Campaigns: best practices for email list maintenance
Email list cleaning refers to regularly updating your email contact list. It’s crucial for effective email marketing, helping you avoid sending emails to invalid or outdated addresses so that your emails land in inboxes rather than spam folders.
When recipients report your emails as spam, major email providers are more likely to automatically send them to spam folders, meaning their recipients are less likely to view them.
Reviewing and maintaining your email lists regularly helps to reduce the risk of this happening, leading more people to open and read your emails and generating better engagement.
Maintaining a clean list protects your reputation by ensuring compliance with regulations and building trust with your audience. A well-managed list will also provide you with more accurate insights into how your emails are performing and what your audience wants.
Review your email list regularly to keep it up to date. You can do this by unsubscribing recipients who don’t engage with your emails, running campaigns to re-engage inactive subscribers and segmenting your audience for better targeting.
In summary, proper email list hygiene helps build a better relationship with your subscribers.
How to maintain a clean email list
As best practice, your subscription list should only include opt-in contacts with a subscription date and a reason for adding the email. Other contacts should be unsubscribed.
There are several things you can do to clean up your data:
- Make sure your lists only have email addresses from customers who opted in to receive marketing communications. Emails that didn’t opt in aren’t permitted. If you have email addresses in your database that you can’t prove have subscribed, you must unsubscribe them immediately.
- Filter out users who haven’t opened any of your emails in the last six months – these email addresses may be spam traps and you should unsubscribe them.
- If you collect emails offline or via a third-party or partner email database, validate them via an email validation tool before adding them to a subscription list. These tools verify that your emails will be sent successfully by ensuring all addresses on your list are in use, formulated correctly and have valid domains.
Learn more about marketing contact status in this article.
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