How To Clean Your Email List

When it comes time to clean your email list, you might wonder what some of the best practices are, especially because it seems they’re ever-changing. 

In this article, we’re talking about email marketing. Specifically, we’re talking about email lists, and why it’s crucial to keep your list clean, and how to do so.

Keep reading to learn our tips and tricks for scrubbing your email list to ensure your emails provide you with the best results. 

Why Clean Your Email List?

Before we get into the “how-to” of it all, you might be wondering why it’s so essential to clean your email list. There are several answers to this question, so we’ll give you the gist of it.

First and foremost, the goal of cleaning up your email list is to make sure you’re spending your time and money on targeting the right people. Like our Automation Department Head, Jonny Wood, once said, “Email marketing is relationship marketing. Like all relationships you have, you get to choose who you surround yourself with. Reach out to the people who WANT to hear from you, and want to engage with your brand.” Suppose you’re going to go through the effort of putting together a beautiful and informational email. It’s often not worthwhile to send it out to email addresses where it may never show up in an inbox, or as soon as it gets there, it’s going to be deleted. 

Here are some other reasons why it’s essential to clean up that email list of yours: 

• Enhanced deliverability (better sender reputation, better open rates)
• Save on costs (don’t pay to have emails that don’t engage with your brand)
• Avoid spam traps 
• Gain more accurate data from customers that DO engage with emails 

Cleaning Your Email List: A Step by Step Guide 

1. Take a look at the number of bounced emails – If you’re showing frequent bounces, take a closer look. With a hard bounce, it’s safe to say that you can remove them from your list. With a soft bounce, check to see why it bounced. Often it could be due to a typo in the email address that could be easily fixed. 
2. Create a re-engaging campaign – create a sub-list of people who haven’t been opening your emails. It could be subscribers who haven’t interacted with the last five or ten emails. Then create and send out a campaign specifically designed to get them interested in your product or service once again. Continue to send out emails associated with this campaign for a month, maybe two, to give subscribers enough time to decide if they are interested. 
3. Check for valid email addresses – You can use a tool like BriteVerify to verify if the email addresses are legitimate. 
4. Remove the following from your list: 

• Duplicate email addresses 
• Spam email addresses (you can tell if there is a strange letter or number combination)
• People who have requested to unsubscribe

1. Remove uninterested subscribers – After your re-engagement campaign has run its course, you might find that there are still people who don’t interact with your emails. At that point, it’s time to remove them from your email list. 
2. Collect data and analyze – Define what made people uninterested in your emails and what you can do to keep future subscribers engaged. 
3. Repeat often – When you clean your email list, it’s not just something you will do once or twice. Instead, scrubbing your list should be done often enough to ensure that you’re targeting the right people and fulfilling your email marketing goals. AWeber suggests that while every company is unique, a good rule of thumb is about every six months. 

Let REVITY Marketing Agency Do Your Email Marketing for You!

At REVITY, we have a team of experienced email marketers that are well-versed in email list clean-up, writing and designing newsletters, automation, and everything else you could want from an email marketing expert. So if you need to clean your email list or even get your email list started, look no further than our team at REVITY. 

We are a full-service digital marketing company, meaning that we do anything and everything regarding digital marketing. We offer social media marketing, content marketing, SEO, paid ads, and so much more. Plus, we offer our services worldwide! Contact us today to learn more about us and to request your free marketing proposal!