Connecting With Your Customers: List Hygiene Techniques

Somewhere along the line we’ve all had the experience of being uncomfortably near someone who’s, shall we say… not so fresh. Whether that person is coming from a long day at a dirty, sweaty job or simply hasn’t bothered to invest in even the barest level of soap technology, the effect is the same. The last thing you want is for your email list to resemble these unfortunate souls. No, you want it showered and fresh and ready to face the day. 

So how do you keep your email list smelling like a rose? In practical terms, email list hygiene means making sure that every address on your list is active and deliverable. If they’re not, you’ll need to purge them in order to reduce your risk of spam traps and other digital maladies. 

Email hygiene also ensures that you’re only sending emails to those who truly want to receive them and aren’t annoying those who don’t. The last thing you want is for your email to start getting marked as spam. These days email service providers (ESPs) are extremely vigilant about spam senders, and if you’re not careful you could be quickly blacklisted. That’s why you’ll not only want to track who is getting your emails, but also what they do with those emails. Are customers responding? Are they buying your products or visiting your site to find out more about you. Or are they simply glancing over them and deleting them? 

There are various sorts of subscribers. The two most common are those who have recently opted in to your marketing list and those who have purchased something from you in the last 120 days. For those who have recently opted in, the worry is that the email address they provided could be false or illegitimate. Implementing a system where they have to opt in twice is a great way to avoid adding these types of addresses. For those who have purchased a product, chances are you already had an area where they could click to opt in to your email subscription. If they have, send a follow up email allowing them to confirm they want to opt in to receiving your emails before you start sending them.

There are even software packages from experts like Keap that let you keep track of how customers respond to your emails. Keap software will monitor things like clicks, which are actually more important than whether an email is opened, since if a user looks at the email in the preview panel of their email program it won’t count as ‘opened.’ 

Once you’re able to identify inactive users you can use some of the list re-engagement techniques we talked about earlier in our series. If these techniques fail, don’t be afraid to delete the addresses from your list. At this point they’re not doing you any good. In fact, they’re hurting you.

Keep your email list clean and healthy and be sure to monitor it. An average email list will decay about 25% each year. If it smells more like a dead fish than a live money maker, it’s time to take it to the showers.