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Please, answer this question honestly: How long have you been checking your email database of subscribers? Do you realize that you didn’t pay enough attention to this? Now the reasons why the priority indicators of deliverability and openness have fallen so much are plainly visible? Yes, a clean email list is the staff of life! Our quick guide is not meant to put pressure on your conscience, but to explain why email list scrubbing is so important to a successful marketing strategy. In addition, we will show you how to carry out an email list cleaning swiftly, efficiently, and at the lowest cost!
What indicates the need to clear the subscriber list?
Regardless of what type of business the company has, any customer support employee will confirm one simple truth: almost all user accounts can and should be “upgraded” in order to simplify and reduce the cost of the enterprise. This means that unnecessary lists with invalid email addresses, outdated contacts, spam traps, and other interactive junk need to be removed regularly. And the remaining high-quality accounts should be fisked, that is, segment the audience. This not only increases the productivity of the marketing department and improves the results of advertising campaigns. This is an effective method to save on the tariffs of the service you use for email newsletters.
The most eloquent thing about the need to hold such an event as email list hygiene is the time period during which contacts were collected. Some entrepreneurs strike a pose when professional marketers recommend removing 95% of inactive accounts from the database. They often complain indignantly. They say this list was created for 10 years, you can’t delete addresses from it just like that! But, please, don’t act like them. If you know the list is many years old, be sure to clear it.
Another important “signal” for list clean up should be sharply dropped Open Rate indicators, low conversions, and poor deliverability. Moreover, if the indicators of soft and hard failures exceed the 2% mark, we recommend that you do data validation.
What are the parameters of the status and availability of emails?
After cleaning email lists, pay attention to the risk statuses that are assigned to each contact on your list. In general, the algorithm of work here for most email checking services is similar. Availability statuses and parameters are as follows:
- “Refused any mailings”. The user decided to refuse mailings of any kind, therefore such contact should be removed from the list;
- “Unsubscribed”. The user has unsubscribed from one (specific) mailing, so he can be left in the lists for other campaigns;
- “Blocked”. The account is blocked by the validator due to frequent complaints about spam or at the request of the owner of the mailbox;
- “Unavailable”. Any attempt to send a letter to the address ends in failure, therefore the system’s solution is not to send mail to this contact;
- “The server considers it spam”. The recipient’s server considered the last mailing to be spam, so do not persist, because this may happen again;
- “User considers spam”. The owner of the mailbox to which you sent the letter decided that your letter is spam, so unsubscribe.
But the “full box” status gives an indirect indication that the account is inactive. This address is usually forgotten or lost. Feel free to delete it, as it will most likely become a spam trap in the future.
What to do next?
A professional mail list cleaner is not only a reliable risk validator. In addition to determining statuses, good service is obliged to offer options for optimizing the received data. That is, what can be done with contacts whose status does not suit. At least 2 solutions are possible here:
- Updating and segmentation of the address list. You can update one specific list of all at once. But first, delete contacts with statuses “blocked”, “unsubscribed”, “invalid”, “complained about spam”. In addition, we recommend looking at analytics for a half-year period or later. If the list contains addresses to which you did not send mailings during this period, it is highly likely that the person will send the first letter to the spam folder. We advise you to define such records in a separate list for further rehabilitation. Also, segment this list for further work with it. This will simplify the task of data recovery, and once again run the lists and reveal invalid accounts.
- User reactivation. Add reanimated users to your clean email list using the segmentation of the “inconvenient” audience, build a strategy for returning it (perhaps our advice on how to write apology business letters will be useful to you), create engaging messages by studying effective examples of activation emails.
You now know almost everything about the importance of hygiene in your subscriber list. Finally, we recommend using proven bulk email address cleaning services. Proofy is what you need!
