You’ve got a great subject line, your content provides plenty of value, you’re sending at precisely the right time….and yet your open rate is frustratingly low. Why is this happening? A common culprit is unknowingly sending your emails to outdated and/or nonexistent email addresses.
For whatever reason (e.g. a new job), some of your subscribers may have stopped using the emails they originally gave you. People also make mistakes like spelling their email addresses wrong or signing up for emails twice.
When a significant number of email recipients don’t receive or open your emails, your messages are more likely to be flagged as spam. And your subscribers can’t open your emails if they go to their spam boxes.
You can prevent this from happening by periodically cleansing your email list. This is the process of removing dead, fake, invalid, or duplicate accounts to ensure that you are only sending your emails to people who might actually open them.
Here’s how to keep your email list clean:
Focus on Engaged Users
Step one in cleaning your email list is separating the contacts who engage with your emails from those who don’t. At first, it might seem logical to just remove the latter group from your list. But here’s the thing about email marketing: Sometimes, people just stop opening your emails for reasons that have nothing to do with your brand. They just naturally become disengaged over time.
If someone has engaged with your brand before, they can probably be persuaded to do it again. So, before you remove an inactive contact from your list, try to win them back by offering something like a small freebie, a discount, free shipping on their next purchase, etc.
If they still don’t open your email, then it’s time to remove them from your list.
Remove Duplicates
Duplicate emails can really mess with the accuracy of your campaign’s performance data. By removing them from your list, you can make sure that your email marketing statistics are up to date and that you aren’t unintentionally emailing anyone twice (which is seriously annoying). If you’re using current software for email marketing, it should take care of duplicates for you.
Remove Spam and Typos
Next, go through your list and separate any email addresses that look misspelled or fake. People write “0” instead of “o” all the time, or “gnail” instead of “gmail.” A fake email address is also pretty easy to spot. They typically look like long, random strings of letters, like nkshiazjowhnx@xyz.com.
Again, this is something good marketing software can do on its own.
Communicate with New Subscribers Right Away
When someone subscribes to your emails, start communicating with them right away. If this person continues to engage with your brand, then you can safely say they are worthy of sending more emails moving forward. The goal is to find out if this person is truly interested in your business as quickly as possible, so you can figure out which email list (engaged vs. disengaged) they belong to.
Manually going through your email contacts is incredibly tedious. When choosing email marketing software, make sure your platform is programed to keep your email list clean. This is an aspect of marketing where the latest technology – like artificial intelligence – can be very helpful.
For further guidance about improving your email list hygiene, contact our team at The Found Gen today.