How to keep a squeaky clean email list with email hygiene
Article topics
- What is email hygiene?
- Why carry out email hygiene?
- The benefits of email hygiene
- How often should you clean your email lists?
- How do you clean your email lists?
- Top tips for improving your email hygiene
- Does your email marketing list scrub up nicely?
The chances are that you do everything you can to keep your office space hygienic, from regularly cleaning your coffee cup to shaking the biscuit crumbs out of your keyboard.
But what about keeping your email lists clean and tidy too?
Good email hygiene can improve engagement and reduce the risk of your messages landing in spam. However, four out of ten businesses admit to never or rarely carrying it out.
New to the concept of email hygiene? In this article we’ll explain what it is, the benefits of carrying it out, and how to conduct your first hygiene audit.
What is email hygiene?
Email hygiene (also known as email cleaning or list hygiene) is the process of keeping your email marketing lists accurate and efficient.
You do this by removing invalid and inactive email addresses, as well as the email addresses of customers who no longer engage with you.
This means an improved chance of reaching customers who want to buy from your business and a lower chance of being marked as spam by email service providers.
Why carry out email hygiene?
Some businesses monitor the success of their email marketing lists by measuring the number of subscribers they have.
While this can be a general indicator of how your email marketing campaigns are doing, this metric doesn’t tell the whole story.
The average email list depreciates about 22% each year. People change their email address, sign up for mailing lists but enter their address wrong, and disengage with brands over time.
This means that some of the emails you send don’t get read. Your emails may also frustrate customers to the point that they unsubscribe or mark your messages as spam.
The benefits of email hygiene
Good email hygiene can streamline your email marketing campaigns and make them more efficient, but there are lots of other great benefits too.
It increases engagement
By getting rid of the subscribers who are least likely to engage with your emails, you can focus your attention on the customers who are most likely to click and convert.
Not only this, but low open rates and high bounce rates (by bounce rates, we mean emails that can’t be delivered to the recipient) can have a negative effect on your sender reputation.
We’ll talk about sender reputation in more detail later.
It reduces costs
Many email marketing platforms charge based on how many contacts you have. Eliminating low-quality email addresses can mean you pay less.
It enhances your sender reputation
Your internet service provider (ISP) grades your business and the emails you send to determine whether you are trustworthy or not. This is known as ‘sender reputation.’
A high sender reputation means your emails are less likely to automatically go to spam. A low sender reputation means your emails are more likely to go to spam.
In the worst-case scenario, your emails may be blocklisted entirely, meaning they don’t reach your customers at all.
High open and click rates enhance your sender reputation, while the following factors impede it:
- High bounce rates
- High unsubscribe rates
- Being marked as spam or junk mail
It’s important to note that it’s perfectly fine for a few people to unsubscribe from your email marketing list every time you send a message.
As a general rule of thumb, an unsubscribe rate of 0.5% or lower is considered normal. However, an unsubscribe rate above 1% may indicate a problem.
Good email hygiene can help reduce your bounce rate and remove the customers who are most likely to unsubscribe or report you as spam.
It helps you adhere to data protection regulations
Data protection regulations like GDPR advise that you receive consent from email subscribers and that all personal data is correct and up to date.
Email hygiene ensures your marketing lists are as accurate as possible and that you minimise the amount of sensitive personal data you hold on people.
Find out more about GDPR and collecting email addresses in line with the regulations.
How often should you clean your email lists?
It depends on how big your email marketing list is and how much your list is growing.
Whether you’re B2B or B2C can play a part too. As a general rule of thumb, work email addresses experience more churn as people leave jobs, while personal email addresses are more constant.
According to Mailgun, 27% of businesses clean their email lists at least once a month, while 16% carry out email hygiene quarterly.
While we recommend cleaning your email lists monthly or quarterly, it’s also good practice to review them on an ad hoc basis. For example, if:
- You notice issues, for example, lower click rates or an increase in spam reports
- You move to a new email marketing platform or customer relationship management (CRM) system
- You get an influx of new subscribers, for example, after a webinar or trade show
How do you clean your email lists?
There are two key steps to carrying out an email cleanup. Here’s what you need to do:
1. Remove any incorrect emails
The first step in carrying out email hygiene is to remove any inaccurate email addresses.
Some email marketing platforms track and mark inaccurate emails automatically and remove them from your email list. If your email provider doesn’t do this, you can do it manually using email validation software.
Here are the different emails to look out for.
Hard and soft bounces
A hard bounce is a permanent failure to deliver an email. This could be because an email address no longer exists, is spelt incorrectly, or is blocked by a strict security filter.
You should remove hard bounces from your email marketing list.
A soft bounce is a temporary failure to deliver an email. This could be because an email inbox is full, your email is too large, or the email server is temporarily offline.
As soft bounces are temporary, you don’t have to remove them from your email marketing list right away. However, if you continue to get soft bounces, you might want to consider getting rid of them.
Most email marketing platforms will convert a soft bounce into a hard bounce after multiple attempts to send an email.
Role accounts
A role account email is a generic email address used by a group of people or a department rather than a person.
These email addresses begin with terms like contact@, marketing@, office@, or info@.
Role account emails generally have lower engagement as these inboxes are often not monitored, or the messages received are not sent to the relevant people.
However, it’s essential to consider role accounts on a case-by-case basis, as some businesses use them for legitimate inquiries.
Spam traps
A spam trap is an email address intentionally set up to catch spammers.
If you send an email to a spam trap, this may lead to your email address, or even your entire email domain, being blocklisted.
This means your emails won’t be sent to your customers, and you’ll have to reach out to the blocklist provider to be taken off the list.
Most spam traps are published on websites, meaning you should never buy email contact lists or scrape sites for emails.
However, some spam traps are email addresses that used to be valid but have been repurposed. This means there’s a chance that a once active email address on your mailing list could now be a spam trap.
Email marketing platforms can help you identify suspicious spam trap addresses by looking for common patterns. However, in the case of recycled spam traps, removing inactive subscribers can help.
2. Identify customers that aren’t engaging
Even if an email address is legitimate, it’s not necessarily a good thing for your mailing list. Customers who don’t open or engage with your emails can mean your sender reputation takes a hit.
A significant part of email hygiene is purging non-responsive email addresses from your mailing list.
The first step is to define what you would consider a ‘non-responsive’ customer.
For example, if you send regular emails, you might consider someone who hasn’t engaged with your content for three months as ‘non-responsive.’ You might change your timescales to 12 months if you send emails less frequently.
The next step is to reach out to these unresponsive customers. You want them to start re-engaging with your content or encourage them to unsubscribe.
If you use an email marketing platform, you can send a series of automated messages to get them to respond – this is known as a ‘sunset flow’. Alternatively, you can send a manual message.
If customers continually ignore your requests to re-engage or subscribe, you can take them off your list or send messages to them less frequently.
Top tips for improving your email hygiene
We’ve looked at how to carry out a simple list clean, but what else can you do to ensure your email marketing list is as up-to-date as possible?
We asked our email marketing experts how to keep your mailing lists in tip-top condition.
1. Implement a double opt-in
With a double opt-in, users need to confirm their email subscription after signing up for an email list.
The benefit of implementing a double opt-in is that customers must verify their email address before signing up for your mailing list. This means you know the email address is valid, reducing the risk of a hard bounce.
Not only this, but customers are more likely to engage with your content as they’ve taken an additional step to show they want to receive your emails.
2. Make it as easy as possible to unsubscribe
When the aim of the game is to grow your marketing lists and increase engagement, making it as easy to unsubscribe as possible might seem counterintuitive.
However, offering an easy way to unsubscribe means people who are no longer interested in what you have to say can take themselves off your mailing list.
When there’s an easy unsubscribe option, it also reduces the risk of people reporting your messages as spam, which can hurt your sender reputation.
Making it as easy as possible to unsubscribe also ensures you stay compliant with data protection regulations. The ICO says ‘You must make it as easy for people to withdraw consent as it was to give it.’
Place a clear ‘unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of each email you send. This should ideally be one-click, meaning customers shouldn’t have to enter their email address or log into an account to unsubscribe.
Note: If you send more than 5,000 emails a day to Google and Yahoo email addresses, one-click unsubscribes are mandatory.
You can also offer alternative subscription options to encourage your less active email subscribers to engage. For example, by sending emails less frequently or offering to place subscribers on more targeted emailing lists.
3. Stop bots from signing up to your mailing lists
It’s estimated that 42% of web traffic comes from bots, automated software programmes that scrape content from web pages.
This means there’s a chance that some of your email subscribers could be bots too. This could lead to higher email bounce rates, which in turn might lower your sender reputation.
A double opt-in can reduce the risk of bots signing up for your mailing lists, but there are other things you can do too.
CAPTCHAs can help differentiate between bots and humans.
Alternatively, you can use a honeypot on your email capture form. This is a hidden form field that only bots can see. If they tick the form, it’s proof that they’re not human and they are blocked.
4. Create good content!
And finally, one of the best ways to keep your email list clean and tidy is to create engaging, compelling content.
High-quality emails mean subscribers are more likely to engage, meaning less inactivity and fewer email addresses you have to purge.
Think about your target audience, the pain points they have, and how your emails can help solve their problems. Good email personalisation can encourage readers to keep reading too.
Not sure what emails to send? Here are seven types of emails to send your customers.
Does your email marketing list scrub up nicely?
Like remembering to empty the bin under your desk or dusting your laptop screen, getting into the habit of good email hygiene has a multitude of benefits.
Plus, it’s not as tricky as you might think – most email marketing platforms do the hard work for you.
Let us leave you with one final thought. It’s far better to have a small but highly engaged email marketing list than a large one with no engagement at all.
Want to give your email marketing campaigns a spring clean? Our email marketing specialists will build high-quality emails and segment your audience so they receive targeted, personalised content.
Get in touch today to find out more.
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