What Are the Advantages of Email List Cleaning?
Email lists are a treasure trove for your business. People have worked their way through a few stages of the sales funnel—hearing about your business, engaging with your site, and making the choice to sign up to hear from you regularly.
However, things change. Potential customers lose interest, stop opening emails, or move to a new email address. When your emails start bouncing, that’s when you know you’re in trouble.
Almost 9% of all emails bounce. On a business level, a bounce rate above 2% is a serious issue.
Why are bounced emails so bad? For starters, they skew your statistics. If you assume all your delivered emails are being opened and read, you’ll have unrealistic expectations for returns on the email campaign.
Another issue with bad email lists is that your organization will be blacklisted. Poor sending behavior will result in email filters and servers blocking your emails. That’s because you’re consistently sending to invalid addresses, which makes it look like dangerous spam.
Fortunately, there’s an effective way to implement email list cleaning practices. We’ve assembled a list of reasons for why—and how!—you can get started.
Save Money
What is email list cleaning? It’s the process of updating your list of email contacts regularly. This is done by implementing recipient preferences if they choose to opt out of emails, removing outdated addresses, and making sure the list is accurate.
The most common way to do this is to invest in the best email list cleaner. Email list cleaning software might seem like an unnecessary investment. However, you’ll easily recoup the money you spend on software or an email list cleaning service.
In most cases, you’ll pay for each email that you send. If you’re sending email communications to dead addresses, or to someone who hasn’t opened your emails for months, your organization is wasting money.
Another benefit that helps you save money is adjusting campaign expectations. For many email campaigns, you’re measuring the number of senders that open, click, and engage with emails.
If you keep sending to users that will never see or open your meals, the numbers are skewed. This can cause you to make poor business decisions, which will end up costing you money in the long run.
Target Your Marketing
One of the top benefits of using an email list cleaning service is that you will be able to laser-focus your marketing efforts. Once you’ve removed all the dead wood from your email list, you can see where growth is actually happening.
What content tends to strike a chord with your audience? What do your active addresses tend to click on and engage with?
Once your list is cleaned up, you’ll also be able to get a more accurate birds-eye view of your audience. Do this by dividing inactive versus inactive emails.
That way, you can send the appropriate messaging to each group. For instance, your active addresses might love the chance to jump on a summer sale.
Your inactive addresses, though, need a reason to come back and reengage with your content. You may need to acknowledge their absence and ask for feedback, introduce a welcome back sale, or a similar marketing technique.
What’s one of the main perks of email list cleaning? You’ll see instant results, which is always encouraging when it comes to introducing a long-term plan.
These instant results come from cleaning up your lists. By removing addresses that will never yield results in the form of conversions, your success percentage will instantly rise.
Improve Delivery Scores
As a business sending out lots of emails, your sender reputation dictates how successful email delivery is. After you’ve already been penalized and blacklisted by email servers, it’s hard to come back from that.
Of course, the best way to avoid delivery issues is to take a proactive approach by avoiding the issue in the first place. By keeping up with changes to your email list and implementing frequent cleaning practices, you’ll avoid this issue.
When sending emails, your reputation is often determined by users complaining of spam, bounce rate, and how engaged subscribers are with your content. By constantly putting in verification work, you’ll maintain your reputation.
Protect Customer Data
These days, one piece of information can be the key to a customer’s entire profile. Whether it’s their email or phone number, customer service is all about convenience these days.
As a business, it’s important to juggle two factors: customer convenience and data protection. To do this, companies need to stay on top of updating information.
If an email address is dead or compromised, who is receiving emails when a customer makes a purchase? What about emails that include their shipping address or other personal information?
Keeping clean email lists is about more than helping the company trim the excess and maintain an agile marketing approach. It’s also about protecting the customer and ensuring you can communicate with them.
Respect Your Customers
With any luck, you have lots of customers who are excited to see you succeed. They believe in your mission, identify with your brand, and love your products.
That means they want to hear from you. If you are launching a new product, running a sale, or updating your site, these loyal customers are committed to hearing from you.
This type of loyal fanbase is the kind of support that can get companies through hard times. These customers also tend to work as free advertising through word of mouth.
As one of the most invaluable resources a company can have, these customers deserve to be treated with trust and respect. If they signed up to hear from you, providing valuable content to reward that trust is crucial.
By investing in an email list cleaning service, you ensure these customers get the content they signed up for.
Stay On Good Terms with Your ESP
As mentioned above, the goal is to stay off any spam blacklists that block email services from allowing their senders to receive your emails. That’s a good first step, but what about your organization’s ESP?
ESP stands for Email Service Provider. You may be familiar with services like MailChimp, which is an email service that sends out mass emails to your contact list. It makes marketing much easier and allows you to target lists easily.
However, your email service provider doesn’t want any trouble either. That’s why they have standards implemented within their platform to identify bad actors. Even if you’re a reputable company, you could be identified as potential trouble if your bounce rate is above 3%.
If one of your email campaigns goes south, this bounce rate could increase drastically. What does that mean for your organization? You could get kicked off your ESP account, which means your email marketing campaigns could be temporarily stranded until you get it fixed.
Be Proactive
If you’ve concluded that email list cleaning is the way to go, what should you do next? It’s important to start with the tools that are already at your disposal: your ESP.
Are you already using a dedicated ESP platform, or has your business not upgraded to that level yet? If you’re switching to a new one, or are just transitioning to one, keep an eye out.
ESPs will usually do the work of removing duplicate addresses for you. It also usually flags duplicates if a subscriber tries to sign up twice with the same email.
Another tip is implementing double opt-in practices. This makes users confirm that they want to sign up, and also prevents misspelled addresses from complicating the whole sending process.
It’s also a great way to prevent spam and make sure users really want your emails. When designing our email templates, you should also ensure that the unsubscribe button is highly visible.
This may seem counterintuitive. Why would you want to point customers toward an easy way to stop hearing from you? It seems like a quick way to defeat your own purposes.
In fact, you’re empowering customers to help you keep your email lists clean and tidy. If they’re doing the work for you, it helps identify inactive subscribers before they start to bog down your lists.
Investing in Email List Cleaning
If you’re looking for the best email list cleaning service, it’s important to take the time to do your research. This includes asking other businesses in the industry, targeting your unique priorities, and looking aat email list cleaning reviews.
If you’re looking at email list cleaning services, it’s important to prioritize a service with 24/7 ISP accuracy monitoring, multi-method email validation, and an intuitive design.
By combining enterprise-level security techniques and high-speed processing, senders should only get emails they actually want. This will trim the excess off your lists and help you target customers that are important to you.
If you’re looking to implement email list cleaning, Email Oversight is here for you. Contact us today—we’d love to help!
