To achieve decent results from your email marketing, you need to keep track of every aspect of the process: your content, your technical capacity, and the contacts of your recipients.
We can talk for hours about the last points, as managing your mailing list goes much beyond just collecting a certain number of emails once. You need to constantly check and clean your email list if you want to have high delivery and open rates.
But why is it so important? How to clean up an email list, is it hard? We will answer this question in the article.
What is an email list cleaning and why do you need it for email marketing?
Mailing list cleaning is a process of deleting invalid, inactive, or spam emails from your email database. Even if you validate the addresses after you have just added them to your list, you still need to check them regularly every now and then, as some of the emails might get shut down, the domain associated with them might become inactive, and so on.
Basically, regular cleaning allows you to remove contacts that can negatively impact your sender’s reputation and your results.
Advantages of email cleaning and managing
So, let’s look deeper into the benefits that cleaning the mailing list will bring to your business.
- You will have higher delivery and open rate, as you won’t send to inactive accounts which can be used to receive or open an email.
- You will protect your sender’s reputation, as you have a higher chance to avoid high bounce rates or spam traps.
- You will optimize your expenses. As the majority of providers charge for the number of emails you send, your goal is to ensure that your messages aren’t sent to void accounts where there is no real person to interact with your newsletter.
Tips for cleaning an email list
As you can see, the process of checking your mailing list is essential for maintaining high results. Here are a few pieces of advice you can use to ensure that your cleaning is efficient and leads to the outcome you expect.
- Make cleaning a regular process. Make a schedule to run a check at a certain date every month, and don’t forget to validate the contacts you get from the email and email list manager software before adding them to your current list.
- Find a tool to automate this activity. This will help you to save time, as well as ensure that all invalid email addresses are removed and none is missed due to a human factor. The market for email marketing solutions is wide, so you will be able to find a stand-alone solution or a plug-in, or additional features provided by your current digital marketing vendor.
- Consider removing not only invalid or bot accounts, but also contact addresses that haven’t shown any reaction on your campaigns for 2-3 months. Even if they belong to real people, most probably, they won’t suddenly interact with another newsletter you have sent, and it would make much more sense for you to let them go.
- Use user verification, captchas, and other similar tools to protect your list from the bots from the beginning. It would make your life much easier, as you will remove unwanted addresses even before doing an actual validation or cleaning.
Conclusion
Hopefully, our tips helped you to understand how to clean your email list and how it will help you increase the efficiency of your marketing. It isn’t hard, but it would make a significant difference.