The effectiveness of your email marketing campaign and the rate at which messages are delivered depends on your attention to email hygiene. Your messages will end up in the spam folder if you don’t practice good email hygiene & validation. Everything you need to know is laid out on this page. So, let’s go right in.
Whether you are avoiding scraped data or paid mailing lists makes no difference. Your email system will crash and burn if you don’t implement regular email hygiene procedures. Attrition from email lists is a reality, even for the most skilled marketers. Up to 35% of the typical list is predicted to be replaced annually.
These uninterested clients and static addresses can slow down your email deliverability and serve as a brake on every campaign if you don’t maintain appropriate email list maintenance. As engagement decreases, deliverability will also slow down. Inbox delivery rates may slow to a crawl instead of a sprint, and your email marketing campaign may finally halt.
You may attribute this failure to your strategy for retaining customers, but poor email hygiene procedures might be to fault. However, there are those clients who can never be won back. You may severely harm your email marketing campaign if you continue to contact these clients and use their email addresses.
In addition, your email lists may be weighed down by invalid addresses, old addresses, or misspellings. Your sender’s reputation will take a severe hit if you don’t clean up your email list. This hit is why maintaining good email hygiene is as vital as keeping existing customers. To avoid being sent to the spam category, keep the message’s weight down.
What exactly is good email hygiene?
Email marketers should adhere to a set of standards known as “email hygiene” or “Email list hygiene.” Maintaining a clean and active email list is essential to the success of any email marketing campaign.
When it comes to email marketing, deliverability is crucial. Everything else is moot if it cannot be delivered. Ignoring invalid email addresses can cause significant problems with your email marketing campaign’s deliverability. Fortunately, you can resolve this issue by maintaining clean email lists.
Is your email list dirty, and do you need to clean it?
Get your email list in order. These indicators are observable in the analytics you use to track your emails, such as:
- Open rates are a significant statistic that might flag a potential problem with your sender’s reputation. A deliverability problem is likely to present if your open rates are falling steadily across all ISPs or even with individual ones.
- Bounce rates; if you see an increase in “hard bounces,” your deliverability is likely to decrease. A problem with the sender’s reputation is likely to cause a sudden increase in spam complaints or a drop in open rates.
- Like bounce rates, spam/complaint rates may foretell a reduction in delivery.
Even if your metrics are vital, it is still important to conduct good email hygiene for the following reasons:
- Your sender score and rate of delivery will both benefit from this. Both will gradually decrease as inactive subscribers age off your email list if you don’t maintain it.
- Your sender score and the likelihood of your emails being read will increase significantly. The relief you’ll feel after removing specific addresses from your mailing list will astound you. While you may believe your deliverability is satisfactory now, it may be much better with a freshly scrubbed mailing list.
What is the recommended frequency for email list maintenance?
The regularity with which you should clean your email list is not set in stone. Confident marketers recommend every three months, but some sources put the number at 6. There are weekly list cleanings among heavy email senders. We suggest a more “ongoing” approach when it comes to maintaining clean inboxes. This clean must occur incessantly, in the background, not just once per ‘X’ time.
The majority of best practices for maintaining clean inboxes through email may be implemented quickly, without much effort, and at little cost. There’s no time to lose since they’re low maintenance and high reward.
