Email List Cleaning: How to Clean Your Email List

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 is email list cleaning?

Email list cleaning is the process of removing invalid, inactive and unwanted addresses from your mailing list, so that you only email people who exist and still want to hear from you. A clean list means fewer bounces and spam complaints, a better sender reputation and more of your emails in the inbox.

Key takeaways

• Remove hard bounces, unsubscribes and spam complainers after every send.
• Fix typos and remove duplicates, fake and disposable addresses as soon as they appear.
• Try to re-engage inactive contacts before removing them.
• Do a full clean every three to six months, and always before emailing an old list.

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.

Bounces, unsubscribes and complaints should leave your list on their own. Mailpro removes them automatically after every send — see email segmentation.

How to clean your email list in 7 steps

1. Export a backup of your list before you delete anything.
2. Remove hard bounces: addresses that do not exist will never deliver.
3. Remove unsubscribes and spam complaints, and keep them in a suppression list so they are never re-imported.
4. Fix obvious typos and merge duplicates, for example gmial.com or the same person on two lists.
5. Remove fake, disposable and role addresses such as info@ or admin@ that rarely belong to one engaged reader.
6. Verify the rest with an email verification tool if the list is old or was imported from another system.
7. Re-engage inactive contacts with a short campaign, then remove those who still do not open or click.

What to remove, and when

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.

Frequently asked questions about email list cleaning

How often should you clean your email list?

Remove bounces, unsubscribes and complaints continuously, ideally automatically after each send. Do a full clean of inactive and suspicious addresses every three to six months, and always before emailing a list you have not used for a long time.

Will cleaning my list lower my results?

Your list gets smaller, but your open and click rates go up and fewer emails land in spam. You also stop paying to email people who never read your messages.

What is the difference between list cleaning and email verification?

Email verification checks whether an address can receive email. List cleaning is broader: it also removes people who unsubscribed, complained or stopped engaging, even if their address is technically valid.

Should I delete unsubscribed contacts?

Keep them in a suppression list rather than deleting them outright, so that they are not added back by mistake when you import a file. Never email them again for marketing.

For the bigger picture, see our guide on how to manage email lists.

Related guide: How to manage email lists: 16 best practices