Why Cleaning Your Email Lists Are Important Before Running an Email Campaign
Your company may be doing an excellent job of crafting email campaigns to send to your extensive contact lists, to tell them about new products and services, your company, and special events or upcoming promotions. But larger lists are not always better. Have you taken the time to ensure your email lists are clean?
Cleaning (or “scrubbing”) is the process in which email lists are filtered to ensure they deliver a quality result. The process involves the removal of any emails that may cause issues, such as bouncing, and removing them from the campaign list prior to uploading to your email platform. It ensures you are sending to valid emails that have opted in to be contacted by your company and who are likely to open and be receptive to your message.
The benefits are abundant:
- Open rates and click through rates improve, gaining more traction for your company.
- Deliverability improves. Fewer emails bounce, and complaints about spam are reduced.
- More money in your pocket – typical automated email platforms charge per tier with X amount of emails allowed in your contact list.
So, when should you clean your lists?
If you haven’t done so in a while, the best time would be when you intend to start a new email campaign. Sort through your contact lists and take out any emails that look funky. Check to make sure there are no hidden characters, and double check that the contacts on the lists you plan on using against a previous unsubscribed list so no one gets upset. Consider archiving anyone who hasn’t opened an email from your company in a long time, or reaching out to a list of these people to see if any of them would like to stay opted in. Once the campaign gets going, watch your open rates, click rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribes rates and start to archive email addresses that are not interacting. And as always, always make adjustments to your email campaigns.