Ah! The joys of spring – and with it, the opening of windows, letting in the fresh air and banishing the dust of a long winter (is it just me, or did this winter seem longer than usual?). It’s time for a spring clean, and once you’re done with the feather duster and cleaning the physical part of your office, it’s time to look at your email marketing – and list cleaning.
What Is List Cleaning?
Email list cleaning is the process of removing ‘dirty’ or ‘dead’ email addresses from your email database; old customers who have long since moved on or never really had an interest in signing up in the first place. You’ve been gathering them for a while, trust me!
But what makes an email ‘dirty?
- They bounce (i.e. they go nowhere)
- They are idle (i.e. they don’t have any interest in you)
You don’t want these emails because they impact your deliverability.
Do what?
Why You Should Clean Your Email List
It’s easy to believe that sending an email that goes nowhere or is ignored doesn’t harm anyone, but that mindset is wrong – it harms YOU (as well as being mildly irritating to the recipient).
Firstly, your email marketing metrics are important. They’re the statistics that govern how you tweak your future email marketing to get better at it and ultimately more successful. If you didn’t analyse your data, you’d just be making the same mistakes over and over (and you’re not doing that, right?).
One metric is deliverability. It’s the measure that your email gets to the intended inbox. It’s not just about the email address existing but also about making sure it doesn’t automatically become marked as spam and end up in junk. Deliverability means that it really did get where you want it to – in front of your customer.
And it’s a stat you want to measure to polish your email marketing. If you have poor deliverability data, then you think you’re doing better than you are, and that way lies mistakes.
A clean email list provides confident deliverability data. That’s a plus.
Another metric to measure is your engagement rate – that’s the people bothering to open up and read your email. Unengaged subscribers may get your email (+1 to deliverability) but might never read them, meaning your engagement rate is low. Honestly, why bother? Clean them out (or write better emails, but that’s for another blog!).
Finally, we get to the ever-increasingly-important sender reputation. This is all about you – are you the kind of email marketer happy to send out unwanted junk into the void hoping some sticks, or are you a conscientious and respectful emailer, making sure you take your customers’ views into account? The former will get you some negative sender reputation, the latter will boost it. Guess which you want! We’ll talk more about that later.
Continuing to send out emails to people who don’t want them harms your sender reputation and, over time, can completely destroy it. Don’t do that to yourself.
So… why should you clean out your email list?
- Higher Deliverability - Emails land in inboxes, not spam folders.
- Engagement Rate - Relevant content reaches interested subscribers, which converts into more sales.
- Sender Reputation - ISPs will view you as a trustworthy sender.
- Boosted Return on Investment - Maximise the return on your email marketing investment in terms of immediate sales, enhanced analysis, and improved efficiency.
The Downside of a Dirty List
What happens if you don’t clean your list? What if you’re getting an OK response with a dirty list?
Well, first of all, the chances are that responses will drop off as uninterested people get irritated and fed up with your emails and finally take the time to hit that unsubscribe button.
But more importantly, times are changing out there in the world of emails. In February this year, Google had an update (referred to as the ‘Google Spam Update’) that fundamentally changed the way they viewed email marketers who were all too happy to keep sending out spam – and where Google goes, soon every other ISP follows.
The Google Spam Update means that you have to authenticate your emails, make sure there’s an easy path for users to unsubscribe and ensure emails are wanted with a strict spam rate threshold. You can read more on the Google Spam Update here .
It all means that your sender reputation is extra important – abuse of mass email marketing can quickly see you put on blacklists that’ll mean your emails won’t get anywhere, including the people that really want to read them.
And there’s more… GDPR has been around for a while and can have costly consequences if you don’t follow it. It means you have to give subscribers a clear choice to join your list and the right to be forgotten if they no longer want your emails. Failing to clear out data and remove all information relating to them following their clear desire to be gone can result in fines.
link to the google spam update blog we wrote in Feb
Maintaining A Healthy and Clean Email List
Enough doom and gloom – by now, you know why you want a clean email list, so how do we do it? It’s a little more technical than rolling up your sleeves and grabbing a feather duster, but not really much harder or more time-consuming.
Method One - Engage with your email marketing platform
You are using a platform for sending your emails and not just using your email client, right? (Seriously, if you’re not using a proper email marketing platform, please contact me now – we need to talk!)
Your platform should tell you some key things: open rate, bounces, unsubscribes, etc. Go through your recent campaign data and look at the results.
Look for those that didn’t open, and go back and see if they have consistently not opened – if so, remove them.
It’s as simple as that; look at the data, analyse the data, make some conclusions, and act on them.
While you’re doing it, you should learn plenty of things about your email marketing campaigns to consider for the future. Are your emails not engaging like you thought they would? Perhaps you need to think about how you’re writing your content, or who you’re targeting. For help and a greater understanding of your email marketing, why not book a consultation?
Method Two - Mailercheck
Mailercheck is an email list verification and deliverability testing tool (you can tell because that’s the first thing it says on the website!). It’s actually a very handy way to validate all the emails on your list. It checks the whole list for invalid or harmful emails in seconds, and you can do 200 for free to test the system.
Mailercheck will also provide you with plenty of data to pour through – we love data!
Maintaining a Clean Email List
It’s important to stay on top of your email list cleaning if you want to be a successful email marketer – don’t wait until next spring to do it again!
Some best practices for maintaining a clean email list over time include;
Having a clear opt-in procedure
Make sure the people on your list want to be there. It can be tempting to gather up as many email addresses as you can, thinking that large numbers increase the chances of getting a new customer, but that’s not how good email marketing works. A clear opt-in process means you know the recipient of your email had at least some interest in receiving it.
Use consistent engagement efforts and strong re-engagement strategies
Don’t just chuck out the same old copy without thinking. Work on your subject line, properly personalise the email, develop clear CTAs, and make sure the content is fun and worth reading. Just because someone is on your list doesn’t mean you don’t have to work to keep them there.
Make sure you offer an unsubscribe option in every email
If they want out, don’t make it hard for them. A clear unsubscribe link is essential.
Analyse data and clear regularly
Checking your email marketing data often and taking steps to clean out dirty email addresses will bring you a far better understanding of your email list and the techniques you need to apply to improve its success.
Talk to Nathan
Let’s face it, not everyone enjoys email stats as much as I do, and some people (gasp!) actually find email list cleaning boring. I know… it’s hard to take. But, if you’re one of those people just contact me and let me manage your email marketing for you. It’ll increase your engagement, boost your sales, and generally make your email marketing far more successful, I promise!
