When collecting leads for your email marketing lists, it’s important to not only validate and clean them at the point of collection or as you onboard, but also to periodically re-check and re-clean your leads as you progress through your marketing efforts.
This is the definition of email hygiene.
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How to maintain a healthy email list
Just as your car or house need routine maintenance, your marketing lists need the same up-keep in order to thrive over the long term.
Below you will find 3 helpful ways to maintain a clean and healthy email marketing list.
List Segmentation
When mailing your email marketing lists, you’ll want to follow who’s actively opening, clicking, and perhaps buying from your campaigns. This is called Activity Data, or Transactional Metrics. These are important data points because it gives the email marketer the ability to segment these ‘active’ users away from the ‘non active’ users.
You can now create specific campaigns designed for your active users and adjust or modify your original campaigns to your non active users. For example, you would not continually send the same marketing campaign to a user who’s not responding or engaging, right?
You would want to modify the content or the offering in hopes to drive more intrigue to that user. Therefore, segmenting your active emails and non-active email will allow higher priority mail to deliver to active segments, improve delivery and reputation metrics by decreasing the sends on inactive segments. It also gives you the opportunity to re-engage with your non-active data segments separately and in a modified way.
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Archive Inactive Users
As you’re mailing your email leads, it’s important to track engagement and activity along the way. This is not only beneficial for segmenting your most active users, but also to eventually archive the inactive or non-engaged users over time. This is called internal list hygiene.
You don’t want to continually mail to a user that’s not responding. Depending on your products, services, or marketing materials, you will want to set up a threshold of time that allows you a baseline of when to remove these users from your deployments.
If you’re mailing to your email lists a few times a week, 60 days is a good standard. If you’re mailing to your lists a few times a day, 30 days is more appropriate. If you’re more of a monthly newsletter type set up, then 90 days would suffice.
The main goal for doing this is to archive these un-engaged users and stop mailing them. You’ll then see that mailing to your active users will increase your delivery reputation. On top of that you’ll also see a much higher activity metric across your marketing deployments.
Periodic Re-cleaning
As most email marketers know, initial cleaning of your marketing databases is a major necessity prior to sending your email campaigns. This will eliminate your harmful and undeliverable emails before you attempt any deployments. It increases your sender reputation because you’re not sending to unsafe emails and it increases your chance of delivery success because you’re not sending to undeliverable emails.
However, what most email marketers fail to realize is the rate of attrition that occurs over time on their email addresses. Email Addresses are dynamic and can change often. Monitoring and tracking that change will prolong the success of future email marketing campaigns and keep the integrity of the marketing lists themselves.
Use a common practice of re-cleaning your email lists every 30-60 days to eliminate dormant accounts, newly created threat based emails, and new undeliverable accounts to ensure your lists are back in good standings and continue to perform at a high level.
About EmailOversight
EmailOversight is a powerful Email Validation service that utilizes real time verification and hygiene techniques to remove hard bounces and dangerous emails from your email marketing lists. Use EmailOversight to verify that your lists are both safe and deliverable before you mail. Readers of this blog get a 20% discount on their first order by signing up here, or by contacting Bryan Jenkins.
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