Why Does Cleaning Your Email Lists Improve your Sales

Let’s dive deep into the value of email list cleaning. You may wonder how a small detail of your email marketing strategy can make such a difference, but in reality, it does. Email marketing is only effective when your correspondence is actually reaching your audience.

Have you noticed your deliverability lately? Or perhaps you’re seeing more bounces than normal, or even getting flagged as spam (oh no!). Then you need to take a look at your email list. You could be sitting on a huge out-of-date email list, used as people’s secondary email accounts, false addresses, or spam traps. You can end up with a mess of invalid, fake, and dangerous email addresses.

I’m sure this sounds increasingly overwhelming as you don’t have the time to go through every email and check if they are spelled correctly, valid, or spam affiliate. But, don’t stress, we have a solution for you. Email list cleaning software. With a validation tool, they do the work for you, remove any burden of looking at thousands of emails, and help you earn more money. Now is the time to be proactive, address your spam responses, improve your sender reputation score, and stop wasting money.

It is never too late to clean your email lists.

What is Email List Cleaning?

Email list cleaning is the process of going through your database of all the emails you have and removing any fake, duplicate, or invalid email addresses. It is also good practice to remove any unengaged and inactive subscribers.

Bonus tip: Remember, you always need to have the unsubscribe option in every email.

By removing any risky, or undeliverable emails you’re able to focus on customers that actually want to hear from you. Did you know that recurring customers spend over 67% more than new customers? By nurturing your current customers you’re able to see an increase in sales because they know your product, and have bought from you before, and now that you know they are active email subscribers you have a better chance of a repeat purchase.

By having a clean email list you’re able to maintain the best email practices there are in the email marketing game. You will start to work with standardized, coherent, and useable data. You will be able to get a better sense of your metrics, and how your emails are landing when you have a solid database.

What Happens With Dirty Data?

Your email list is one of your most important assets, maintaining a clean email list is not only beneficial for you but also helps you maintain a strong relationship between yourself and your subscribers, and your ESPs.

Your dirty data can jeopardize your campaign because it affects your sender’s reputation score. Your sender reputation score is the score that internet service providers assign to a business that sends email correspondence. It’s a huge part of your deliverability, the higher the score the more likely your emails will be delivered to their desired recipients.

Because ISPs are constantly getting more sophisticated when keeping out unwanted emails for their customers, you need to have a good sender reputation score. This means reducing the amount of “spammy” messages or having too many emails sent at once, getting flagged as spam too many times, and the list goes on for what causes a low sender reputation score.

Your Sender Reputation Score Suffers:

• How your open rate is with your current list
• The number of emails that aren’t delivered because of a syntax error or misspelling of an address
• The number of emails sent to the spam folder or labeled as spam by the recipient
• If you’re unknowingly sending emails to spam traps

Losing Money

When you use an email verification tool to help clean your lists, you’re able to start focusing on the subscribers that actually want to hear from you. When you’re sending unwanted emails to people that may not open them or even receive them, you’re costing yourself money. Reduce any lost costs by sending your email marketing campaigns to those who want to receive them.

Unclear Metrics

When you have a dirty or unclean list, you’re hindering yourself from understanding realistic data. Dirty data makes the water murky when trying to understand how your email marketing campaigns are actually landing. You won’t have a clear idea of your subscriber’s engagement which inhibits you from personalizing your email marketing campaigns.

Personalizing email marketing campaigns is incredibly important and effective when it comes to your strategy. When you personalize messages it helps increase your sender’s reputation because you’re getting more open rates, as well as improves your inbox placement.

When it comes to your metrics, you need to have a clear understanding of how your email campaigns are being received. You should take note of your bounce rates, open rates, click-through rates, unsubscribe rates, and so on. When you have a foundation of your metrics you can see what changes or tweaks need to be done in order to improve your next campaign. You need to know the metrics in order to improve them.

Why Do Email Lists Decay?

Email list decay is, unfortunately, inevitable. Email lists decay on their own by 22.5% annually. Yikes! But it’s not your fault. Email decay happens when people stop using old email addresses, replace them with newer ones, if they change companies, and no longer use this address, or if unqualified leads opt out of emails. Regardless of how many people opt-in or opt-out, you need to focus on gaining legitimate and engaged subscribers.

Research has shown that only 1 in 5 emails actually make it into the desired inbox. You know that you are working hard on your email marketing campaigns, and a statistic like that is less than satisfactory. That’s why we have stressed the importance of email list hygiene.

Industry experts suggest that you clean your email lists every 3-4 months in order to maintain a healthy list and help ensure that you stay out of spam traps and off of any blacklists. When you are actually sending to people that are interested and engaging with your content, this helps increase your sales overall.

Increase Your Sales

A clean list is a strong list. The bottom line is that you are only as strong as your emails that make it into the inbox. This means that you should be two steps ahead of your email marketing campaign by maintaining a healthy list. You want to increase your sales, so you want people to actually read your promotions, newsletters, and any updates from your business.

Take a look at your email marketing campaign with a birds-eye view. You should be able to see your email list as a source of strength and confidence. You know that you will be sending to engaged and interested subscribers. You know that your email list is clean and will avoid any spam traps or blacklists. With a clean list, you can now get a firm understanding of your metrics and how well your campaigns are performing. With all these factors in mind, you’re able to personalize your messages and try out A/B testing to see what your recipients are responding to and how to engage them more effectively. A strategy that consists of a clean list helps increase your sales and overall marketing ROI.

Maintain A Clean List

Quarterly Clean Ups

Go through your lists every 3 to four months to make sure you’re cleaning on a regular basis. After this is put into practice you’re able to minimize the number of mistakes that could have been accumulating for years, it will cut down on your organization’s time. This helps ensure that your database is constantly updated and in tip-top shape.

Try Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a great way to assess the health of your email lists. It will evaluate the quality of your contacts and what phase they are in their buyer’s journey. This could be done with a point system that is based on responses or initial actions taken. By using your metrics of open rates and click-through rates you can get a better idea of lead scoring for your contacts.

There are unqualified leads who have very low scores and are not very interested to be a potential customer at the moment. These leads you can remove from the database or move them to a less frequent cycle of email marketing.

Your marketing-qualified leads are those that are ready to join the email marketing communications, they are opt-in leads and want to be updated on what’s going on with your business.

Lastly, your sales qualified leads. They are those that are top-rate contacts who are ready to convert to buyers. With these leads, you will want to send them personalized emails and offers to help them move to that next step.

Opt-Out Option

Always allow your users to opt out of email communications if they want to. This means having a clear and easy “unsubscribe” button at the bottom of every email you send. This helps you maintain a clean and healthy list but also keeps you within the CAN-SPAM Act regulations. A great rule of thumb is to engage with subscribers who actually want to hear from you.

At one point or another, some subscribers will be tired of your communication, and with no way of your email list, they’ll send you to the spam folder. This puts you and your business at risk of being flagged as spam and one step closer to ending up on a blacklist.

Additionally, keep in mind the amount of email communication you’re sending. Are you oversharing? You don’t want to overwhelm your user’s inbox and become annoying and unwanted. You could even give your subscribers the option to take a break from email communication with you and reduce the frequency of what they receive. This not only helps you maintain a clean list but also helps improve your personalization for your subscribers. You can then focus on what really sparks their interest and what they want to hear about.

A Clean List Means More Money

We’ve talked about what happens with a dirty list and why it’s so important to have and maintain a clean email list. When you have a solid sender reputation score, you increase your chances of deliverability, the more times you end in the inbox the more likely you are to see an increase of engagement and sales.

Email list cleaning is very simple and email verification tools such as Emailable do the work for you. Your list will then be run through their tool which shows a simple and easy-to-understand review of your email list. How many emails are deliverable? How many are risky? Then you can export the deliverable emails and be able to send them with confidence.

Dirty data can impact you in multiple ways. With dirty data you put your sender reputation score at risk, you start spending unnecessary money by sending to people that don’t care to read your content or see your offers, and you then start to work with unclear metrics. With unclear metrics, you will not be able to understand how your email marketing campaign actually functions.

Your email lists decay, by no fault of your own. It’s part of every email marketer’s nightmares but by doing routine checks on your email list you can stay ahead of your competitors and land in your subscriber’s inboxes. Then you can lead score, and decide who receives what email and when. With your timing, you’re able to communicate more effectively. And always remember to have the opt-out option for your subscribers. They will be more than happy to remove themselves which decreases your likelihood of being marked as spam.

A clean list is a happy list and a happy business is one that makes money.