There is no greater asset in digital marketing than an email list. With all that said, if your list of email contacts contains invalid or outdated contacts, or if your subscribers are socially not connected, then your sender reputation can be harmed, etc. Thus, open rates may come down while bounce rates go up. Hence it is very necessary to clean one’s email list regularly to maintain a highly reactive acting subscriber base.
With this article, you will familiarize yourself with why email list cleaning matters, how to clean one’s list manually, and the best practices in maintaining one’s list.
Why Should You Clean Your Email List?
Some important reasons why email lists should be cleaned are:
1. Improve Deliverability
ISPs monitor recipient’ s behavior once they receive emails from you. So, a clean list ensures that your emails land straight into their inboxes rather than their spam folders or going somewhere else.
2. Reduce Bounce Rates
Hard bounces are generated by invalid email IDs or and obsolete addresses. The cleaning process will help eliminate such addresses and keep bounce rates low.
3. Higher Engagement
Engaging subscribers who respond to your messages will increase open rates and click-through rates, and thus the returns from your email campaign. This will increase the amount of engagements from the previous one.
4. Cost Reduction
Most email marketing platforms will price you based on the number of subscribers you have. There is one way to reduce unnecessary costs which is by cleaning out inactive and fake email accounts. This is the part where your cost can be reduced.
5. Sender’s Reputation
Cleaning maintains a positive reputation with ESPs and helps you stay away from blacklisting areas. Always, clear your mail list in order to gain the trust of sender’s and increase your reputation.
Manual Methods to Clean Your Email List
Using an automated email checking tool is faster, but here are some manual methods to clean your list in case you want to get your hands dirty:
1. Export and Review the List in Excel or Google Sheets
- Export the list by using our professional tool named as SysTools Email Address Checker to move forward.
- Look for obvious typos, duplicates, malformed addresses (like “gamil.com” instead of “gmail.com”).
- Use different filters to look for patterns of inactivity. Monitor and rectify those emails and clean your list to maintain decency.
2. Hard Bounce Removal
- Go to the reports section on your tool to check all email addresses bouncing back.
- Strip out every address from your list that consistently returns a hard bounce.
- Cleaning can remove the chances of emails getting bounced which leads to reducing the hard bounce rates.
3. Segmenting for Inactives
- Find those who haven’t opened any of your emails for the last three to six months. Make a separate list of those emails.
- Send them a re-engagement email or remove them if they do not respond in some frame of time.
4. Check for Spam Traps
- Remove suspicious emails that never engage at all like your spam attacks.
- Do not use emails that appear auto-generated or those with uncommon domains. This can be the trap from attackers to find a path to enter to your inbox.
5. Manual Domain Validation
- Use WHOIS or any simple domain lookup tool to confirm if the domain is active or not.
- Usually, if the domain does not exist, the email address is no longer valid. It can’t be used to send it to anyone.
6. Go With Double Opt-in Protocol
- Just make sure that your new subscribers confirm their email addresses prior to being added to your email list. By adding any unknown people who have any suspicious email address can give you trouble.
- This will prevent anyone from signing up with fake or incorrect email addresses.
Conclusion
While the time-consuming process gets carried out on cleaning an email list, it in turn pays, with deliverability, engagement, or costs being good. If you’ve got a small list or are growing big on a campaign, maintaining and pruning your list would keep you on top of email marketing. For huge datasets or keeping the validations ongoing, going with the above mentioned tool would really assist in speeding up the process and keeping things accurate.