How And Why You Should Clean Your Email List

A Guide to How and Why You Should Clean Your Email List

Maintaining a healthy and engaged email list is a task that can often get overlooked. But if you want to optimise your email marketing strategy, it's time to tackle this head on and give your email list a thorough cleanse. 

As an email marketing expert, in this guide I delve into the reasons behind cleaning your email list, and provide you with actionable steps to ensure your email marketing campaigns thrive. 

A Clean Email List – The Foundation of Email Marketing

Your email list is a dynamic asset that requires regular maintenance. Cleaning your email list is essential for a healthy and effective email marketing strategy. Let's explore the reasons why investing time in this is a strategic move for any brand or business.

Enhance Deliverability and Open Rates

Do you spend hours drafting the perfect email, filled with valuable content or exclusive offers? If that email doesn't land in your subscribers' inboxes, all your efforts could go to waste. Email Service Providers (ESPs) are becoming increasingly sophisticated at filtering out spam and having a clean email list is a crucial factor in ensuring your emails make it into your customers’ inboxes.

When you regularly clean your email list, you remove inactive and invalid email addresses, reducing the chances of your emails bouncing. This, in turn, boosts your sender reputation and signals to ESPs that your emails are legitimate and worthy of reaching your subscribers' inboxes. As a result, your deliverability rates improve and more of your emails are opened, driving engagement and conversions.

Optimise Metrics

Engagement metrics, such as Open Rates and Click Rates, are at the centre of email marketing. An unengaged email list can affect these metrics, providing an inaccurate picture of your campaign's success. By regularly cleaning your email list, you ensure that your engagement metrics reflect genuine interest and interaction from your audience.

Identify and remove subscribers who haven't engaged with your emails for an extended period. This not only refines your metrics but also allows you to tailor your content to a more responsive audience. A smaller, engaged list often outperforms a larger, unengaged one in terms of conversion rates and overall campaign success.

Maintain a Positive Sender Reputation

Your sender reputation is a really important element in the success of your email marketing campaigns. ESPs and spam filters monitor your sender reputation to determine whether your emails deserve a spot in the inbox or should be relegated to the dreaded spam folder.

A clean email list positively impacts your sender reputation by reducing bounces, spam complaints, and unsubscribes. ESPs view consistently clean lists as a signal of responsible and ethical email marketing practices, enhancing your chances of inbox placement and ensuring your messages are seen by the right customers.

Strengthen Customer Relationships

Receiving emails from a brand you haven't interacted with in months, or even years is a clear way to annoy your subscribers and potentially tarnish the trust you've built with them. Cleaning your email list helps you maintain a relevant and engaged audience, fostering stronger relationships with your subscribers. However, if subscribers have only just started to disengage with your brand, you can pinpoint when this happens and know when you resend target emails and campaigns to re-engage them.

When you regularly remove inactive or uninterested subscribers, you create space for new and excited ones to join your list. This influx of fresh leads allows you to tailor your content to a more receptive audience, increasing the likelihood of building meaningful relationships and retaining customer loyalty. You can also personalise content based on your most engaged customers, allowing you to personalise content around your most active customers and engage potential customers.

Cost-Efficiency

Most email marketing platforms charge based on the number of subscribers on your list. An overflowing list not only affects your engagement rates but also increases your costs unnecessarily.

By regularly cleaning your email list, you optimise your subscription costs by only paying for active and interested subscribers. This cost-effective approach ensures that your marketing budget is allocated where it matters most – reaching and resonating with your target audience.

How to Clean Your Email List – A Step-by-Step Guide

Now that we've established the importance of maintaining a clean email list, let's dive into the practical steps you can take to ensure your list remains a powerful asset in your email marketing toolkit.

Segment Your List

Start by segmenting your email list based on different criteria such as engagement levels, purchase history, and demographics. This segmentation allows you to tailor your cleaning strategy to specific groups within your audience.

Remove Inactive Subscribers

Identify subscribers who haven't engaged with your emails for an extended period. While the definition of "inactive" may vary depending on your industry and email frequency, for example, you could consider subscribers who have received at least 20 emails from you in the last year, and not opened or clicked a single one.

Send a re-engagement email to this segment, inviting them to confirm their interest by clicking a link or taking a specific action. If they remain unresponsive, it's time to say goodbye and remove them from your list. While it may seem counterintuitive to reduce your subscriber count, the benefits in terms of deliverability and engagement far outweigh the numbers.

Clean Out Invalid Email Addresses

If your emails consistently experience bounces or lack engagement, email providers may divert them to the spam folder. Therefore, it's crucial to routinely exclude emails that are persistently bouncing. When using Klaviyo, for example, profiles are automatically suppressed with seven consecutive soft bounces, however it’s advised to proactively exclude emails that soft bounce more than four times from your campaigns. 

Bounces can be categorised into two types: Hard Bounces, which result from permanent issues like misspelt or fake email addresses, are automatically removed and suppressed by Klaviyo. On the other hand, Soft Bounces, which are temporary, are often caused by issues like a full inbox or a momentarily down recipient email server. 

Another option is to permanently delete email addresses from your list or segment. However, be sure that you actually want to delete these profiles, as they’ll be completely erased, no history or data will be kept and this action usually can’t be undone. 

Unsure if you want to permanently delete subscribers from your email marketing platform? Most email marketing tools, like Klaviyo, have the option of suppressing profiles, which keeps their data, but no emails will be sent to suppressed profiles. Because of this, it is almost always better to suppress unengaged profiles, rather than delete them. 

Manage Unsubscribes Promptly

Respect the preferences of your subscribers by making the unsubscribe process simple and efficient. Promptly removing unsubscribed individuals maintains a clean email marketing list and shows that you are listening to your audience's choices and preferences. 

Utilise Advanced Analytics

Leverage the analytics provided by your email marketing platform i.e. Klaviyo to gain insights into subscriber behaviour. Monitor Open Rates, Click Rates, and other engagement metrics to identify trends and patterns. Use this data to refine your segmentation and cleaning strategies, ensuring that you're continually optimising your email list for maximum impact.

Conclusion 

Email is a proven channel for successfully connecting with your audience, however, the effectiveness of your email marketing strategies hinges on the health of your email marketing list. By prioritising the maintenance of your list, you not only enhance deliverability and engagement but also optimise your costs and build stronger relationships with your audience.

Think of cleaning your email list as a strategic investment in the long-term success of your email marketing campaigns. It's not just about numbers but also about quality. A smaller, more engaged email list can often outperform a larger, unengaged one in terms of conversions, brand loyalty, and overall campaign success.

As an email marketing expert, maintaining a healthy email marketing list is crucial to the success of your brand. Regularly assessing, segmenting and cleaning your email list to ensure it remains dynamic and responsive will help your brand thrive and contribute to sustainable success.

If you’d like to learn more about optimising your email marketing, please get in touch, I’d love to help!