Many small business owners focus on building their email lists and do a great job of adding email subscribers consistently. The struggle, however, is maintaining a clean list. This is important because if your list is not clean and active, your open and click through rates will be low. Over time, it will affect the overall deliverability of your emails. Also, most email marketing solution providers charge based on the number of contacts, so non-active or non-valid contacts are costing you.
Let’s take a look at how to clean your email list.
- Check Your Bounces
If your email campaign does not reach your intended recipient, it is labeled as a “bounce”. You want to run reports to see which email subscribers are bouncing and why. For example, is the email undeliverable because the email address does not exist or is the recipient on vacation, so their inbox is full?
If the email address does not exist, check your spelling carefully. Often, it is a simple typo that you can correct quickly. Maybe yahoo is incorrectly spelled tahoo.
Look for email addresses that are being “blocked,” meaning the recipient’s email service provider is blocking emails from your service provider. You can either delete them or reach out to the individual contacts and get an alternate email address.
- Segment Your List
Cleaning your email list is also about getting organized. List segmentation is key to the organization of your email marketing. By definition, list segmentation is organizing your email list into different segments or groups so you can send targeted, relevant emails to subscribers based on interests, behaviors or traits.
Your first step is to determine how you want to categorize your list. If you are realtor, for example, and you often share information about listings in different areas, you might categorize your list by location. A home buyer who is interested in living in a particular area is much more apt to open an email about that area versus a general email with all listings.
According to Constant Contact, 39% of marketers who segmented their email lists experienced higher open rates and 24% experienced better deliverability and increased revenue.
- Re-engage and Remove Your Inactives
Studies show that 60% of your list is inactive. Although that sounds horrible, it also sounds like a great opportunity to re-engage. As you look at your list, who has not opened one of your emails in the last six months? Put those individuals on a list. You can call it Inactive. Then send a re-engagement email to that list. Your re-engagement email can have a subject line that says Action Required or We’ve Missed You. In the body ask if they would like to continue receiving your mailings. Remove those who say no. You can also try adding an incentive for them to re-engage (or make another purchase) by offering a discount.
It’s important to have a healthy email list to truly maximize email marketing. Clean your list today!