But, building up email for the sake of numbers isn’t a practice you want to continue if you want to have a healthy email list. So, let’s discuss a few key things you’ll want to know when your email list has a few cobwebs in it. In this post, we’ll go through why cleaning your list is important, when you’ll know it’s time for a clean, and finally, the steps to take to get it done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Reasons to strive for a clean email list<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
By now, you’ve likely heard all about why you should grow your email list<\/a>. In fact, you might be proud of the subscriber base you’ve been able to build. Now, the best way to keep that motivation and growth going is to keep it optimized for engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A stagnant or bot-infested email list is worse than having no list at all. Once you have a good system for bringing in visitors and signing them up as subscribers, you should schedule frequent cleanings of your list. Here’s why email maintenance will benefit your list:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your sender reputation is what mailbox providers like Gmail evaluate when they’re trying to decide to deliver it to spam or the inbox. There are several factors that influence sender reputation, and every receiving mailbox provider out there uses their own secret algorithm to determine your score. Three big factors that we know for sure are things you can improve by regular list maintenance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To keep your reputation from becoming the villain, you’ll have to avoid certain mistakes like growing your list indiscriminately. Other common mistakes marketers make when growing and nurturing email lists are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n You should treat your list the way you would a prized possession. Clean and maintain it so that it holds its value for years to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When emailing, you can see a rough estimate of your list’s health by looking at the bounce rate<\/a>. This is a metric showing you how many of your emails never found the address they were sent to, whether it’s because it doesn’t exist anymore, because the user abandoned it, or because it was misspelled when it was collected. Try removing any contacts that are causing bounces. This will immediately improve your bounce rate to keep your reputation high<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deliverability is a metric that measures the ability your emails have to go to your subscribers’ inboxes versus the junk or spam folder. This is different from email delivery which you can easily check by looking at how many messages were delivered versus how many bounced. Deliverability is complicated to measure, but there are a few things that might affect email deliverability<\/a> poorly, for example:<\/p>\n\n\n\n By cleaning your list, you’ll likely increase the overall engagement of your email campaigns<\/a> and avoid affecting your deliverability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most email management tools charge you depending on the size of your list. If you’re paying for that bigger list, it should be so you can get the most out of it. When it’s cluttered with old leads, your costs go up, but your conversion rates go down. If ever there was a time to sound an alarm in your marketing team, this would be it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As you work towards a clean email list, you’ll start to see how the cost of managing them becomes more suited to your budget and more efficient for your sales goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If your ROI, opens, or clicks are in a slump, it may be time to clean up your list. Regular cleanings are important whether or not you see signs of distress on your email list, but a higher number of unsubscribes and spam reports are two trackable red flags to look out for. So how do you know whether or not you need to clean your email list? Here are some signs that your list needs maintenance:<\/p>\n\n\n\n With every campaign you send out, you should be analyzing the performance not just of how many people opened it (your open rate) but also how many bounces it got. If you’re getting more bounces, it may be time to take a look at the addresses showing problems and find out why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You might wonder whether you should delete them all right away and get rid of the problem altogether, but there’s a case to be made for waiting. The thing about bounce rate is that there are two different types of bounces, hard and soft<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not all email bounces happen for the same reasons. Hard bounces are the ones that you must get rid of — these are bounces that aren’t going to be fixed. Maybe the email address doesn’t exist or it was permanently deleted. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Soft bounces are those that have temporary issues. Maybe the recipient is out of storage, or they’re having trouble retrieving a file you attached. When email servers see a bounce, they usually attempt to resend the email a few days later<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In terms of bounces how do you know what’s a deal-breaker and what’s one that you should give a second chance? You don’t. That’s why the most common thing to do isn’t to delete all email addresses that bounce but to keep tabs on them. If they keep bouncing week after week, then scrap them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you’re not immediately deleting bounces, how do you keep a “good” bounce rate? Just like the click-through rate, what’s acceptable and what’s not depends mainly on your industry and the number of leads you’re bringing in every day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Overall, you should try to keep your rate under 3%, so if you’re seeing an uptick in bounces but you’re still under that mark, keep an eye on it and scrub out the repeat offenders later. If you’re in an urgent state where your bounce rate has hit 8% or more, go into crisis mode and get to scrubbing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If your engagement — largely measured by click-through<\/a> and click-to-open rates<\/a> — is down, there might be issues with your list. The best way to get back on track is to spend time trying to figure out exactly what’s causing the drop in engagement. But if you’re short on time, start troubleshooting the loss of engagement by conducting a full clean — and tackle your other metrics at the same time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When considering the big picture, since any drop in email performance can directly translate to a drop in revenue, it makes sense to keep your list as problem-free as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are a few ways you’lll know that your list has been invaded by a spambot. Spambots can add emails from other places on the internet and some can even make it seem like your list is doing well, but upon closer look, you’ll find that something is wrong. Here are a few things to watch out for:<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you do realize that you have bot-added addresses or fake sign-ups, don’t panic. You can get your list back by scrubbing it with the steps we’ll explain in the next section.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The benefits of a clean email list are varied and vast. Once you’re convinced that you’d like to start putting scheduled scrubs on your marketing team’s calendar, here’s what you’ll do to pull off a successful email list scrub<\/a>. Start with calculated tidying, then move on to more challenging measures, and finally reengage your list to keep as many leads as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like with a home, before you do a deep clean, you want to tidy up. Get rid of the most obvious — things lying around that really shouldn’t be there. What does this mean when it comes to your subscribers? <\/p>\n\n\n\n You might find unused segments and remove subscribers or create more targeted segments. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Additionally, check for contacts added on multiple active lists, check the last-sent date on any lists, and delete them if they’re too old. This will start to make sure everything aligns with your current organization for email marketing<\/a> and isn’t too outdated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Additionally, remove role addresses like marketing@company.com or sales@company.com. If possible, just find a personal point of contact for clients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For a clean email list, segment your email subscribers<\/a> into three main groups: those who love you and open your emails almost every time, those who sometimes open, and those who hardly ever engage. Then, approach each group differently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For this clean, you’ll want to leave this segment alone. They’re already showing good engagement and seem satisfied. You can definitely come back to this later and try to improve their performance even more, but for now, let this segment set the standard for what you want the rest to look like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Next, address those who open your emails sometimes. What does it mean if only some emails provoke engagement? Something about your email content<\/a> doesn’t quite match what they’re looking for. When trying to fix it, you can make subtle changes and run A\/B tests<\/a>, sending different variations of the same campaign to two groups within this segment and seeing which performs best. You can also test the time of day<\/a>, frequency of emails, or just ask them for their preferences with a survey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you’re looking for something quick that can make a big difference, ask subscribers on this list to add you to their contacts. It will keep any emails from going into spam and allow more opportunities for engagement by going straight to the inbox they open every morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, you have a list of people who don’t really care for your content — or at least that’s what it seems, from how they interact with it. Don’t be so quick to toss them aside and delete them to focus on the more engaged ones. There might still be something you can do. If they’re not looking at your emails, it could be because they never arrived in their inbox. So, how do you weed out the ones who do see them and choose to ignore them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Come back to this segment after you’ve finished your clean. If you send out a few “winback campaigns” or “reengagement campaigns” and see change, pick out those that are making a comeback and move them to the first or second segment. As for those who remain uninterested, you’ve done what you can, so you’re free to delete them. Before you do, though, give them one last chance by sending out a goodbye email that says something along the lines of:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We noticed you’re not interested in our emails anymore. If that’s the case, we’re going to clear your email from our list. If we’re wrong and you’d like to stay subscribed, let us know! Reply to this email, and we’ll stay connected. If not, farewell and thank you for the good times.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, stay true to your word and delete them from the list after a week or two if they don’t respond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To keep a clean email list, for all emails going forward, add a line at the top reminding subscribers that they opted into these emails and why. This can give readers a chance to evaluate why they’re getting this email and keep them from reporting you as spam. It can also help them decide if they want to continue getting this type of email.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is great because it helps people unsubscribe themselves when they no longer find value in your content. Unsubscribes in good measure are actually good for your list. It’s like a Roomba, cleaning up while you take care of business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reminders of why you’re subscribed to a list do wonders for keeping users from unsubscribing. Most of the time, readers just want to know that they weren’t added by some bot. If they’re getting an email, they’d like you to know that they found it useful at some point and might again later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Use tags to start tracking<\/a> your bounces. Create a tag for all the addresses that bounce back when you send an email, and identify the ones that consistently cause problems. If possible, save any that bounce because of obvious misspellings. If you have other forms of contact for these leads, reach out and ask them if they have updated information and would still like to receive content from you. Finally, delete any that your email provider recommends for removal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Go back to your segments and approach the second group, the one that is lukewarm about your content. Reengage them with an active campaign. If you haven’t finished cleaning out the third group, you can try this with them as well. There are a few ways to entice people on your list to remember why they signed up in the first place, like that goodbye email we saw earlier, but you can also try offering an exclusive discount to gauge that segment’s interest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After noticing a drop in email opens, Wonderbly, a personalized children’s book business, sends an email asking you to reengage. In exchange, they offer a discount on their products. This shows them who on their list is still interested in their content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What if you could get one last “yes” before a subscriber was totally convinced that they were leaving? Offering options can be your saving grace. In your very last email to a subscriber that doesn’t interact with your emails, offer them the option to only get some emails. After all, they probably signed up for a reason and sometimes, if you offer them less frequent emails or to only receive certain types of content, you’ll reignite the spark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What kind of options can you give readers? It all depends on what you send. If you have separate newsletters<\/a> or emails — one for news, one for third-party content, one for coupons<\/a>, etc. — allow them to check which of these emails they’d like to receive.<\/p>\n\n\n\nMaintaining sender reputation<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Improving bounce rate <\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Increasing deliverability<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Optimizing email management costs<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Signs that you need to scrub your email list<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Your bounce rate is up<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Types of email bounces <\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Good versus bad bounce rate<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Your open and click-through rates are down<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
You have bot subscribers<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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How to get a clean email list step-by-step<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
1. Do a preliminary clean<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
2. Segment your list<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Your engaged group<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Your middle group<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Your disengaged group<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
![\"Email](\"https:\/\/www.constantcontact.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/ReadyAd.png?w=295\")
3. Implement a permission reminder<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"Email](\"https:\/\/www.constantcontact.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Social-icons-and-email-footer.png\"){kind=icon}
4. Address your bounces<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
5. Reengage your audience with a campaign<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"clean](\"https:\/\/www.constantcontact.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/AD_4nXc97YUgSWg0PSOp9q3vP8wZRYLEyXzG_HeVwtlM6eUJNip4BbM4ZhZJyuVZPEi5t86m2Fa9nCWw8OmXsPUcQo3JJC2p6MlFUTjcjttk1S2EAXpVq4__CmudpDajDm5eYyxIp8UF8Egi8fG7dySAZkBmLohVkeykwDEg28CzjZNwFvLWceNrA.png\")
6. Offer the option of opting down versus opting out<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"Update](\"https:\/\/www.constantcontact.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/New-yorker-preference.png\")