Most of us know that building our email list is very important, but many people focus too much on growing it and end up neglecting its maintenance.
Just like your home, your body, and your relationships, your email list requires maintenance to stay healthy and active. Regularly reviewing your list is key to ensuring that the right people are receiving your messages in their inboxes, rather than their spam folders .
Why list maintenance is important
A healthy, up-to-date email list is worth the time it takes to maintain.
In addition to weeding out unengaged contacts (and therefore improving bahrain telegram data conversion rate), the quality of your email marketing list is key to the deliverability of your campaigns. Having unsafe or typo-filled email addresses on your list is one of the most common ways to hurt your deliverability , and the lower your engagement, the more likely your messages are to end up in spam.
Strategies to keep your email list healthy
Now that you understand the importance of maintaining a healthy list, here are some of our favorite ways to do so:
1. Obtain explicit consent
Whether required by law or not, getting your subscribers’ permission to email them has always been an email marketing best practice. Keeping your list limited to people who have opted in to join it fosters brand loyalty and keeps unsubscribe rates low . Plus, engagement is likely to be higher since your subscribers know you’re going to email them and have already shown interest in your content.
The best way to ensure that your subscribers have given their consent to receive your emails is to collect their contact information via opt-in forms – better yet, why not use a double opt-in, where users are required to confirm their email address by clicking a link in the confirmation email?
2. Make it grow organically
When you’re building a list from scratch, it can be tempting to buy lists of email addresses to get started, but that’s a mistake. Sending emails to people who haven’t signed up to receive them is not only risky for legal reasons, but it can also hurt your brand and negatively impact your campaign results in ways that take much longer to fix than they would have taken to build organically.
On an individual level, potential customers are less likely to open your emails unless it's to unsubscribe, and when they realize you've been sending them messages without their consent, they're likely to associate your brand with unethical practices.
On a broader level, your engagement numbers will be very low, not to mention your conversion rate, and you may even get flagged as spam. Plus, if you were able to buy those leads, so was everyone else, meaning you'll just be one of a bunch of companies competing for user attention.
3. Do your spring cleaning (and summer, and fall…)
Starting with organic signups from people who are genuinely interested in your brand will save you a lot of time in the long run, but you will still need to do periodic cleanups.
It’s a good idea to schedule your maintenance and designate one or two people to take care of it, to make sure it doesn’t fall through the cracks. Once a quarter, twice a year, or whenever it suits your team, check your list for low-quality email addresses and remove any contacts who aren’t opening or engaging with your emails.
“To keep our list healthy and fresh, we don’t send an email to someone who doesn’t open our emails three times in a row. We try to re-engage them by sending them another personalized email with a surprising offer,” says Brad Smith of Wordable . Putting this tactic into practice keeps your list clean, affirms your real target audience, doesn’t negatively impact your open rates and CTR, and reduces the chances of your emails being caught by spam filters.
This regular maintenance also gives you the opportunity to identify any potential issues in your email marketing strategy. Look for things like email blacklists or spam traps that you may be unwittingly triggering, optimize your email segmentation , and make sure you're providing subscribers with a clear way to unsubscribe.