Email Marketing Cleanup Tips You Need in Your Corner
If you run a business, you need email marketing in your corner! Did you know that 99 percent of email users check their inbox everyday day? Of these people, 58 percent check their email first thing in the morning. Implementing the right email marketing strategies can help you generate leads and convert more prospects for your business. Being at the forefront of your customers' minds through emails helps them be aware of where you stand and what's available to them—it's an extremely effective method to help your customer navigate which of your products and services are best suited to their needs.
Making sure your email list remains clean is just as important as sending out emails to your audience. A clean email list helps ensure you’re targeting the right audience for your brand and may increase your return on investment over time. Let’s take a more in-depth look at how to keep your email list tidy.
Try This Before Cleaning Your Mailing List
Since emails are the best way to control communication with your audience, it’s critical that you keep as many customers engaged as possible! Sending a sequence of triggered emails to inactive subscribers may help them re-interact and re-engage with your company.
It’s cheaper to re-engage a customer than acquire new customers. It can cost up to 5 times the amount to acquire a new customer instead of retaining an existing one, and the success rate of selling to customers you already have may be as high as 60-70 percent.
Sending re-engagement email marketing campaigns isn’t just about reconnecting with your subscribers. Your deliverability will go down and your emails may go to a spam folder if you’re sending them to inactive subscribers, so it’s important to see who wants to re-engage with you. You need to show people why it’s worth their time to read and reconnect with your email content!
Why do people ignore emails?
They’re getting too many emails already
The emails are too long
Too salesy—no one likes product pushing with no substance
Confusing design
They aren’t optimized for mobile devices
The content is repetitive or irrelevant
They only signed up for a one-time offer, not daily emails
To get subscribers to start reading your emails again, send a re-engagement email sequence of 3+ emails starting 30-60 days after a subscriber becomes inactive.
These can be short and simple:
Offer to let people take an email hiatus or opt in for fewer emails
Promise to send more personalized content
Offer something for free or at a discount
Remind them why they signed up to begin with
When is it Time to Clean Out Your Mailing List?
If you’ve already tried a re-engagement sequence and it’s not working on certain subscribers, it may be time to let them go. Keeping your least-engaged recipients on your mailing list can kill your open rate.
It may be time to scrub, or clean out your mailing list, if you’re getting reduced open rates, reduced click-through rates, lots of unsubscribers, or spam complaints. You’ll want to remove unsubscribers, spam emails, purchased subscribers, and duplicate email addresses. You should aim to clean out your email list at least once per year, but if you have lots of new subscribers coming in, it may be worthwhile to clean it out more frequently.
How to Clean Out Your Mailing List
If you’re ready to clean out your mailing list, you’ll want to clean out your most active list first because the subscribers on that list are the ones driving your leads and sales. If you only have one list within your email marketing platform, then you can ignore that tip and get started with one of these tips:
Remove Unsubscribers
The easiest way to improve your open and click through rates is to remove unsubscribers from your email list. Your email marketing platform will tell you which email addresses have unsubscribed, they’ll just need to be deleted permanently. If you’ve already tried sending a re-engagement sequence to inactive subscribers and still have some on your list, feel free to clean them out too. Your email list may go down in numbers, but it’s better to have a smaller number of engaged subscribers instead of a large number of people who never engage with your content.
Clear Out Duplicates
Sometimes consumers will subscribe to your email campaigns more than once—maybe they forgot they signed up for your newsletter or are trying to snag a second coupon code. Duplicate email addresses should be cleared out because they increase the number of emails you’re paying to send to.
Remove Spam Email Addresses
Spam emails are relatively easy to spot and should be removed from your mailing list. Examples include: chance_31807-21@yahoo.com or 2222@juan.com. Keeping emails like this on your list can negatively affect your open and click through rates—clear them out whenever you can!
Remove Soft Bounces
When emails constantly bounce or go unopened, inboxes will start sending your emails to the Spam Folder. That’s why cleaning out bouncers will positively affect your deliverability and reputation.
Correct Typos
It happens more often than you think: consumers enter their email address wrong when signing up for a newsletter. Maybe they were typing too fast or autocorrect worked its magic. Regardless, you’ll want to look for obvious typos and remove invalid email addresses. E.g. sarah@gmial.com → sarah@gmail.com.
How to Keep Your Email List Cleaner Moving Forward
If you want to avoid a big cleanup session in the future, it’s best to be proactive! Here are a couple of easy ways to keep your list in tip top shape:
Use a Double Opt In
Implementing a double opt in is a great way to keep spam email addresses from making it onto your mailing list. In other words, bots won’t stand a chance! A doubt opt in will send someone an email after they sign up for your newsletter asking them to confirm their interest in being on your list. This can lead to better engagement rates over time.
Make Unsubscribing Easy
Keep your open and click through rates higher by allowing people to unsubscribe from your emails. Making it easy to find the unsubscribe button allows them to quickly opt out of receiving your content. It will be sad to see them go, but do you really want someone on your email list who’s never going to open your emails? We don’t either!
A Real Life Example from Fearless Foundry!
Prior to August 2022, we were sending to a list of almost 1900, but only getting an average of 150 people opening our emails for a 7.75 percent engagement rate!
We realized it was time to clean out our list and reduce our costs, so we reduced it to 775 in August 2022. For the next couple of months, we consistently DOUBLED the number of opens (average 325) for an engagement rate of 45 percent!
If you feel like you need some guidance when it comes to email marketing, reach out to us! Our overqualified team of creatives are experts at creating unique, genuine email content for brands, and can help get your email list in tip top shape.