If you’ve been maintaining an email list for a while now, it inevitably gets a bit shabby over time. Marketers are often terrified to clean up this list as it involves removing addresses of potential customers. This article intends to help you revamp your current mailing list without having to lose conversions.
What does cleaning an email list mean?
Also known as scrubbing, cleaning your email marketing list is the process of eradicating inaccurate and inactive addresses from your database. You could set a time frame and scrub off your mailing list every 90 days, for instance. This also allows you to remove unsubscribed addresses if you haven’t already.
Risks of not cleaning your email list
If an email list isn’t cleaned for a long duration, the list becomes bloated and sometimes even toxic. The main goal of having email lists or list building is to generate leads or brand awareness to a specified group of people via email. However, if you haven’t appended this data, and there are plenty of people who’ve sent your emails to the spam folder, the email client may think you’re spamming. This is why it is imperative to discard inactive or inaccurate email addresses.
Furthermore, you risk being troublesome to the very people you market to. It doesn’t make sense to market to people who don’t want to hear from you.
Benefits of cleaning your contact list
- Improves ROI and reduces marketing costs – Email service providers charge basis the size of your email database. Quite naturally, you would pay more to send out emails to 50,000 people rather than 25,000.
It, therefore, doesn’t financially justify keeping inactive and inaccurate mailing IDs in your database. There is no reason to spend on people that are not actively engaging with your brand. Cleaning up this database will therefore improve your ROI as well.
- Reduces spam complaints – You do not want your business to be associated with the word ‘spam.’ If there are multiple spam complaints on your mails, your business mails may be blacklisted. Getting out of this mess is no easy task either. It is far more effective to avoid this altogether.
If you are regularly scrubbing your mailing lists, the chances of getting spam complaints would be relatively lower. Your message will then find its way to accurate leads that want to hear about your business.
- Increases click-through rates and open rates – Scrubbing your mailing list will improve your overall metrics. Some of these metrics are click-through and open rates.
Let’s say that your database has around 2,000 email addresses, and you have a 20% open rate. That’s not a flawed metric at all. But, if you clean up your mailing list and your database now consists of only 1,500 email addresses, you may now have a 30% open rate. This is clearly a much better equation to have.
When is the right time to clean your mailing list?
It is true that the more often you clean up your mailing list, the more effective your email marketing is going to be. There are marketers with huge lists that scrub them every week. This may not be necessary for your business. You can start by cleaning your mailing list every three months. As your list grows, consider shortening the intervals between scrubbing to keep up with the volume.
Some warning signs that you mist clean your mailing list are mentioned below.
- Your open rate is incredibly low
- Your click-through rate is lower than usual
- Spam complaints are piling up
- Bounce rates are increasing
Tips to scrub or clean an email list
- Start with your most active list – Email lists are usually segmented into groups. We advise you to start with your most active list and then follow through with the others.
- Scrub off duplicate addresses – There are instances where people often forget that they’ve signed up for an email list and re-subscribe. Remove these duplicate addresses to keep your list trim and healthy.
- Remove ‘spammy’ addresses – As an email marketer, it is not difficult to identify ‘spammy’ addresses. For instance, if you see an email address like ‘hgshhfhf@gmail.com’, it should strike you as ‘spammy.’ Consider removing such IDs.
- Remove unsubscribed addresses – If someone doesn’t want to hear from you, honor their choice and remove them from your mailing list. It’s that simple! It is doubtful that someone will buy a product or service that is persuaded by emails that they unsubscribed.
- Correct typos – You can often find typos on your mailing list. If this typo seems very obvious to you, do not hesitate to correct it. For instance, xxx@yhaoo.com can be rectified to xxx@yahoo.com without a second thought.
Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing. Even though there are more modern forms available to a marketer in this day and age, email marketing is still one of the most popular and effective methods out there.
It is imperative to maintain marketing lists and scrub them off as often as possible. This would increase your lead generation numbers along with several other metrics. Also, remember to follow the right tips when you’re cleaning your mailing list. This would ensure that you get the best out of your email marketing.
Scrubbing off addresses may mean that you’re losing on information, but it’s essential to understand that it is not vital information. It is obsolete or unwanted data, and your marketing health can benefit from discarding them. If you understand the importance of having a clean email list, but do not know where to start from or if you want to buy email list, book an appointment with our email marketing experts for a free sample. This will help you understand how mailing lists should be maintained. Our email database is authentic and appended regularly to help businesses like you.
