Is Your Email List Safe To Use? The Importance Of Email List Hygiene

Are you delivering messages to people who really want them? If not, then your email marketing efforts may need some overhaul.

An email list hygiene is critical for any online or digital entrepreneur making that break or entry point into the web marketplace.  You have to learn how to declutter your email list as this can make or break your business.

What is Email Hygiene?

Email Hygiene is screening out the cold email subscribers from your email marketing campaign while retaining your warm email subscribers. That is more like keeping your golden eggs secure and getting rid of the bad ones. It is important to perform regular email hygiene or cleanup to ensure that your emails will be opened and read.

Email Service Providers like Gmail and Yahoo Mail have become more intelligent and intuitive. They have become highly responsive and sensitive to what their recipients would want to have in their inboxes. ESPs are now looking deeply into all your emails plus the kind of engagement that recipients have with each one. How your messages are handled like the open rates are now being evaluated and integrated into the internal systems of ESPs.

Yes, ESPs are now able to able to calculate the open rates, unsubscribes, click-throughs, and inactivity rate into this algorithm that decides your place in the recipient’s inbox. In this way, the ESPs are able to determine instantly if you categorically belong in the inbox or spam folder judging by the way your messages are handled by the recipient.

So, with email marketing, it is vital to be able to track and monitor the behavior of your recipients. The challenge with email marketing is how you can fire up engagement and keep that burning for a long time because even highly engaged subscribers tend to lose interest after some time. So, that permission to send email might have an expiration date at some point for your business. Keeping healthy email hygiene is a good habit to practice regularly because this ensures that your emails are delivered promptly and have high open rates.

Why Email List Hygiene is Important

Email list scrubbing or cleanup should be done regularly or several times a year to ensure that you are targeting people who are really interested in what you have to offer. You have to remove inactive people who are not interested in your business.

If they won’t even open or read your emails then what is the point of keeping them. Keeping a healthy email list is not about maintaining the numbers but the quality of your recipients. You have to deliver the right message to people who are genuinely interested and excited to be your member and to receive messages from you in their inboxes.

 Here are the reasons why email list hygiene is important for your business:

• Increase Open and Click Rates. You increase the likelihood or percentage of your emails being opened and read with a healthy email list. Trimming off inactive members or recipients will allow you to focus on the active or warm recipients who love getting your emails. This then improves your click and open rate percentages.
• Fewer Bounce Rates. Once the number of bounces goes up, this can hurt your reputation and also affect email deliverability. There is an increased chance of your emails being marked as spam. Although there are a number of other reasons for bounce rates such as invalid email addresses or some technical errors but still maintaining a healthy email list will help you reduce problems with bounce rates. This is where you will need an efficient email verification service.
• Fewer Chances of Being Marked as Spam. By instinct, we would mark as spam those emails that look unauthorized or fishy. While some would randomly mark emails as spam in an effort to get more organized and get rid of the trash. The last thing that a business would want to be labeled as spam or trash because mailbox providers would log these spam complaints and chances are, your emails will skip the inbox and go straight to the spam folders. A lot of times subscribers would forget they even signed up on your email list and then mark you as spam. This affects your sender reputation and could end up losing more subscribers in the long run.
• Accurate and Detailed Reporting. With a healthy and clean email list, you will have substantial and accurate data that you can rely on for your future email marketing strategies. You will know your exact stats and your report would not be skewed by inactive email subscribers on your list.
• A Decrease in Costs. You can improve your email marketing efforts and ROI with a healthy and hygienic email list. This is because every inactive subscriber or member is costing you more money than you should. Getting rid of these cold email subscribers and keeping the good eggs will be beneficial to your email marketing strategy.

How To Revive Your Dead Subscriber List

It is really a breeze to drive conversions to clients who actually want to be in your domain. However, driving engagement is really a hit or miss thing and takes a lot of consistency and injecting excitement to get it revved up continuously. Here’s what you can do to revive your email list and skyrocket your email marketing efforts:

• Re-engagement Email. Send your subscribers a re-engagement email that asks them to confirm their interest like giving your members a variety of subscription options, confirming their current or active email address, and asking them to click a link to verify that they really want to be in your list.
• Evaluate the Problem. There is always a reason for every casualty or death. As the owner of the email list, you have to be proactive and dig into what caused the actual drop of interest in your emails. If they are not opening up at all, then there might be something that you’re missing.
• Hit that Mark. If you leave your audience hungry for information for too long then you might not be engaging or resonating well with them. They lost interest because you might seem to be too much of a salesman and not really providing real value to your audience. Look for that loose end and fix it.
• Be Consistent. Do not over-commit yet under-deliver with your subscribers. You have to be consistent yet not overwhelm them with an influx of messages. You have to find that balance that leaves them hungry for more content yet keeps them intoxicated with what you have to offer next.

While it might be too complicated to deal with, an email hygiene list is the driving force of your email marketing campaign. You have to keep that list viable. You have to update any changes in email addresses or remove those bounced or inaccurate email addresses. Having to do this regularly all-year-round might be too much work for an email marketer, but it will be well worth your time when you see the profits roll in.

Royce Calvin

Royce is as passionate about Internet Marketing as he is with his ever-present cup of Starbucks coffee.

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