WHAT IS EMAIL LIST CLEANING AND WHY YOU NEED IT?

Do you think your email list is looking a little dated and in need of some maintenance? Email list cleaning is a job that scares a lot of marketers and business owners because it means removing some addresses from their list. According to Hubspot recent research “Email marketing databases naturally, degrade by about 22.5% every year”.

There are a few reasons why the emails in your list can become invalid:

• Unused or abandoned email accounts
• Job changes resulting in email change
• Typos or invalid entries on websites and forms

These are only a few reasons why your email list needs attention. Proactively cleaning your list on an ongoing basis will help find and remove the updated issues that have formed over time.  Cleaning email lists refer to the process of purging your contacts by deleting outdated, disengaged, irrelevant, and uninterested emails. This helps keep the integrity of your marketing list but also builds meaningful relationships with your engaged subscribers.

Regularly cleaning your list is crucial if you want to increase your marketing emails’ overall engagement rates. When you do this, you can create more targeted email contact lists that let you focus on customers who are truly interested in what you have to offer.

In turn, you increase your conversion rates as your community of subscribers will be more engaged. It will lead to having higher revenue as well as increased customer satisfaction. Not a lot of business owners realize this, but not pruning your email list can cost you. As the sender, it will result in damage to your reputation because of higher unsubscribe rates, email bounces, and complaints which will affect your ability to deliver successfully.

The damage will add up in the long run, which may negatively affect your marketing campaign and sender reputation. It can impair your ability to reach your customer base that also includes your most engaged subscribers. Now that you know the importance of cleaning email lists and the risks if you do not, the question is ‘how do you keep it clean?’ The use of an email list cleaning service may be the answer.

Email List Cleaning Best Practices

How to know if you need to clean your email list?

As an email marketing specialist you probably always keep track of the most significant KPIs, such as Open Rates and CTR.

• Increased Unsubscribes rate
• More Spam Complaints
• Reduced CTR
• Reduced Open Rate
• Increase in Hard Bounces

How often should you clean your email list?

• Every 3 Months – for those businesses that reach out to their subscribers once a month.
• Once a month – for those who reach out to subscribers on a weekly basis.

This will ensure that you have the most accurate and deliverable data, which will provide better analytics and KPI, as well as help you manage your sender reputation.

How an Email List Cleaning Service May Help You

One of the things that can help keep your email list quality high is an email list cleaning service. Such services facilitate the ability to search, find, and remove all these problematic emails that are hindering your ability to successfully deliver emails. They provide an automated way to upload your databases and scan them for issues. This eliminates the need to manually go through your lists, which can take hours if not days of work.

Email list cleaning and email verification services offer many benefits, many of which include:

• Lower hard bounce rate – the most important thing while sending emails is to make sure the emails are delivered. If your hard bounce rate starts to increase, it will negatively impact your sender reputation and thus get you blocked from delivering your emails successfully and potentially get you blacklisted. When that happens, emails that normally were delivered to your recipients won’t be able to reach the inbox, making your email marketing campaigns obsolete.
• More actionable insights – actionable data insights give a better idea about subscribers, so by removing invalid email addresses from your list, you will deeply understand how engaged they are with specific content.
• Increases conversion rates – when the prospects with invalid email addresses are removed from your list and only valid emails are being sent, the chances that more people will successfully receive your message and engage. Thus, when your messages are being received by an engaged audience, your conversion rates will increase.
• Accurate campaign statistics – working with invalid email addresses from your list may lead to inaccurate marketing campaign statistics. Email list cleaning eliminates addresses that are damaging your sender reputation and distort your stats.
• Better targeted marketing communications – once your email list is cleaned, you can divide it into 2 segments: active and inactive. Each segment should be targeted with appropriate messaging.
• Maximized revenue opportunities – as it was mentioned above, undeliverable email addresses harm your sender reputation by placing your emails in the spam folder or blocking delivery. But if your list is cleaned and delivered into Inbox, it will have higher chances to be opened, have better engagement and therefore better revenue opportunities via appropriate segmentation.
• Increased email ROI – when unnecessary emails are removed, investment is better distributed on valid ones and so it increases your ROI.
• Good sender reputation – spam traps, spam complaints, bounces, and subscriber level engagement are determined by sender reputation. Avoid them and build a high sender reputation, which will positively influence your email deliverability.
• Cost Savings – nobody wants to pay for emails that won’t even deliver. Email validation services remove those bounced emails before they send so you can increase your positive email marketing efforts.

You can benefit from filtration steps such as the email address formatting, syntax errors, spam trap domain checks and much more by using EmailOversight’s services

How to Clean Email List

Now that you know how important cleaning your email list is, it’s time to understand how you can obtain it. There are two options you can consider here: do it manually or use some tools and software.

Manual scrubbing can take a while in case of large email lists, so taking into consideration how precious your time is we would highly recommend that you consider having a reliable real-time email verification service provider instead.

You will need to find the most accurate email verification and validation service by implementing some research on your own. While you can check some data, such as syntax and typos manually, reliable email verification and validation service will let you check the existence of an actual email, as well as to detect any malicious emails that can hurt your sending abilities.

Cleaning Email List Manually

Whenever considering cleaning your email list manually, keep in mind that this is time and effort-consuming, and the results are not guaranteed. There are some data points that can be checked manually, such as syntax and typos.

You can send “Confirmation” emails manually, asking your subscribers to confirm their willingness to stay on your list. This is called ‘Double Opt-In’. This is the best way to confirm if a user or potential subscriber wants to get your content on a regular basis and will also confirm the safety of the email address in question.

Cleaning Email List using Email Verification Services

Luckily, nowadays there is no need to scrub thousands of emails manually. Consider having the most accurate real-time email verification service, that will do all the dirty work for you. Having this process properly set up will help you get:

• Reduced bounce rate
• Improved click-through rate
• Skyrocket open rates
• Reduced cost of sending email campaigns
• Saved time screening lists manually
• Better identified potential leads and segment customers

EmailOversight’s Email Verification and Validation services were designed keeping in mind the needs of marketing managers and email marketing specialists. The service is Easy-to-use and provides 99% accurate results. This combined with flexible list management and reasonable pricing makes EmailOversight services a must with regards to validating your data the right way and keeping your email operation running at an optimal level. Real-time email verification is a necessity for every business looking to improve their email marketing metrics and ROI, and as you can see, email validation services can make this process so much easier.