Email Database Hygiene: 7 Tips to Keep Your Email List Healthy
For every $1 spent on email marketing, it yields a $32 ROI.
That’s a high ROI if you are investing in email marketing. But even if you do invest in email marketing strategies, you still need to have specific strategies in place to help you get to that ROI.
One of the most things you need to do with email marketing is learning to keep your email list healthy. This is considered your email database hygiene.
If you want to keep your email list healthy, you need to follow these seven tips on email database hygiene.
What Exactly Is Email List Hygiene?
Before jumping into the seven tips on email database hygiene, it’s important to look at the definition of email list health.
Email list hygiene refers to keeping your list clean so there are a higher engagement rate and less bounce rate. You want to ensure that everything looks correct with email addresses and that your content is being sent to the right address.
The purpose of a hygiene list is so you can get higher open rates and more interaction with your customers.
Now that you know what email list hygiene entails, it’s important to look at the ways to keep your list healthy.
1. Look at the Bounce Rate
The first part of keeping your email list clean is looking at the bounce rate. You want to see what emails are bouncing based on who you are sending them to.
You want to evaluate why your emails are bouncing. The bounce rate is when your emails are not delivered.
It’s when your emails are bounced back to you because they weren’t delivered. There could be multiple reasons for this bounce rate.
It could be that the bounce rate occurred because the subscriber’s information was incorrect. It could be that the email was missing a letter, which caused the email to bounce back to you.
This is why it’s important to evaluate your email list and see who is bouncing. In some instances, you may be able to someone’s email if they are missing a letter in their email. They might have forgotten to put .com at the end of their email.
2. See Who’s Inactive on Your List
Another part of email hygiene is seeing who is inactive on your list. You want to evaluate who is not opening your emails.
Someone who is inactive on your email list is bringing your open and click-through rate down.
When you discover who is not participating in your emails, you can simply drop them from your list. You don’t know if this person is going to come back and start reading your emails or if they changed their email address.
But if they aren’t opening your emails, it could be a reason to drop them from your list.
3. Start Segmenting Your List
If you want to make sure your list is healthy, you need to start segmenting your email list. You need to make sure that you are sending emails to the right target market.
Segmenting your email list is dividing your email list by interest. You want to send different content based on who is on your email list and what behavioral choices they have made.
When you do segment your email list, you can create more customized and personal content for your email subscribers.
Segmenting your list is about keeping your audience engaged. You want to send them valuable content based on their needs.
4. Remove Negative People
If you find that you have negative people on your email list, which means you have people who reply to your every email and say negative things about your email, it’s best to remove them from your list.
These negative people are most likely sending your email to spam, which is only hurting your deliverability. You want to send your emails to people who enjoy reading your emails.
You want to send emails to people who are going to open them and take action. While you may think the more people the better with your email list, it’s important to only have people who are going to be positive.
5. Evaluate the Analytics
Keeping your email list clean is about also evaluating the analytics.
You want to keep an eye on the open rate. If you find that a lot of your emails aren’t opened, it could be because your emails are getting sent to spam.
The reason could be that your email subject lines are being triggered into spam. The analytics can give you some insight into where you need to improve your email content.
The analytics can also tell what kind of audience is opening your emails and clicking on your emails.
If you have different products, you may discover that some of your email lists enjoy specific products or promotions over others. This can help you identify what kind of emails to send and who to send them to.
6. Don’t Buy an Email List
Another tip to keep your email list healthy is to avoid buying emails. That’s the opposite of keeping your email list hygiene.
When you buy emails, your email content is more likely going to be sent to spam because you are sending unwanted emails to people.
Buying emails only hurt your deliverability.
You need to avoid buying an email list and try building up your email list organically. When you attract an audience to your email list organically, you know for sure that they want to be on that email list.
This is why it’s important to evaluate what methods people are finding your email list. You want to identify what source produces the most leads or puts the most people on your email list and replicate that success.
7. Make Sure You Are Sending Valuable Information
The final part of keeping your list healthy involves evaluating the content you are sending to your email list.
You want to evaluate if you are sending valuable and actionable content that is helping your target market solve problems. It can be easy to produce content in your emails that is always about buying.
Instead, you need to focus on telling stories in your emails. You need to focus on getting a higher engagement in your emails.
Evaluating the health of your emails is about figuring out what kind of content you are consistently sending and if that content is consistently improving.
If you find that stories are improving and the general content of your emails are improving, then the open rate and click-through rate should be higher.
You should see an improvement in analytics across the board.
What Are the Benefits of Cleaning Your Email List?
Now that you know the best tips to clean your email list, you should consider what benefits it provides to you and your target market.
When it comes to your business, cleaning your email list helps you figure out where you need to improve. It helps you assess what kind of emails are opened the most.
You can also assess your target market and see who is opening and clicking on your emails. It helps you improve as a business and find ways to get your customer engaged.
You also have an idea of how to segment your list based on what they want and need. When you segment your audience, you have a better idea of what content to send them.
Cleaning your email list also helps your target market. When you take subscribers off that are never opening your emails or only complaining about your emails, it helps your deliverability.
It also helps your emails stay out of spam. You don’t want some of your emails ending up in spam because it could hurt future email campaigns. If too many people say your email is spam, it could permanently hurt your email marketing deliverability.
Now You Know Everything About Email Database Hygiene
Learning everything there is about email database hygiene is critical if you want better results in your email campaigns. Email hygiene is about finding ways to improve deliverability and understand your target market better.
When you follow the tips in this article, you have a better idea of what you need to do in your email marketing strategy. You now know what’s involved that keeps your emails fresh and engaging. You have an idea of what it means to stay on top of your email strategy.
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