Now we have been asked:“Why it’s important to clean your email list regularly.”

Being proactive in your email list cleaning is an essential part of any successful email marketing strategy because without it by the time you discover that you have an issue with email hygiene it’s generally too late.

How do you know when it’s time to clean your email list?

Well, you can usually see the first warning signs in your email marketing statistics. Just login into your Email Marketing Service Provider (aka Mail Chimp or AWeber) and see if you have any of these following problems:

• Reduced open rate
• Reduced click through rate
• More unsubscribes
• More spam complaints

All of this adds up to one big red flag. If people aren’t opening and clicking, they aren’t converting. That means you’re missing out on leads, sales and revenue.

Want more reasons why you need to clean your email list? Keep Reading…

My 8 Reasons Why You Should Clean Your Email List Regularly Starting from Today

1. Increase Email Deliverability

As your deliverability rate lowers, so does your reputation with internet service providers (ISPs).

A poor reputation will lower your deliverability even further. So avoid this spiral by cleaning your email list regularly to eliminate invalid data and keep your VIP stat looking polished and healthy.

2. Reduce your Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is a vital sign indicating the general health of your email list.

List cleaning keeps your bounce rate tiny by removing the invalid, discontinued, and fake emails that are responsible for most hard bounces and identifying risky ones that could lead to additional hard or soft bounces.

If your bounce rate goes above 3 to 5%, you will immediately see a negative impact on your deliverability and inboxing rates. At 8 to 10%, your delivery rates will start to drop dramatically.

Additionally, some systems employed by email service providers, like Omnivore by Mailchimp, will suspend your account if you just exceed the standard bounce rate for your industry.

3. Reject the Junk Folder > Find the Inbox

Email list cleaning is essential to a successful inboxing strategy. While email design best practices plays a vital role in inbox placement rates.

It doesn’t matter how relevant your subject line, if your company is known for sending to unresponsive, closed or inactive email accounts then there’s a higher chance that your emails will get flagged and redirected to the junk folder.

4. Protect All Your Reputations

Undelivered emails and spam traps can do a number on your sender reputation in a hurry. The internet is kind of like high school– once you get a bad reputation word spreads quickly. You will soon find yourself blocked from the inboxes you want to reach.

And you don’t have just one reputation to protect. Once upon a time, your email sender reputation was all about server (or IP) reputation. While server reputation is still very important, it’s equally important today to watch out for your domain reputation.

5. Avoid Honey Pots

Honey Pots (or Spam Traps) are valid email addresses created for sole the purpose of catching spammers at work. They are like kryptonite for your sender score and can even get you blacklisted by ISPs.

The best email verification services update their databases of known spam traps continually, to help you avoid being tripped up by one. No service can truthfully promise to remove all honey pots from your lists. But following email collection best practices and regular list cleaning will help to keep you off the ISP hit list.

6. Fewer Spam Complaints

Cleaning your email list reduces the number of spam complaints. Some subscribers mark your emails as spam because they don’t remember signing up, even if they actually did.

The problem is that email providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and others log spam complaints. If there are too many, they’ll start sending your emails straight to the spam folder, which means skipping the inbox.

And they’ll do that for everyone you send email to – not just the people that reported you. That is a huge problem for all Email Marketers.

Email Cleaning helps by cutting down on the number of subscribers who are annoyed enough to mark your emails as spam. Fewer spam complaints equals a better sender reputation. That means more of your emails will reach subscribers’ inboxes.

7. Lower your Sending Costs

Would you change Email Marketing Service Provider to save 22% on your annual bill?
If so, then why are you wasting money sending to an email list that hasn’t been cleaned?

Email data degrades at an estimated rate of around 22% per year as people change addresses, jobs or just disappear from the digital space. If you haven’t cleaned your list in a year then you are paying to send emails to accounts that are no longer active.

We definitely don’t recommend this! You could be using the money you save on your email service provider in your marketing e.g. Facebook Advertising.

8. Increased Data Accuracy Leads (Better Reporting) to Superior Strategies

When your email list is bloated with unengaged subscribers, it can be hard to tell how your email marketing strategy is working.

It feels great to hit benchmarks for email collection. For example, what if your company database just hit half a million contacts? That’s great!

However, if you’re hanging onto dead leads in your database just to pad your stats it is nothing but vanity.

Good strategy sometimes involves making tough decisions. Swallow your pride and cut your list down to its true size.

A smaller list that’s truly interested in and acting on your messages, will provide you with email marketing statistics that will be more accurate. That means you can safely use that data to guide your future marketing efforts.

Just to Recap:

Cleaning your email list will generate immediate positive results that bring you greater returns on the time, energy, creativity, and money that you invest in your mailing campaigns.

Execute an email list cleaning now or before your next email campaign to avoid much bigger issues down the road.

A service that will clean your email list accurately and super quickly – Sign Up Here!

If you currently use AWeber as your Email Marketing Service Provider then you can manually clean your list by following these instructions.

Talk Soon,
Nicky Cane