Email List Scrubbing for the Busy Marketer
Email List Scrubbing for the Busy Marketer
Smaller email lists with highly engaged subscribers will always outperform larger lists with inactive members.
In this article, we’ll talk about how important it is to email list scrubbing service, how often you should do it, and the best ways to do it.
Reasons to get rid of email subscribers:
- Cost: Each user incurs a fee. Every single person that signs up to your mailing list costs money. The cost of using a service like MailChimp, where one subscriber can belong to several different groups, can increase dramatically if you use this strategy with the same subscriber.
- Precise Reporting: Increases the reliability of your engagement metrics (e.g., if 50 percent of your list isn’t receiving your emails, your data on what’s working and what isn’t will be completely incorrect).
- Deliverability: You increase the likelihood that your entire list will be flagged as spam by ISPs! Bounced emails are marked as spam by ISPs, and all major email clients use them as a spam signal. Sending messages to inactive accounts will cause your mailing list to be marked as spammy. As a result of these complaints, your email provider may decide to remove your list from circulation.
- How often should my list be cleaned?
Typically, you may expect between a quarter and a third of your list to churn (decrease) each year. Some of these figures will consist of those who have chosen to opt out of receiving your emails, but this number should be rather low (or at least it should be if you’re providing the proper material!) Deleted emails and disinterested readers account for the vast majority of your churn.
Our team at Verify550 suggests you sanitize your email list at least once a year, but no less frequently than every three months.
Fortunately, you may arrange things in such a way that much of the tidying up occurs automatically. It requires a little more forethought, though.
What to do if your to do list is a mess
Get rid of the inactive or non-working email accounts. To be sure, check your email program’s settings, but most reputable programs will do this automatically.
Get rid of any fake email addresses. Sales@ and support@ are examples of such email addresses. Most of the time, they are distributed to a large number of people. ISPs are aware of the fact that not everyone who receives one of these emails has specifically requested to do so. As a result, they frequently either ignore them or label them as spam.
Do not continue to inundate inactive subscribers with emails. Don’t include the “cold” group in your email marketing efforts. Your top line will increase dramatically as that segment of your database has been degrading your results up until now.
Mark the dormant users who have joined your list. Consider making a summary of what people on your list have done so you can find the least interested ones.
Make sure your email list has a “cold” section. Gather the subscribers who are considered “cold” together. Label it “chilly.” With this step taken, you can treat this subset of your audience independently of the rest.
Make sure your “cold” email engagement sequence has a strong call to action. Just a simple “keep receiving our content on XYZ by clicking this link” would suffice. (For this to work, your email program has to have the option to automatically add or remove tags from messages based on the links that are clicked within them.)
Give your “cold” section the cold sequence. If your email platform permits it, you should ideally establish a series of rules to consistently classify inactive subscribers as “cold” and insert them into this sequence. You may save a lot of time and effort by using automation to keep your list in tip-top shape.
For the record, here’s one last word of caution: watch how you count the number of times people interact with your list. Specifically, you can gauge your audience’s interest in your material by looking at their open rates. In the past month, Apple released updated email privacy features that have been wreaking havoc on open rate data. Our research shows that click-through rates are a better way to tell how interested users are than other measures.
Are you looking for a way to make sure your emails get delivered?
Here’s the good news: Verify550.com provides email list validation service that will help make sure your messages are not blocked by spam filters.
Our company has been in the business of delivering quality email marketing campaigns for so many years. We know how important it is to make sure your message gets through, and we’re here to help.