Email list hygiene and maintenance are critical for optimal email marketing performance. It involves regularly cleaning and managing your email list to ensure better deliverability and engagement rates.
What is List Hygiene?
List hygiene is a process where you remove inactive, bounced, and other non-engaging email addresses from your list.
- On average, 20-50% of email addresses decay in 1 year.
Engage with new subscribers and assess the effectiveness of communications.
- If subscribers show no further interest, they are wasting space on your email list.
Keeping subscribers on your email list who have no interest reduces your deliverability rates.
- It’s best to focus your energy on targeted engaged contacts. Since the Apple Mail Privacy Protection release, Cendyn recommends that you use "clicks" as a form of engagement, since "open" engagement can be skewed by machine opens.
Why is List Hygiene important?
It significantly enhances sender reputation and boosts engagement rates by increasing open and click-through rates while reducing unsubscribes and spam complaints. However, while crucial, list hygiene isn't a guaranteed solution for deliverability issues.
Moreover, it minimizes the risk of landing on email blocklists and avoids sending to Spam Traps.
Spam Traps
Cleaned lists can minimize sending to Spam Traps, which are used to identify spam-like email. Anti-spam organizations and Internet Service Providers (ISPs), use spam traps emails to identify people with poor list hygiene and/or senders sending to un-engaged subscribers.
Three types of Spam Traps:
- Pristine Spam Traps - Also sometimes called “honeypots,” these are addresses/domains that were created for the sole purpose of existing online anonymously and have never actively signed up to receive email. Pristine traps most commonly end up on mailing lists when senders purchase, rent, or scrape addresses.
- Recycled Spam Traps - These are addresses that used to be actual users that have since abandoned or closed the email accounts. ISPs and other filtering companies obtain control of these addresses to collect data on companies that continue to mail to unengaged users. Large amounts of recycled traps allude to opportunities for improvement in list hygiene.
- Typo Spam Traps - An email address with a misspelled domain name, used to catch senders who have poor list hygiene practices.
Tips for Maintaining Good List Hygiene
- Cleaning Frequency: Consider cleaning every six months but adjust based on program metrics. Review engagement metrics after each send and stick to a consistent schedule.
- Avoid Purchasing Lists: Third-party lists often lead to poor engagement and spam complaints.
- Remove Role Accounts: These non-individual accounts (@support, @info) are less likely to engage and can harm your sender reputation.
- Handle Bounced and Invalid Emails: Continuous mailing to invalid emails affects delivery rates; clean hard bounced emails promptly.
- Remove Unengaged Recipients: Regularly remove subscribers who show no interest to maintain engagement metrics.
- Confirm Email Subscriptions: Implement double opt-in methods to ensure genuine interest and remove bad email addresses immediately.
- Protect Website Email Collection Forms (Webforms): Add reCAPTCHA or Honey-Pot solutions to all webforms to minimize the impact of Web Bots.
- Avoid the use of Fake or Placeholder Emails in the PMS: Ensure that the Operations Teams are not using fake or placeholder emails (i.e. getemail@getemail.com or Fake@gmail.com). These emails can negatively impact your campaign KPIs.
In conclusion, observing best practices, especially email list hygiene, significantly improves email engagement, sender reputation, and deliverability rates, essential for reaching recipients' inboxes.
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