Do you know the most important part of your email marketing campaign? It is the email list. Email list plays such an important role that you can determine the performance of your online marketing campaign, user engagement, and general health and progress simply by observing it. This is why purging unclean and incorrect data from the list is crucial.
What’s more, a clean email list ensures that your marketing is 100% effective to customers who are interested in your brand, and you don’t spam people who don’t want to hear back from you. No, there is no upside to keeping people on your email list who have marked you spam, unsubscribed you, or who have not engaged with you in over 90 days.
All said and done, this seems like a good idea. But why do you need to clean your email list, and how exactly do you accomplish this task? Keeping your email list clean has many benefits, and we will scrutinize every detail to know why it’s best for your brand, plus a neat how-to to get you started on the right path.
What Are The Benefits Of Keeping A Clean Email List?
- You risk getting marked spam
What is the first thing people do when they don’t want to read your email? They either put it in the trash or junk folder. When they junk your mail, email providers like Gmail, Yahoo, think that you must be sending spam emails.
When you continue sending emails to people who have junked you, you end up risking your complete online presence. Besides, there is not a single upside to marketing to people who don’t wish to hear back from you.
- Reduced marketing cost
You are paying a hefty price to mass market your brand. The price between sending email to 5000 people and 10000 people will vary astronomically. The email providers will charge you by the numbers whether the customers open your emails or not.
- Your open rates will improve
The problem with having a located email list is that your open rate is correlated to this. This is an important metric in the business that you should be tracking religiously. If you have a poor open rate, you do everything to improve it, including modifying your current marketing strategy. But how do you know your open rate is accurate when you have unclean emails in your database?
Let’s look at this example: Let’s say that your business requires to have a 10% open rate monthly. If your open rate is lower than that, it means people are not interested in your marketing campaigns, products, or brand.
Now, you have a database of 10,000 emails, and your open rate is staggering at 8%. You cannot figure out why and end up spending a lot of money on improving marketing strategy with little to no ROI.
Then you decide to scrub your email list. You end up with 5,000 active emails. On one hand, you have cut down marketing costs, have focused on accounts interested in your products, and on the other, your ROI has shot up to 16%. This means you are performing as expected, but tracing the metric incorrectly.
- Improve your click-through rate
CTR will always be lower than your open rate. If 500 subscribers open your emails, you might get 20 clicks at best at a time. Now, this is expected for any business. But remember, click-through rate (CTR) is a vital metric to track. If you measure incorrectly, you don’t know the health of your marketing campaign. And a sharp drop in CTR is always a huge cause for concern.
- Reduce your bounce rate
The more invalid emails you have on your list, the higher will be the bounce rate. Spam complaints are nothing to joke about. If an email provider thinks you are spamming, after a certain limit, your emails will automatically be directed to the spam box of your new clients.
Fortunately, cleaning an email list is not a difficult task. You just have to follow the strategy behind it.
Tips and Tricks for Maintaining A Clean Email List
- Remove redundant emails
Lots of people subscribe to the same mail lists. If your website already does not have measures to prevent signing up with an existing email id, you should recheck your list for redundant emails and remove them,
- Focus on segmentation
Your clients should be segmented in order of frequency of engagement. This means, your highly active clients should never be put in the same marketing list with someone who shops once every six months. When you have proper segmentation, start by the lists that are most active to least active. Since you do not engage with the least active segment that frequently anyway.
- Make way for double opt-ins
Having double opt-ins is the best way to ensure that your target audiences are interested in hearing from you. How does this work? Once your customer have subscribed to your newsletter (opt-in), they will receive an email where they will need to reconfirm the subscription, hence the name double opt-in.
Quite predictably, users who have chosen to go for double opt-in are the ones who are genuinely interested in your brand, and this is what you need.
- Block email addresses from disposable providers/fake email addresses
If you have a manageable list that you can verify manually, look for emails from disposable providers. They provide the user with a temporary email account which lasts about an hour. So, the user signs up with you, but never receive emails. The domain names are usually spot on. @arkssga.com or some gibberish. Remove emails that belong to unregistered domains.
And then proceed to identify fake email addresses such as [email protected]. Clients often make a separate mailbox for emails from brands. They don’t add any value to your campaign.
- Remove people who wish to unsubscribe
People who complain of spam should be removed ASAP to ensure you have spam complaints at the low. We have explained why, but it is worth repeating. Plus, removing unwanted emails will improve your ROI.
- Verify emails in bulk
You can utilize email verification services. These providers have free trials where you can generate a report for a sample of your database and see the performance of the emails you have enlisted. If you have a sufficiently big database, you must use an email verification service to clean out the junk.
The Wrap Up
As you can see, keeping your email list clean is the need of the hour. So, how do you ensure that you email is well-updated and clean? Do let us know in the comments below.