Email list cleaning is about removing old or inactive contacts from your email database. These contacts could be subscribers that are no longer engaging with your emails or dated email addresses that are no longer active and might return bounces, blocks, or become spam traps. In the short term, cleaning your email marketing list can improve your open and click rates, reduce your unsubscribe and bounce rates and, most importantly, improve your overall email deliverability in the long term.
The reason behind this is that in recent years, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as Gmail or Hotmail, have become smarter and moved away from traditional spam filters. Their focus is now on engagement. ISPs are learning how recipients interact with the messages that come into their inbox, which helps them determine whether emails should go to our inbox or land in our spam folder. So, if your contacts are no longer valid or engaging with your emails, your deliverability rates will be hurt.
How to clean up your email list
Make sure to use an Email Service Provider (ESP) offering advanced statistics and segmentation, and clean your contact list:
- To remove invalid contacts, go check your last campaign statistics, select contacts that appeared as blocks or hard bounces, and delete them from your contact list.
- If you want to give your inactive contacts one last chance, create a segment with people who haven’t opened and clicked a campaign in the last six months, and send a re-engagement campaign to this segment. Then, remove from your list only the contacts of this segment that haven’t shown any interest in receiving your emails.Â
You can also use an email validation service. Those kind of email verification services identify four types of bad emails to clean email lists: bounces, inactive recipients, unsubscribers, and complaints. This way, you make sure you’re not wasting resources sending emails to typos and spam traps.
Result
Removing old and inactive contacts from your email list will improve your email deliverability statistics and increase your marketing ROI.
