Spring cleaning is not only good for your house, but it’s also good for business.
Especially when it comes to email marketing, where sending emails to an old list could be hurting your brand AND costing you money.
In the past, marketers could send their message out far and wide and the consumer really had no choice in tuning it out.
Now, however it is easy to mark your email as spam and register a complaint or the email provider can suspend your account to maintain their deliverability rate and reputation. Neither one of these things spells success for you, so your best option is to do a twice-yearly scrub down of your database. The nice thing is that a lot of email providers already help to keep your lists up to date, but here are a few steps to make sure you are ready to go:
- Misspellings and Punctuation – When you are in the database, search for misspellings ([email protected]) or missed punctuation (tom2gmail.com). These will affect your bounce rate and will lower your success rating.
- Bounce Rate – Take a look at all of the emails that have had a hard bounce and scrub them from your database. A hard bounce means that an email is never delivered, so you can feel safe in removing them.
- Feedback – Monitor your feedback so that you can quickly remove subscribers that have marked your email as spam.
- Inactivity – We have also signed up for email newsletters that we fully intend to read and then never actually do. The same is true for your subscribers and you should remove the ones that are inactive/never read your emails.
Once you have removed the old emails and fixed the misspelled ones, you can do more to tidy up your lists. First, if you haven’t created an opt-in page for your email system, create one and share it. You are more likely to have success with your email marketing campaign if the people you are emailing WANT to get something from you. Also send a personalized email to your existing list with an opt-in link to see if they want to continue to receive your emails.
Another great step in having a on-target email database is when you acquire new subscribers, send them a personalized welcome message. You can send a variation of the welcome message a couple of times over the first month, so that they know that you care that they are reading what they have to say. Lastly, you can take a look at the click thru rate for your emails to see which topics are more appealing to certain people. Then create filters to continue to capture their attention.
By following these steps, you ensure that your hard work gets read by people who care and you stay on brand. Getting banned for having too many red flags is bad news for business.
Have other tips for cleaning your email database? Start the conversation in the comments.