Email List Cleaning: 5 Best Practices To Ensure Better Engagement

HOME / AutoResponder Resources / Email List Cleaning: 5 Best Practices To Ensure Better Engagement

Welcome guest. Table of Contents

Have a nice day!

Email list cleaning refers to regularly updating the email contact list by being responsive and removing outdated contacts. If you want tips, keep reading because we have listed 5 best practices for email list cleaning to ensure better engagement.

  1. Always include an Unsubscribe button in your email newsletters

Having an email list that is expansive seems like the most desired thing at first glance. But if your email list contains too many inactive email addresses, or essentially ‘bad email addresses’, this can backfire instead.

The thing is, keeping a large email list costs a lot more money. Meanwhile, if your list is comprised of bad email addresses, you keep sending emails to people who don’t even engage with your content.

You could even be marked as spam by people who no longer wish to hear from you. With all of that being said, cleaning your email list becomes super important to maintain the health of your email list.

One super easy and obvious way to help you maintain this is by including an Unsubscribe button. It needs to be clear and easy to reach so people can remove themselves from your mailing list.

  1. See your list growth and decide how often you need to scrub the list

Now, although it is great when someone unsubscribes from your mailing list as this helps your clean-up, this isn't always managed smoothly, right?

Not everybody bothers enough to unsubscribe from your mailing list; some people simply ignore and delete your constant email sends. Therefore, it is still part of good 'email list hygiene' to do a regular clean-up.

How often should you do this? In most cases, once every 2 to 3 months is considered good enough.

But if you have the time, try to analyse your email list growth and see if you're growing much faster than expected, or even much slower than expected. Depending on this, you can reduce or increase the frequency of your cleanup.

A list growth that is incredibly rapid may need regular cleaning once every month just to keep things on top.

  1. Use automation to keep your list healthy

Having to do all the cleanup yourself can be quite a tedious demand. Running a cleanup every so often can take away a lot of your time that could instead be utilised for creating marketing plans.

However, at the same time, email list hygiene is crucial for its health, so you can't just disregard doing it in the first place. What to do to save time though? Use email list automation.

Autoresponder tools and software often come with nifty designs to help you create rules for your email list health. You can automate your cleaning by creating ‘rules’ for emails that have not been opened by your recipients.

However, such software can only help you speed up cleaning and not determine why your emails aren’t opened.

Therefore, don’t forget to study what strategies work and don’t work for your engagement in your email newsletters.

  1. Utilise an email confirmation function

Cleaning up your email list is a good habit and must always be carried out with utmost seriousness. In fact, you should have a key person who is in charge of this aspect.

However, needing to constantly weed out bad email addresses can be quite taxing, right? So instead, you should reduce the likelihood of piling up unresponsive email addresses. One way to do this is by enabling two-step email confirmation.

When a new subscriber joins your mailing list, have them type in their email address, and then wait for a confirmation.

Through an email autoresponder, send them an email confirmation notification through which they can click a link to confirm their email address.

Doing this may be an extra step, but this protects you from keeping rubbish email addresses that your new subscribers aren't even using that actively. It's a smart way to avoid duplicate emails as well.

  1. Have a consistent schedule for cleaning up

As mentioned before, you need to make an email list clean-up process an integral part of your email list health maintenance.

Some people may find this process cumbersome. Some people may not feel very excited about this part of email marketing. After all, it is more exciting to create content and get people to sign up.

But email list cleaning must be done if you want to cut costs and maximise revenue. Therefore, to cut out stress from your daily obligations, it would be wise to set aside a cleaning schedule that is run regularly.

To make sure your email list cleaning is always maintained, set up a cleaning schedule on your work calendar. This way, you already know when it’s coming and you can plan your working days ahead.

It would also be a good idea if you have a member of your team who can dedicate their time to enforce this task.

Hope you enjoy reading "Email List Cleaning: 5 Best Practices To Ensure Better Engagement" :)

What Is The Difference Between A Newsletter, Mailing, And Autoresponder?

One common thing among newsletter, mailing, and autoresponder are that all of them are components of an email marketing system with their specific role and tasks.

A newsletter is a set of regularly sent emails to those recipients who have subscribed to it; Newsletter is issued and sent to the specific contact lists on the occasional basis which maybe annually, biannually, quarterly, monthly, fortnightly or weekly. The interval of publishing and disseminating can depend upon the role, nature, and requirement of the marketing.

The salient features of a newsletter include its regularity, punctuality, and certainty; that it will be issued on regularly defined intervals and it is predictable; secondly it is sent to the selected areas and selected subscribers which include only those who have already shown interest in the relevant products/ services.

Mailing is also called e-blast and those are irregular in nature; they are sent to various recipients with a certain and specific intention. Mailing generally comprises of a specific topic, area of concern or subject. Mailing emails are neither regular nor predictable by the recipients; as compare to the newsletter.

Autoresponders are also sort of email messages which are considered to be replies or a direct response to the queries raised by the email recipients. Autoresponders are prewritten messages which may be customized and modified by the sender from time to time on a need basis; however, generally, those are not amended so frequently. Autoresponder can be a single response or a series of emails in follow up of one another depending upon the situation.

The autoresponders are basically triggered by various actions of email recipients like in response to the form they filled up, in response to subscribing a newsletter, in response to showing interest in some product/ service, in response to adding something in the cart, or in response to making some purchase, etc.

All three terms are equally important for email marketing; however, their meaning, role, and functions are quite different and are not to be confused with each other.

Hope you enjoy reading "What Is The Difference Between A Newsletter, Mailing, And Autoresponder?" :)

1 Tip For An Efficient SMS Campaign

Use Short Numbers

A short number or short code, as the name suggests, involves only a few digits. A long number on the other hand contains relatively a lot more digits. The catch here is that short numbers are easy to recognize and remember.

A short number usually contains five to six digits. This makes these numbers easy and quick to read, and call out, when asked for by a customer.

If you are wondering, “Why would someone give me their personal contact number for my SMS campaign?”, the following detail might clear some doubts. Customers, most of the time, would not hesitate to subscribe if they notice a short code involved. It’s natural for people to trust a short number rather than a long number; which are considered as personal contact numbers. A short code makes people feel a lot safer.

You could also avoid fake news regarding your brand from spreading. This could be news regarding new deals, offers, new outlet, etc. Since you have a short number, people will know that the only authentic source of SMS regarding your brand is your short number.

Here Is The One Costly Email Autoresponder Mistake

Unpolished content

Grammatical errors, typos, imbalanced design; you name it. They are all signs screaming out loud that you are not a professional business maker. Impressions matter a lot in this industry. Even when people are looking for something affordable, they want to know that the product they're buying is trustworthy.

A trustworthy business owner is clearly someone who has put a lot of effort and thought into their creation--even if sometimes you really don't have to put THAT much work if you're following a great strategy. However, attention to detail is indisputable. It goes to show that you will be attentive in providing your products and services, too.

It doesn't mean you have to come up with a super extravagant design. Just make sure you have great content that is polished to the maximum where grammatical errors nor typos do not exist, so they don't instead drive your readers' attention away from the message.

1 Tip For Perfecting Your Email Etiquette

Nothing is Private:

An organized firm always has its staff teamed up. From the manager of the firm to a mediocre employee in the office, everyone is well aware of what happens inside and outside the firm. Hence, if we assume that what we write in our email might just be read by the email reviewer of the firm or the assistant manager then we are very wrong.

The email is indeed read, and after being reviewed it is discussed as well among other employees and higher management staff. So, what you include in your email, let it be your own personal information, your over-esteemed appreciation for the firm or your goodwill radiating from the words written in the email (or an unfortunate criticism regarding the firm by mistake), will be known to every person who is in charge of reviewing the emails in the organization.

Therefore, it is advised to be careful and open while creating an email for the organization, keeping in mind a few notes such as being respectful and not including irrelevant or informal details. Hence, the best way to follow this step is by reading your email as a receiver yourself.

1 Tip For Writing Email Marketing Copy That Converts

Don’t sacrifice clarity

You should prefer clarity over entertainment. Don’t overwhelm the customers by writing vague, “trying to be catchy” paragraphs. Make sure the users know that the email marketing copy has a comprehensive motive and not spam. Also that the email you are sending, has a clear reason to reach the user so that the user doesn’t feel that you are spamming them with unnecessary content while wasting their time.

Your message should give out at least:

  • Information of some value
  • Provoke the viewers to take discrete action (to increase your click-through rates)
  • Offer them substantial details.
  • Do not exaggerate, it looks spammy

The core principle is to make your customers’ efforts, in opening and going through your email, worth it because nobody would want their inbox filled with non-informative emails. So, create ideas that are precise and on point so that readers don’t find it annoying and report it!