Do you want to power up your email campaign to support your business’s long-term goals? You must have already tested some strategies like content, design, offer, subject line, timing, etc. Are those plans effective enough? In some situations, despite your best efforts, the outcomes may not align with your desired expectations. The truth is that a catchy subject line or an irresistible offer might help you excel in your short-term goals, but email list hygiene practices have always been the backbone of any email campaign for serving long-term goals.
Email list hygiene habits influence deliverability in email marketing operations. Without proper email hygiene, your emails are doomed to the spam folder. So, stay with us to ace your email marketing skills and learn the tactics of maintaining email list hygiene and everything there is to know about it. Let’s dive in.
Table of Contents
What is Email List Hygiene?
Ensuring your email list remains clean and accurate is imperative for the triumph of your email marketing goals. Not implementing proper email list hygiene best practices can put all your hard work in jeopardy. Now, in the high-paced digital world, around 306 billion emails are used to send (according to the 2020 year data), which is expected to proliferate by 22% touching 376 billion emails/day by 2025.
Depending on the business, an individual receives at least 100 emails per day. As you can already understand, the competition is extremely tough to get the attention of your subscriber. Practicing email list hygiene helps strengthen your email marketing campaign and achieve your goals.
Simply put, email list hygiene is a process of keeping your email list clean, transparent, and concise by removing all unwanted people who are not interested in your content. Removing bounced, unengaged, inactive, and fraudulent addresses from your email list might shrink your list. Making a distinction between customers or clients genuinely interested in your business, product, or services has been simplified.
Why is Email List Hygiene Important?
Effective email marketing depends heavily on email deliverability. Whether you acquire email lists through legitimate means or not, failing to maintain good email hygiene can have disastrous consequences for your email campaigns. Neglecting email list hygiene can hinder your email deliverability by weighing down your campaigns with disengaged customers and inactive addresses. Email hygiene helps do away with email addresses that are clogging up your database and helps make room for quality lists.
1. Improve Reputation
If you don’t want to risk your brand or company reputation, then maintaining email list hygiene is your key. Avoiding inactive, non-respondent, invalid email list from the campaign add value to the deliverability and help in building a good reputation with your clients.
2. Accelerate Engagement Rate
Eliminating incorrect email addresses from the target audience empowers campaign performance and can have a positive impact on open and click-through rates. This, in turn, can mitigate hard bounces and ultimately result in improved engagement.
3. Avoid Spam Traps
You don’t want to lead to a pitfall. You must erase the invalid data from your email list to avoid landing on the spam list. This practice will ensure that your email doesn’t fall under the blacklist and reduce the chance of negative brand association.
4. Targeted Email Campaign
Audience focused email campaigns have shown immense potential for creating success. To achieve desired marketing goals through an email campaign, a structured filtration of the email list allows you to customize the campaign according to the objectives leading to a positive outcome of your campaign.
5. Maximizing Conversion
The verified email list with all the parameters placed can help you to enhance your connection with your prospects. By engaging with individuals who are genuinely interested in your product or service, you can guarantee swift and efficient conversions.
Tips to Keep Your Email List Clean
To ensure email marketing campaign success, following multiple best practices, such as using catchy subject lines, offering enticing incentives, and providing high-quality content, is important. However, one vital factor often overlooked is having accurate and up-to-date data in your email marketing lists. Maintaining good email list hygiene process is essential for the success of any campaign, and check here for a few tips to ensure your email list hygiene practice has no errors.
1. Credible Source
It is vital to acquire data from trustable sources. There are many channels from where you can easily get the email list. But before finalizing any deal, examine the vendor’s credibility by analyzing the online reputation, review, and web presence.
2. Fix a Timeline
Do you have a regular schedule for cleaning up and updating your email list? As email list cleaning is a continuous process, it is always said to set a realistic timeframe for data sets depending on the volume. A month may be too short, while a year may be too long. Cleaning 3 or 4 times a year for optimal email list hygiene practice. It ensures that the email list is adequately maintained.
3. Validate Data
Validation of purchased or existing data is extremely important. This process will remove the non-responders from your list. Making the data more accurate and valid. Implement double opt-in processes to ensure checklist accuracy and validity. Additionally, take help from technology: leverage email validation and verification tools to identify and eliminate invalid or unreliable email addresses.
4. Hire an Expert
Sometimes, leaving the task to an expert is better. Hiring an email marketing expert will help you to achieve your desired goal. Also, integrate technology into your email campaign to maximize productivity and accuracy.
5. Remove Inactive Respondents
It’s essential to focus on engaging with your active subscribers and consistently providing them with valuable content rather than catering to inactive lists. This way, you can maintain a strong relationship with them and avoid any negative impact on your deliverability. But how do you differentiate between active and inactive? Email list hygiene can fix this problem. This process will help identify inactive or non-responsive accounts, and excluding them from your list will help boost the engagement rate in no time. Remember, by prioritizing your active subscribers, you’ll be able to achieve tremendous success in your email marketing campaigns.
7. Find out the Reason for Leaving
The reason could be anything – your content isn’t providing value, or they don’t like the services you provide. Finding out the reason for the unsubscribe responses is essential for planning your future campaign. Ask questions and evaluate how you can improve your email campaign. Evaluating answers might lead you to find a more effective email marketing strategy to achieve your marketing goals.
8. Segregate the Email List
19% of all emails go missing or have been caught by popular spam filters. And your email marketing campaign’s ultimate goal should be not to land inside the spam folder. How do you solve the problem? Its relevancy, a perfect time, and personalized content – that’s all. These factors will help reduce the chances of facing the worst-case scenarios. To identify those factors, you must need the email list segmentation.
An email marketer needs to incorporate segmentation in the email list hygiene process to deliver tailored massage to make the campaign impactful. The segmentation parameters could be anything aligned with your campaign, brand, or organization. For instance, demographic, geography, interests, and behavior could be your segregation parameters. These parameters can be changed on time per your campaign strategy to keep email list hygiene maintained.
9. Add Value to the Content
When email marketing is crucial, you must know who is interested in your content and will likely receive future communications. Also, you must know your subscriber list and run an in-depth analysis on what types of content provide value to them.
Your email subscribers are seeking valuable content that can enhance their lives. While some may appreciate a fancy promotional email, others prefer helpful information about your industry or services. According to 81% of B2B marketers, email newsletters are a potent tool for content marketing. Adding filters or asking questions during the subscription process will allow you to discern what your subscribers are interested in.
A report from Monetate stated that marketers had observed a spike in sales of about 20% when using personalized content. In the year 2021, 64% of B2B marketers said their email strategy was effective for meeting business goals. It is highly impactful for improving the ROI of email marketing campaigns through humanized and persuasive content strategy.
10. Revive the Inactive List
How many addresses are invalid or spam in your email list? How many are valid but not interested in your content? It’s pretty complicated to find out. But practicing email list hygiene helps you to gather the information you need. While invalid and spam addresses are of no use, you might want to re-engage with an inactive email list that can add value to your campaign.
Trying to revive the existing one is always suggested before getting another email list. The process is cost-effective, and the subscribers have been interested in your business for a while. Why not try again to add value through a personalized communication approach?
Above, we already discussed segregation, content value, and unsubscribe reasons. Planning a campaign such as a drip mailer or nurture mailer to re-activate your inactive subscriber list will be easy when you get all your answers in one place. It’s important to segregate your inactive and active email lists by implying hygiene tips before starting any campaign.
11. Track the Metrics
Campaign metrics are one of the crucial parameters for maintaining email list hygiene. While each campaign is bound to track specific metrics to measure the campaign’s impact, it also helps to clean up the no respondents lists to elevate the result. Open rate, bounce rate, and click-through rates are essential metrics to speculate. Also, these results help in distinguishing between active and inactive email lists.
So, to perform any email list hygiene practice, you need engagement data to validate, such as email deliverability rates, hard bounces data, and spam complaints. Monitor bounce reports to extract invalid or non-existent email addresses and clean your email list.
Final Note
Maintaining a healthy email list is crucial for connecting with your clients, providing valuable content, and building lasting relationships. By prioritizing email list hygiene, you can improve deliverability and increase ROI. Never restrain yourself from making constructive decisions to keep your email list fresh, and you’ll be amazed at how successful your campaigns become.
