Do you need to clean your email lists? If you’re not seeing good results with your campaign engagement or deliverability, it might be just what you need!
We all know that email campaigns often don’t get the engagement they deserve – or that they don’t even reach the inbox!
Consider removing uninterested, irrelevant, or disengaged contact information from your email contact list.
In this article, we will explain the 5 main tricks that help clean email lists readily.
Email list cleaning (Clean Email) – what is it?
Email list cleaning is a process of regularly cleaning your email contact list that involves weeding out outdated contacts and being responsive to recipients’ preferences. This results in an updated email contact list that is more effective for interacting with recipients.
Cleaning your email list: 5 simple tips
After learning why it’s important, here are some simple steps to improve your email marketing:
Engage people
When engagement rates are low, it may be because your recipients don’t care about your content. Or maybe they feel compelled to consume your content, but don’t take further action. Some ways to get people to respond:
- Provide an incentive for respondents by including a survey in the email
- Create a new product or ask for feedback on something you’ve done
- Use multi-list forms to allow contacts to set communication preferences, such as preferred newsletter frequency and topics of interest, within emails themselves.
- Promote your social media channels by running a giveaway
Inactive subscribers can be filtered out if they aren’t engaging with your emails. The next step is to determine what to do with these users. Segmenting your subscribers into subgroups based on their preferences will help you create tailored email marketing campaigns.
Re-Engage your customers with an email campaign
Engagement levels do not necessarily indicate that recipients do not want to hear from you. It could simply be that the content you are sending does not appeal to them. It is worthwhile to consider other types of content you can provide that may be more appealing to less active subscribers before you write them off.
With the right win-back email offer, unengaged subscribers can be enticed to act, like:
- Discounts or gifts.
- A special benefit.
- Exclusive content.
You may find that your email subscribers appreciate your content, but are just fatigued by email. You might have email subscribers who appreciate your content, but they simply feel ‘tired’ of receiving emails. Inboxes especially tend to fill up even faster during the holidays!
It is also possible to reconnect with these contacts on other platforms. If you want to be followed on social media, add links to your profiles.
Opt-in must be renewed
If your most engaging subscribers continue to interact with your emails, there is no need to ask them to opt into your emails again.
You may have disengaged subscribers who wish to leave but have not taken the time to unsubscribe. Perhaps they think that unsubscribing is too difficult, or they care so little about them that they prefer to delete them individually rather than opt-out altogether.
By sending a re-opt-in campaign, you can do yourself and your unengaged subscribers a favor; if they don’t re-subscribe, you can remove them.
What is the best way to do this?
Transparency is key! If your subscribers are inactive, you should notify them that you’ve noticed their lack of engagement and that you don’t want to clutter their inboxes. You can re-sign up for future emails by asking them if they want to receive emails in the future and including a call-to-action button.
Do you know what to do if they don’t respond?
Let it rest for a week or two, then delete it. Marketing automation can automate this (see step 5).
Provide an easy way to unsubscribe
People are typically required to be able to unsubscribe from their emails. There’s a lot of variation in how businesses handle this requirement because the law doesn’t necessarily state how to accomplish it.
Are you aware of this? The bulk email software developed by GrowMeOrganic is fully GDPR compliant and automatically contains an unsubscribe link in all emails. You need not do anything extra to comply.
To keep subscribers, some businesses intentionally make unsubscribing difficult. People usually don’t like it.
Avoid hiding your unsubscribe link or making the opt-out process too complicated or time-consuming. You risk having your emails marked as spam if you don’t let recipients leave, which is a huge attack on your reputation as a sender.
By reporting your emails, ISPs (Internet Service Providers) lose confidence in your emails, causing them to block or filter your emails out of other recipients’ inboxes as well.
It can be difficult for business owners to understand why it’s important to make it easy for customers to leave. Since you likely spent time and money to attract these consumers, why would you want to lose them? Unsubscribe buttons and one-step opt-out processes won’t encourage subscribers to leave if you are giving them a reason to stay. Give them something of value, and they will stay.
Automate your marketing
You can clean up your email list with marketing automation. Subscriptions that fit certain criteria can be automatically removed or segmented.
Using marketing automation, remove bounced emails from your list by removing outdated or invalid addresses. Instead of removing addresses after a single bounce, set up a rule to remove addresses that bounce two or more times. If people haven’t opened your email in 6–12 months, you can also make the rule based on a time limit.
A full inbox or server technical error can cause even valid email addresses to bounce on occasion. The fact that an email bounces multiple times indicates that it is no longer active.
B2B companies should pay particular attention to this. Most of their email lists consist of work addresses, which have a much shorter lifespan than personal addresses due to employee turnover.
Ensure you understand how your email provider handles different types of bounces and automatic blacklisting before setting up such a rule. By understanding this, you can create rules that will fill in any gaps that you think need to be filled.
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