There are many reasons why you should clean email lists frequently. That’s because sending messages to every email in your database will not guarantee people are going to really open them.
In fact, if you have many invalid, fake or inactive accounts in your lists, it’s very likely that a lot of the messages might not even be delivered to the intended destination.
You need to be aware that harmful accounts in your lists have a negative impact on your deliverability rate, check message clicks and lead conversion.
Doing everything within your reach to protect interactions with your audience must be a priority for your marketing team. Clean email lists regularly is an important step and strategy that will make sure that your messages will be delivered to your target audience.
In light of this conclusion, when you clean up an email list, you are also protecting your engagement rate against unsubscribe requests and high spam rates.
But when and how should I clean email lists? That’s the question you should be asking yourself. To help you answer it, we prepared this article, intending to assist you in cleaning your lists and showing the tools to do this job for you.
- What is a clean email list?
- Why clean your email list: the benefits of email scrubbing!
- What to do before you clean your email list: best practices
- How do you clean an email list?
What is a clean email list?
The best word to define a clean email list is “updated”. When you try accumulating many contacts with landing pages and newsletters, for example, some of them will become obsolete, outdated or simply unavailable after a while.
You shouldn’t keep these accounts on your database because they are taken into account when your performance rates are calculated, pushing them to lower levels, which is negative to marketing strategies in general.
Cleaning up email lists is the most effective manner to identify accounts that are invalid, inactive or no longer relevant to your business.
Save only the contacts that are able to generate interaction with your company. Focusing on what really matters will have a powerful impact on your performance and also help you reach your established goals.
Warning Signs: what are the risks of not cleaning your email list?
It is not difficult at all to realize when your contact lists need some cleaning. Your business is always going to give you many warning signs and they all show up in your performance as a business and deliverability rates.
Now you have one more reason to keep track of them, frequently and closely. You will notice that the moment you need to clean email lists is:
- when your open click rates are declining;
- when you receive many spam complaints from the receivers;
- when your bounce rates are increasing;
- when your contacts decide unsubscribing;
- when the numbers of the engagement rate and responsive users drop.
It is almost impossible not knowing when something is up with your contact lists. If people are not opening, or worse, not receiving your messages, a red flag has to be lifted. There is no conversion when the interaction is not happening.
Don’t hesitate when you identify these signs in your marketing campaigns. At the first opportunity, clean up your email list.
How often should you clean email lists?
Well, this question doesn’t have only one answer. It all depends on how big your company is and how well it is performing, regarding engagement with your audience.
The easy and quick answer is that you should do it at least once a year or even more regularly. When you clean your email lists, make sure to analyze your open and click-through rates, unsubscribe requests and spam complaints.
It will make you understand when the best moment to clean up your email lists is.
Why clean your email list: the benefits of email scrubbing!
It is proven that a clean email list can improve your overall performance. The main reason to explain why it happens is that your marketing ideas are going to reach out only to responsive users, which, in turn, can cause interactions.
Following, check out all the other advantages of working with a clean email list.
Improve deliverability and engagement
If your receivers give positive feedback to your messages and can get a good experience from your company, your emails won’t be labeled as spam.
It improves your deliverability rate and facilitates engagement with your company.
Better sender reputation
Many companies can’t reach inboxes easily because their messages are often identified as spam or they bounce back to their origin. This scenario is bad for your online reputation and the main cause of this problem is an email list full of invalid or inactive accounts.
It justifies the necessity of having a clean email list. If you worry about your reputation as a sender, you have to get rid of dangerous email accounts.
Increase open and click rates
When there are only interested contacts in your subscriber lists, your messages are likely to be opened and read by your target audience.
This way, it is possible to increase open and click rates. To find these users you must clean up the email list.
Decrease spam complaints
Receiving many spam complaints can kill your reputation as a sender. You have to protect your company from unhealthy email addresses in order to keep the spam rate always at a controlled level.
It is important to mention that if your company receives many spam complaints, it can compromise all the emails you send, which means even interested subscribers won’t receive your message.
That is why it is so important and urgent to clean email lists. If you don’t want to see new leads, conversions and sales get lost, make sure to scrub harmful emails off your contact lists.
Reduce bounces
When your email can’t get to its final destination, they bounce back to you. It is a common situation that happens when you try reaching an invalid or nonexistent email account or a full one. Even a technical error can cause bounces, such as a weak connection.
Having many bounces causes the same problem as receiving many spam complaints, which means both are terrible to your online presence.
Having a clean email list will keep you away from these accounts and make sure your messages are going to make it to the final destination.
Improve your email marketing strategy (better reporting)
The success of email marketing strategies should be measured by how much engagement your messages can generate, not by the number of people you reach.
It is better to trace marketing strategies to reach your target audience than send messages to uninterested users. The last group is likely to delete your email or worse, report it as spam.
Focusing on your target audience will give you valuable data to plan future marketing strategies.
Better ROI
If you invest only in reaching users that are engaged and interested in your business, you can spend less and do more.
Obviously, the Return on Investment rate (ROI) will increase. You should often clean email lists to keep a close eye on the users that can give you the desired return, and the ones that no longer interact with you.
What to do before you clean your email list: best practices
Now that you know how your company can improve its online performance by interacting only with responsive and active email accounts, it’s time to think about how it is possible to clean an email list, as well as finding the easiest and fastest way to do so.
Keep reading to get some suggestions on how you should start cleaning up an email list.
Identify reasons for bounces
Email lists full of invalid accounts, with emails that no longer exist or that were typed wrongly can be a reason for bounces (in this case, they are called hard bounces).
Also, if you are trying to reach full inboxes or uninterested users (named soft bounces), your email can return to its source. When soft bounces happen regularly, they will become hard bounces.
It’s worth mentioning that avoiding hard bounces must be a priority in your inbound marketing campaigns.
For example, typos in emails are usually characterized as bounces and they are easy to spot and fix. With an email verifier, you can even prevent these emails from reaching your database.
Understanding what is going on helps you to think about a successful solution.
Send a re-engagement email campaign
Sometimes, you have to think of strategies to call the attention of some subscribers, especially the ones that have lost interest in your products.
You have once captured their attention, after all, they are subscribers. All you have to do is to lure them back into your business.
Consider giving special discounts and offers, exclusive content, a small but meaningful gift, or any other form to please them, as a way to reconnect with these users.
Make it easy to unsubscribe
Some companies judge it as an effective strategy to make unsubscribing difficult. The common thinking here is “if I tire my users, they will give up unsubscribing and I can keep their contact”.
However, the most probable outcome is that the user is going to mark their messages as spam, which is bad for their sender reputation.
All of your users must have the decision to stay or to leave, your role is to make the opt-out option visible, fast and simple. Trust in your content, if you make your customers happy and satisfied, they won’t leave.
Understand your email audience
What do your subscribers want from you? This is a question that you must know the answer to. To provide quality content, you have to understand very clearly what amuses and interests your target audience.
How do you clean an email list?
Cleaning an email list is easier than you may think. You can use a platform to help you identify and validate email accounts, such as SafetyMails. Our services can keep your lists free of emails that can damage your reputation and marketing campaigns.
We have some suggestions on how you should scrub email lists. Check them out!
Which email lists should you clean?
You must clean all your email lists, paying attention to the following aspects:
- cleaning your most active lists is an awesome idea because they are the core of lead generation and sales conversion;
- don’t forget your older contacts, because there is a high possibility that they are filled with invalid or no longer active email accounts;
- you have to scrub even newer lists, once people lose interest very fast and you have to remove unengaged users from your database.
Remember that clean email lists are never a one-time job. They demand attention and effort on a regular basis. After all, you do want to stay away from spam complaints and harmful email addresses.
Remove inactive subscribers
Keeping inactive users in your database can make your engagement rate drop. Even
worse, it can lead you to a wrong conclusion about your audience or marketing performance.
That’s why it is extremely important to clean email lists and remove inactive subscribers. Without them, you can have a bigger and more reliable picture of your company’s real situation.
Identify disengaged subscribers
If you have subscribers that don’t open your messages, don’t click on them and never interact with you, they are probably disengaged and you should think about removing them.
Before that, we recommend planning a re-engagement campaign email, trying to get in touch with these users one last time. But if this project fails, the best decision is their removal. Keeping these accounts will do nothing but hurt your deliverability rate.
All in all, if you save only engaged users, you can think about more successful strategies. Have conversations only with people who want to listen to what you have to say and offer.
Consider using double opt-ins
When people fill out their information in registration forms, it is a good idea to ask them to confirm this registration through email, because it can reduce the incidence of invalid electronic addresses in your subscriber lists.
This strategy is called double opt-in and its success rate is very expressive. Many companies have been using this option, keeping their email list clean and free of invalid emails.
Just make sure this confirmation email will make it to the new user’s mailbox, keeping your bounce rate low.
How to clean your email list through a service
Many businesspeople and marketers don’t have the habit of scrub email lists because there is a lack of time in their calendar to execute such a task.
However, it doesn’t work as an excuse anymore, once you can clean email lists through a service.
An email verifier works with accuracy and it is fast at checking subscriber lists, considering aspects, such as:
- validity of an email list;
- identification and correction of typos and misspelled domains;
- verification of email lists in bulk, which is perfect if your company is large-sized;
- verification of emails from disposable providers;
- elimination of fake email addresses;
- removal of duplicate email accounts;
- removal of emails that belong to people that have unsubscribed from your channels.
Cleaning your contact lists with the help of a service is ideal if you have loads of emails to check or even if you are starting to collect emails from the internet.
After clean email lists, it is preferable that you keep it that way. It is not hard to maintain a healthy contact list, once email verifiers can validate accounts even before they enter your database.
Our platform, SafetyMails, will validate emails while users are still typing their data in landing pages, for example. That’s the most effective way to keep fake emails very far from your lists. Thanks to our email intelligence service, you can rely on our service to protect your database from harmful entries and improve your results.
SafetyMails’ email checker can also remove invalid, disposable and spamtrap electronic addresses or emails that can harm your company’s deliverability rates.
You can upload your email lists directly to your account or through one of the available integrations (such as MailChimp and RD Station) to have access to detailed analysis reports.
Besides time saved and useful integration, using SafetyMails to clean email list bring other advantages to your company, such as:
- Help you reduce costs per lead: No more spending unnecessary budget on fake or invalid electronic addresses;
- SafetyMails services can stop you from being blocked: you might be blocked or blacklisted if you send emails to invalid emails;
- Protect your reputation: an email checker can eliminate bad registrations for good, protecting your company against them. Your reputation will never be safer;
- SafetyMails will also help you keep a distance from spambots. They won’t even be able to sign up to your contact lists;
- It is possible to increase your ROI when you clean email list frequently: if you invest only in subscribers that are engaged and interested in your business, you can spend less and do more;
- Keep you away from blacklists: make sure your contact list is clean and use an email verifier to keep away all the fake email addresses to avoid being blacklisted.
Validating your email lists will make a difference in the results of your marketing campaigns, besides keeping your email lists always clean.
Would you like to keep your email lists always clean? Check SafetyMails API to validate contacts in real-time!
