Emails are prominently one of the most trusted and result-oriented ways to generate revenue. In the last five years, customer acquisition via email marketing has increased by 5 times. But before you consider email marketing as one of your digital marketing activities ensure that your email list is of high quality. That means you should be sure that your email list has valid email addresses and those enlisted customers want to hear from you.
When setting up your email marketing effort, email address list cleanliness is extremely important to the subject. The troublesome piece of email marketing is getting valid email addresses of users who want to engage with you, correct? Off-base. Unfortunately, not many companies customarily give much consideration to email address list cleanliness. Why everyone should care about email list hygiene.
Why should you care about Email list hygiene?
Ignoring the email list hygiene exposes you to a variety of risks that can hamper businesses in the long run. A low-quality email list always adversely affects the sender’s reputation. Also, as every email marketer should know, to run a successful email marketing the sender’s reputation matters a lot. In fact, a good email reputation is good deliverability.
Removing inactive or invalid email addresses from your email lists has additional advantages which are listed below:
• Email list cleaning decrease the marketing spend since you get charged for every email you send
• It increases email marketing performance
• Your sender reputation improves
• You get high deliverability
On the other hand, you should be well aware of the disadvantages of not using a clean list of email ids. When a user receives an unwanted email from you then there are multiple risks you get exposed to some of which are stated as under:
• Poor open rates and click rates
• Bad email deliverability
• Poor sender reputation
• User can ignore or delete your emails. In a worse scenario, they can mark your email as a ‘Spam’
• A high number of spam complaints can get the domain blocked
No business wants to risk their business, therefore, it is essential to understand what does bad email list means and how can the email list quality be improved to ensure better performance.
The major reasons for Bad Email List quality
When an email list is rented or bought by a third party there is a high chance that the list would contain a huge percentage of duplicate, junk, and inactive email addresses. Another reason for bad email quality could be the email submitted by the users are not correct or have some errors which should be identified and removed.
Time is one more factor that should be kept in main. Your email list tends to diminish over a while. As the email list grows old many of the email ids become inactive due to various reasons like the user has left the job, or started using a new id, etc. Therefore it is important to ensure that the list of email addresses is filtered over some time to ensure good deliverability.
You can easily identify if your email list quality is reducing my paying attention to the following metrics:
• Open Rates
• Click Rate
• Bounce Rate
It is always great to note the email marketing performance not only to ensure you achieve good conversion or customer acquisition but also to ensure that your database is delivering the emails as expected. If you notice a consistent or sudden decline in performance you should first ensure that you are using a clean email list.
What to do to ensure a Healthy Email List Quality:
To have successful email marketing ensure that the user is ready to receive communication from you and identifies you.
1. Permission-based Email
Always use the permission-based email list for your marketing activities. By sending emails to the users who have permitted you to send emails, your brand builds the trust factor and brand recognition. User opt-in strategy to collect email addresses so that the user knows they are willingly subscribing to your emails.
2. Email Segmentation
Segment your list of emails by age of the email address and keep the list updated by the last message delivered or last filtered date. This will let you know how long you have been using the emails and if the email contact is still valid or not.
3. Re-engage with your subscribers
Try creative and personalized ways to re-engage with your subscribers. In the process, identify the list of email addresses they never engage with your email and exclude them. Sending emails to such email ids will only increase the chances of your getting unsubscribed.
How to clean email lists?
A clean, well-managed subscriber list is a list of valid email addresses of users who have engaged with one of your emails within at least the last 6 months.
Remember a ‘Messy” email list with addresses of spam traps, unknown users, and inactive users can cause deliverability issues as well it ruins your sending reputation.
Getting an email address is fundamental, expelling inactive or invalid email addresses from your list can be similarly critical to the long haul achievement of your engagement endeavors. Using an email verification tool like Clearalist is a simple solution for periodic cleaning of your email database. Such verification and validation tools come in handy when you have a large set of database.