7 Signs Your Email List Is Unhealthy & How To Clean It
Building an email list can take a lot of time and energy, and for this reason, people can be reluctant to remove any contacts from their list, ever. After all, the more people you’re sending your messages to, the more reach you’re having, right?
No, not really. Having a huge email list isn’t worth much if you’re sending the wrong information to the wrong people. In fact, that’s a great way to get sent straight to people’s spam folder.
Are you wondering whether your email list is in need of a good cleaning?
Let’s take a look at 7 signs that it’s time to clean your email list
1. Your Bounce Rates Are Escalating
The last thing you want your email list to be is outdated. If you have escalating bounce rates, and it’s definitely time to clean your email list.
Using your email marketing software, run a report to catch the contacts with soft bounces. These are contacts whose email addresses are temporarily unavailable. If a contact gets three soft bounces, erase their email and information from your list.
For contacts that have hard bounces, which indicate that they are permanently unreachable, erase the contacts right away. If you don’t, then your emails are much more likely to fall into fraud management tools such as spam traps or you can have severe damage to your sending reputation and negatively impact delivery.
2. Your Email Address List Is Filled With Contacts That Aren’t Following Your Brand or Buying Your Product
Take a look at your email list and identify which contacts have followed your company on social media or purchased products from your brand. In order to find this type of data, you’ll need to invest in higher-level analytics that connects profile data with real-time data capture and omnichannel execution.
It’s important that your list focuses on loyal, high-performing customers. If you’re sending your marketing messages to people who aren’t engaged in your brand, it will likely miss the mark and might even get marked as spam.
3. Your Data Sets Are Incomplete
You’ll want to look thoroughly into the quality of the data sets you have. If you have contacts on your list for whom you don’t have a first and last name, you should erase those contacts right away Otherwise, you can’t send a personalized email.
You’ll also want to quickly scan your list for “role accounts,” which might start with “info@”, “hello@”, or “webmaster@”.
Take some time to see if you have any double contacts for the same individual. Merge this contact information so you aren’t sending multiples of the same email to the same person.
4. You’re Increasingly Getting Spam Complaints
If contacts don’t remember signing up for your email list, which happens more often than you might think, they might mark your emails as spam. When an individual marks an email as spam, this is logged by mailbox providers such as Gmail and Yahoo.
If you’re getting a lot of spam messages, email providers will end up sending your emails straight to people’s spam folders. You’ll want to get rid of any spam complainers that are on your list. It’s also a good idea to keep an eye on canceled subscriptions because if you’re getting more spam complaints than unsubscribers it might mean your unsubscribe process is too complicated or not working properly.
5. Your Engagement Metrics Are Tanking
Your engagement metrics are a key part of understanding how successful your email marketing campaign is. Things like the click-through-rate and email open rates help you to understand the quality of your reach and your sender reputation.
Set a cut-off period, something like 6 months, a year, or two years, and erase any contacts that haven’t engaged with your emails in that amount of time. You can also have a re-engagement message to try and revitalize your relationship with subscribers that have been dormant.
6. You’re Getting a Lot of Negative Feedback
Some client lists are more vocal than others. If you have a particularly chatty group, this is great. Regardless of whether the feedback is positive or negative, hearing it straight from the horse’s mouth is always going to help your business become as successful as possible.
If you’ve noticed you’re getting a lot of negative feedback, though, it might be a sign that you’ve got the wrong people on your email list or your messaging is missing the mark.
There are always going to be some unhappy people out there. However, if you are getting a high proportion of negative feedback reviews and messages, it’s time to take a hard long look at both your email list and your marketing strategy.
7. People Are Unsubscribing Frequently From Your Email List
Taking a look at your unsubscribe list is a really helpful tool for understanding how effective your emails are. When people take this action, they’re sending you a message. This might be that you’re sending emails way too frequently, that they don’t like what you’re sending, that they don’t know why they’re on your list, or any combination of these reasons.
For every campaign you send out, you can expect to get a few requests to unsubscribe. It is preferable that people unsubscribe from your list rather than marking your messages as spam. However, if you notice that your unsubscribe rate is increasing, then you got a problem that you need to figure out.
Clean Your Email List: The Benefits
There are a number of benefits to cleaning your email distribution list. Let’s take a look at the advantages of regularly scrubbing your list.
It Will Increase Your ROI and Reduce Your Email Marketing Costs
The size of your database frequently informs how much email service providers charge you. If you are emailing a bunch of people who report you as spam, don’t open the emails, or the contact information is incorrect, you are likely spending money that you don’t need to.
This means that it makes sense to clean your email list in order to reduce your marketing costs.
On top of this, cleaning your email list can increase your return on investment. You will be targeting customers who are actually interested in the messages you are sending and this will result in more engagement and sales.
It Will Reduce Your Spam Complaints
The last thing that you want is to be frequently reported as spam. The best thing you can do is avoid being blacklisted as spam, as it can be hard to recover from. When you give your email list a regular scrub, your messages will be reaching the inboxes of leads and no one else.
It Will Increase Your Click-Through Rates and Open Rates
Separating the wheat from the chaff in your email list can help to boost your open rates and your click-through rates. This is because you’ll be getting rid of contacts that aren’t engaging with your material anyway. By targeting the right customers, and only the right customers, you can help improve your overall metrics.
How to Clean Your Email List
When it comes time to clean your email lists, start with your most active lists. Then, over time, you can move to your less active lists.
Go through your email list and ensure that there aren’t duplicates. Duplicates can bloat your email list and end up reducing your ROI. Get rid of them to keep your list squeaky clean.
You’ll also want to take a look at the addresses in your list and get rid of any that seem “spammy.” These might be company emails or email addresses that seem to be made up of randomly generated numbers and letters.
While you’re going through your list, make sure to take care of any typos that are obvious. If you have email addresses and contact information entered incorrectly, then you’re bloating your list with addresses that won’t work.
Lastly, make sure that you honor unsubscribe requests. No one wants to receive unsolicited messages from a business, and when they explicitly opt-out, do the honorable thing and make sure they are removed from the list.
Would you rather hire a professional for the job? You can learn more about EmailOversight and our services in the next section.
Is it Time For You to Clean Out Your Email List?
There are a lot of reasons why you should take the time to clean out your email list. However, as a busy business owner, you might not have the time or resources to do this on your own.
That’s where EmailOversight comes in. We provide a better, smarter way to clean your email lists. Our email hygiene tactics and real-time email verification tools can help to increase email deliverability performance, increase web traffic, help create conversions, improve your reputation, and raise engagement rates.
Why should you choose EmailOversight? Our user-friendly management solution can help you to reach your audience by validating and appending data and cleaning your list. You can learn more about our services here.
