Email List Hygiene Tip #1
There comes a time when every email subscriber list needs a little cleaning.
Why?
Well, a well maintained list will help your:
And a well maintained list can keep your from being blacklisted.
To maintain a healthy email list, you will want to verify any soft bounces and consider running a special campaign to re-engage those inactive subscribers. (And if those inactive subscribers don’t re-engage, you will want to remove them from your list.)
So, what’s involved?
Email List Hygiene Tip #2: Timing Is Everything.
According to the experts at AWeber, your email subscriber list should be cleaned every six-months.
And as they mention in this article, a good first step is to run a re-engagement campaign targeting your inactive subscribers.
Email List Hygiene Tip #3: Keys To Effective Re-Engagement Campaigns.
The goal of a re-engagement campaign, also referred as a win-back campaign, is to motivate a response. I highly recommend testing to see what works best – but your options include a poll or survey that’s quick and easy, a contest or give-away, and even coupons.
The reason this effort is valuable to your business is that these people subscribed for a reason, and you want to try to understand why they haven’t been opening or clicking so you can address the issue and increase their level of engagement.
That said, if they ignore this campaign, it’s time to remove them from your list so you can avoid those problems mentioned earlier in this article.
Oh, one more thing – your re-engagement campaign can be a single email, or it can be several emails sent over time. For example, a series of three or four emails sent over a two-week period.
Email List Hygiene Tip #4: Remove Role Email Addresses
Hopefully you have some type of automated process to identify email addresses that represent a group so that they are removed from your list. For example, “support@” or “help@” email addresses.
Since these aren’t going to a person, you will probably notice these email addresses have extremely low open and click rates. Bottom line – these types of email addresses aren’t going to be effective and they are going to drag down your campaign metrics.
Email List Hygiene Tip #5: Hard and Soft Bounces.
People leave their jobs, and one of the ways you find out about this is when you see their email addresses show up on your Bounce Report. When this happens, you should have a process in place for the assignment sales person to reach out by phone and find out what’s going on – is there a new person responsible for the job duties? Is the position currently open while a search for a replacement takes place?
With that information, you can update your CRM and take appropriate steps with your email list.
A Few Closing Thoughts.
When it comes to your less engaged subscribers, another thing to test is offering frequency options. For example, if you are emailing your list once a week, you might want to offer bi-monthly or monthly email frequency. I have recommended this to clients and the results have been extremely positive – and the folks at Coschedule have linked to 20- reports on email frequency strategies that you should check out.
