Email Spring Cleaning: Why and How to Clean Your Email List

List cleaning is also a super important part of managing your email marketing strategy, as it helps you to:

You have two options for cleaning your email list — you can clean it manually, or you can automate the process.

You damage your IP reputation if you have a faulty email list and send out campaigns to spam traps.

Other factors that contribute to a bad IP reputation include:

Lousy data impacts your deliverability rate.

If you have fake or faulty email addresses on your list, then your email campaign will hit a hard bounce.

But that’s only a part of the problem.

Deliverability problems result in:

Most email marketing platforms charge you based on how many contacts you send mails to.

While they won’t cost you a considerable sum, they might use all your available emails, and that’s when they add up to the cost.

Platforms like Mailchimp automatically remove hard bounces but won’t remove soft-bounce emails until they’ve bounced 7 times.

What makes this even worse is that you’re wasting marketing opportunities and decreasing conversion opportunities.

If email service providers (ESPs), like Gmail, believe that you’re sending spam, they’ll automatically send it to the junk folder.

But why would they think your emails are spam?

Well, when someone no longer wants to receive your content, they can report it as spam.

If you receive continuous spam complaints, your emails will be blocked, which prevents people who want to read your emails from receiving them.

List cleaning will help you create a list of targeted and engaged contacts to provide valuable content to.

By doing so, you can focus all your energy on leads who show interest in your product or service and target your content to meet their needs.

What’s most important is that you’ll experience higher conversion rates, resulting in higher revenue and more business growth.

You can also reduce your bounce rates, which will improve your sender reputation because it shows ESPs that you’re a responsible email marketer.

As mentioned before, a good reputation will increase your deliverability rate significantly!

Now that you know what you can achieve when you clean your list, let’s get into removing the old dust bunnies!

To understand why your list is dirty, you first have to ask why it happened?

Some reasons why your email list can get dirty include:

Human error is the top reason why inaccurate data ends up in your email list.

These errors can include typos, information entered into the wrong field, missing fields, and inconsistent formatting.

Data decay is a natural process whereby you gradually lose data due to contacts changing their information and the data becoming outdated.

Decay occurs for several reasons, including people who change their email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, and jobs.

There are a few ways you can end up with duplicate subscriber contacts.

Duplicates usually occur when the subscriber opts in for your list more than once to re-download a lead magnet, for example.

You may also find that you’ve manually added the same contact twice.

If your engagement rates increase, it’s time to filter out those who aren’t interacting with your emails.

A low engagement rate doesn’t mean that your subscribers aren’t interested. Maybe they just don’t like the type of content you provide.

So, before you remove them from your list entirely, ask yourself if you could provide them with more appealing content.

Unengaged subscribers may just need a push in the right direction, and you can do that by offering:

Contact segmentation is an integral part of cleaning your email list. It allows you to:

Segmentation allows you to personalize your email campaigns based on your buyer personas and where they fall in your sales funnel.

It can also help you to send specific emails to the subscribers who set communication preferences.

Segment your subscribers based on demographic information, like location or the stage they’re at in your sales funnel.

Most countries require you to provide a way for people to opt out of your email communication.

Take the US CAN-SPAM law that states that:

As mentioned before, there are a few reasons why you may end up with duplicate users on your list.

When you send double or even triple messages, you can end up reducing your return on investment (ROI).

So, not only will it cost you more, but your contacts who are interested may flag your emails as spam if they keep receiving multiple of the same email.

While you can manually remove duplicate contacts, most ESPs have automation rules to make this process easy.

Take systeme.io, for example. Our software has multiple ways of identifying duplicate, inactive, and unsubscribed contacts.

Simply go to your contact list and filter your contacts with the 15 filter options — some of which go into even more detailed segmentation filters.

Then you can easily find any duplicates and remove them.

Using such specific filtering will make it easy to identify any duplicate contacts and correct errors from there.

Remember, marketing automation workflows are your best friend for having clean email lists, as you can filter and remove information you don’t want any longer.

You’ve implemented all the tips, and your list is spotless, but how can you keep it that way?

Well, it’s pretty easy.

You can set up a service to notify you every time you get bounced from email inboxes.

That service can then help you to define rules every time something like this happens.

For example: If an email bounces from a sent inbox, the email address would be removed from your list.

(These are known as webhooks, and they’ll help keep your email list clean without you having to pay much attention to it.)

Other measures you can take to ensure your list remains clean include:

Regularly employing these strategies will ensure that your email list remains clean for as long as you intend to use it as a marketing strategy.

What’s better is that because it’s an all-inclusive platform, you get access to the whole digital marketing toolkit.

With systeme.io you can also:

Email marketing can be an extremely lucrative business, if you play your cards right.

A vital part of maintaining a good email campaign is regularly ensuring that your email list is clean and up to date.

To summarize how you can do that in 6 simple steps:

And what better platform to use to automate your email and marketing sequences than systeme.io?

Sign up for a free no-strings-attached membership today, and watch your engagement skyrocket!

- How to Build an Email List From Scratch

- Single vs. Double Opt-In: Which is the Best for Your Business?

- Email Marketing Guide: How to Do it With Easy Examples