Give your email marketing list a spring clean!

Spring is in the air so, there’s no better time to tidy up your email marketing list! Even the most careful of email marketers will collect inactive and inaccurate email addresses over time – and, if left unchecked, these can start to really affect your spam score and deliverability rates.

Fact of the matter is, you might as well not bother sending your emails at all if you’re sending them to people who can’t - or don’t want to receive them! So, just follow these simple steps and give your email marketing list a spring clean today!

Identify low activity contacts

The first step to good email list hygiene is to identify all of your low or no activity contacts. Specify how you’ll decide which contacts are classed as ‘low’ activity, for example if the recipient hasn’t opened an email for X amount of time.

Make it a priority to get rid of any emails that have resulted in a high bounce rate. The same can be said for any addresses that are clearly unattended inboxes, for example ‘welcome@noreply.net’. Similarly, email addresses that are clearly misspelled can be removed without causing much concern.

Determine which contacts to remove

For low activity email addresses, consider sending out an email to determine whether or not the address is active and, if so, offer the recipient the opportunity to confirm if they wish to continue to receive your emails. The response to this email will help you to determine whether or not to remove or keep the contact.

If you don’t feel comfortable removing low response email addresses, why not create a list for users with very low engagement rates, to which you only send high priority emailings – for example at Christmas or to announce important changes to your products.

Keep your contact list tidy!

To keep your email list tidy going forward, make sure you grow your list organically – incentivise the sign up and offer subscribers exclusive offers or content. Don’t try to obtain email addresses by purchasing lists, for example, as you’ll just end up with a load of people who are unlikely to be genuinely interested in what you have to offer!

Whilst it might seem difficult to remove those hard earned email addresses, don’t be nervous about hitting ‘delete’. Prevention is better than the cure, so give your email list a list a clean-up today and start to benefit from higher open rates - and higher levels of engagement!