How to Clean Your Email List (in Two Steps!)
You clean your house, you clean your office — but do you ever clean your email list?
Why is Email Cleaning Important?
Email cleaning is an important part of maintaining the health of your email list. Without it, your emails might wind up in the wrong spot.
Every time you send an email to a contact — especially a new one — their email service provider (ESP) is checking out your message and trying to determine if it’s spam.
If you have a nice, healthy email account and domain, you’re less likely to be labeled as spam. But if your account has a history of sending emails to invalid addresses, ESPs may start looking at you suspiciously.
Every time you send an email that bounces, your account essentially gets a ‘ding’ against it. If you get a lot of hard bounces, those dings add up and cast you in a bad light.
If few of your contacts open your emails, this can also bring down how good you look to ESPs. Email cleansing can help you keep open and engagement rates high, and keep your emails going into inboxes, not junk.
How to Clean Your Email List
The process of cleaning your email list is simple. You’re going to delete any and all contacts who fall into one of these three categories:
They haven’t opened one of your emails recently
You sent them an email and it did a hard bounce
Their email address has returned a soft bounce several times in a row
Step 1: Set Up a New Segment
Log into your email account and open up your contacts lists.
Sort your contacts by the time they last opened one of your campaigns. Providers like Mailchimp let you sort contacts’ engagement by several ranges. Select anyone who does not show recent activity and move them into a separate segment.
You don’t need to delete these folks just yet, but they require some specialized attention to increase their engagement. By placing inactive contacts in a separate segment, you can target win-back campaigns just to them — and ultimately delete them from your list if they just aren’t taking the bait.
Step 2: Check for Email Bounces
Next, pull a report of how many email bounces have occurred on your list or within a given segment.
Remove any email addresses that show a hard bounce — these addresses are invalid and that’s not going to change.
Look at how many addresses have experienced a soft bounce. If the bounce happened some time ago, the issue’s probably been resolved and you can continue emailing them. If you’re seeing multiple soft bounces in a row, though, you might be dealing with someone who’s abandoned their (now full) email inbox. You’ll typically want to delete them from your contact list at this point.
Get Help with Email Cleansing and Strategy
Still feel overwhelmed by all the steps and strategy behind a successful email campaign? Book a 90-minute call with Shawley Marketing for some help! We’ll review your email strategy and provide actionable tips you can implement — all delivered within 24 hours of our call.
