit of opening your emails, indicates to their email provider that your emails are not spam, and prompts them to save your contact details to avoid losing your emails. It’s a win-win for everybody.

4 Reconnect with Your Email Subscribers

Here’s the last tip on email list cleaning best practices. Before you delete emails from your list, look for ways to reconnect with those still interested in your newsletters.

How do you do this? Divide them into separate lists based on their preferences and demographics.

Focus on engaging features such as surveys and hyperlinks to encourage higher click-through rates instead of just opening. As an example:

  1. Ask for views and comments on a recently launched product or service.
  2. Create a competition and request them to engage with your social media profiles.
  3. Include a survey with the added option of providing rewards or giveaways to participants.

Send these emails. This is a great way to get your audience re-engaged.