The importance of good email list hygiene

Spreading your message to an old or purchased email list not only wastes your effort and time, but also potentially harms your brand's good name. More than ever, businesses are finding it vital to keep their lists up to date and free from redundant addresses. Here are 3 reasons.

 1. Consumers’ preference 

Over 77% of consumers choose email as a channel of receiving permission-based marketing messages while 76% of consumers do not want to receive email from any parties if they have not asked for. It is a good practice to give your recipients the choice of opting into and out of your mailing list. By asking for recipients’ permission, you will ensure your list only contains recipients who want to receive your content. On the other hand, asking users to unsubscribe can help maintain clean list. This does not contradict the purpose of email marketing. Contrarily, let uninterested users unsubscribe reduces SPAM rate. This is because the consequence of sending email to uninterested users can only be reporting SPAM if you do not provide unsubscribe option.

 2. Improve senders’ reputation 

Healthy list helps improve your sender's, and your brand's reputation with internet service providers [ISPs], preventing your emails from inadvertent bans, thus allowing you to raise positive engagement with your customers. This is because ISPs will evaluate if you are spammers depending on the email deliverability and recipients’ action. Sending to stale or purchased list will result in low email deliverability and high bounce rate. In this case, ISPs may block your email as they suspect you are harvesting data online rather than thru legal channel. Furthermore, ISPs will send your emails to SPAM folder if they find out recipients are not active with your campaign. Thus, you should remove and separate inactive users from your list and design another re-engaging campaign for them.

 3. Reach targeted audience 

By keeping hygienic list, the number of emails you need to send will drop a lot. Take Corporate AccountabilityInternational (Litmus) as an example, which is a non-profit organization in Boston. It has grown a huge email list. Yet, only 60% email address of the list are valid. What makes the matter worse is that 45% of the users of valid email address never open its email. It's obvious that size of email list does not mean success of email marketing. However, after cleaning the email list by cutting down 40%, the open rate is doubled and the click-through rate rises dramatically by 50%.

By removing old and invalid data, as well as inactive users regularly, your list will remain fresh and targeted. Thus, you will reach targeted customers who are interested in your products or services by cleaning your list. Deliverability as well as open rate and click rate will also increase. This in turn helps improving your sender’s reputation and reduces the chance of falling into SPAM folder.

Let’s keep maintaining your list and reach right person with right content. So, how to manage inactive users list? In the next blog, I will share the tips of preparing re-engaging campaign.

Stay tuned!

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Source:
edmdesigner
Litmus