Quality is far more important than quantity in the world of email marketing. Although having many contacts in your email list is a good thing, inactive subscribers and invalid email addresses can lead to low engagement and hard bounces that will negatively affect your email campaigns.
Continuing to send messages to a dirty email list will eventually lead to your emails being sent directly to the spam folder. Your email deliverability will also suffer, and your campaign will not see the results you want.
How Did My Email List Get So Dirty?
Understanding how your email list became dirty in the first place is important as it will dictate how you clean your email database.
How is faulty email data getting in your list, and why does it happen? Here are the most common reasons that lead to a dirty mailing list:
Human Error
Human error is one of the primary culprits that leads to wrong contact information being added to your email lists. People make mistakes, and this is simply something that cannot be avoided all the time.
It could have happened when your marketing team was compiling data manually or when you relied on your site visitors to input their information on a landing page. These mistakes can easily lead to typographical errors and incorrect information.
Specific protocols in place can help minimize faulty data that you can get on your mailing list due to human error.
Data Decay
The second most common reason for a dirty email database is data decay. Despite building your mailing list from scratch and ensuring that it’s clean, it can still succumb to decay, especially when you don’t maintain your list.
Data decay is when your clean email database starts to lose the quality and accuracy of its information because of changing details. Contacts will eventually move on to new online accounts, phone numbers, job titles, and postal addresses, and they won’t let you know about it most of the time.
Leaving your list unattended will eventually result in it becoming outdated or dirty. That’s why experts recommend cleaning and updating these lists frequently. Implementing email authentication is also a good practice since it helps check if a contact’s address is still valid.
Duplicate Information
Duplicate contact information is possible in an email list for a few reasons. One is that the interested subscriber may have entered their data more than once by accident.
It’s also possible for your marketing colleagues to have done this by mistake. Again, human error is a common reason for a dirty email list.
What Are the Consequences of Using a Dirty Email Database?
Seeing that email data will decay over time, it’s only reasonable to try and keep track of these changes to stay updated on contact information. But what happens if you continue using a dirty email list?
The consequences are as follows:
You Will Eventually Be Blacklisted
The worst consequence that you will get when you choose to continue sending to an email list with bad data is being blacklisted. There are blacklist providers that stop spam from reaching people’s inboxes. When a specific IP address or domain continues to breach the rules regarding spam, whether knowingly or unknowingly, these entities will eventually add them to a blacklist to prevent them from sending emails.
Email marketers who aren’t careful in ensuring their contact databases are updated will find themselves on the receiving end of such punishment. They can also cause their domain to be blacklisted, resulting in their campaigns being useless since they can’t send messages anymore.
You Will Experience a Higher Churn Rate
The second worst consequence of continuing to use a dirty email list is that your email marketing campaign will experience a higher churn rate. Marketers face two types of churn when using emails, and both relate to using bad contact data.
The first kind of churn concerns hard bounces, spam complaints, and unsubscribes from contacts. These can happen, especially when you constantly send emails that are not relevant to your recipients.
The next type of churn is not as obvious as the first but is equally harmful to email deliverability. Such users churn because they don’t receive your messages in the first place as they may be sent straight to the spam folder or are no longer using the same address.
You Can’t Create Personalized Emails
When you can’t get your hands on precise information regarding your subscribers, you naturally won’t be able to create personalized messages for them. This also means you can’t segment your contacts since you obviously don’t know much about them.
Not being able to create tailor-made content means that your subscribers will not be as engaged to your campaign as much as you’d like. They can even be annoyed by your irrelevant messages to the point that they will mark your emails as spam.
You Can’t Get Insights on Your Sales Funnel
Besides not being able to personalize your email content, bad email database information also leads to minimal or no insights concerning your sales funnel. You won’t be able to tell the health and performance of your funnels with poor contact data.
You can’t tell things such as:
- The number of qualified leads in your list
- How many of your contacts have gone stale
- The type of users make up the majority of your list
- The leads you need to disqualify
You’ll be able to answer the questions above with accurate information once you put some effort into making sure you have a clean email database.
When Should I Clean My Lists?
Now that you know that keeping your mailing lists clean is essential if you want to succeed as an email marketer, how can you tell when is the right time for email list cleaning?
Sometimes, you can identify a disorderly mailing list simply by looking at the details. However, one of the best places that will help you confirm that you do need to have it cleaned is by checking your email marketing metrics.
Check out the analytics reports from your past email marketing campaigns and try to see if there are any noticeable patterns. Some of the metrics you need to look out for include:
- Email open rate
- Click-through rate
- Unsubscribe rate
- Spam complaint rate
Once you get hold of the numbers on these statistics, you want to check them against the standard email marketing benchmarks for your industry. If your metrics can’t compare to what others in your niche are doing, then you definitely need to get your list cleaned.
Clean Your List When You Have High Spam Complaint and Bounce Rates
The most common actions that email recipients do with unwanted messages is to send them to the trash folder or mark them as spam. Having your messages flagged as spam has more serious consequences for any brand doing email marketing.
Whenever subscribers file a spam complaint against you, they’re letting email service providers know that a sender is providing unsolicited or unwanted email content to them. These providers are particularly strict when it comes to spam complaints since they want their customers to have the best email experience possible.
If you reach a specific threshold for your spam complaints, your emails have a good chance of being directed to the spam folder straightaway. This means that recipients won’t even get to see your message most of the time.
Email bounces are another thing to keep an eye on as well. Whenever messages return undelivered, your email deliverability metrics will go down and negatively affect your sender reputation.
Having an Organized List is Crucial for Your Email Deliverability
A clean email list is beneficial to any business that wants to invest in email marketing because it means that people want to hear from the brand regularly. However, people change, and when they do, the information that’s relevant to them changes as well.
Previously satisfied customers will start losing interest in your brand and stop engaging with your content. They may also sign up to a new email address without letting you know about it. Once your emails begin to bounce or are reported as spam, then your email deliverability will be in trouble.
That’s why you need to have an organized email list if you want to maintain positive deliverability and sender reputation.
The following are some excellent reasons why you should start implementing email list cleaning for an organized database:
You Can Focus Your Marketing Efforts
One of the biggest advantages that you can get with email list cleaning is that you can focus on your email marketing efforts. After removing all of the unengaged and invalid contacts in your list, you will start seeing positive growth with your email campaigns.
Cleaning your list also means that you get a more accurate view of your target audience. You’ll learn what types of content are most effective with them and what your subscribers tend to engage with more often.
When you get to separate inactive accounts from your active contact list, you can send the appropriate forms of messaging to each group. For example, you can send a re-engagement email campaign to those contacts who have not opened one of your messages within two months.
You Can Improve Your Email Delivery Scores
One of the best ways you can prevent delivery problems is by being proactive with your email marketing. Avoiding these issues is a must, and you can only do this by keeping your email list clean.
That’s why you should start implementing constant list cleaning practices. You can even follow an email authentication guide to help ensure your lists are valid.
As you send emails to your recipients, the number of bounces, spam complaints, and engagement from subscribers ultimately determines your sender reputation. When you can verify your contacts regularly, you get to send messages to engaged users and maintain your sending reputation.
You Get to Save Money
Another reason why you should invest in email list cleaning is that it actually helps you save on costs in the long run. Most email service providers charge their customers based on the size of their mailing list. When you’re sending messages to invalid and inactive addresses, then you’re wasting money.
Besides identifying and removing bad email data to save on cost, you also help save money when you can adjust your campaign expectations. Email marketing campaigns are measured based on several metrics, such as the click-through, open, and engagement rate of emails.
When you continue sending emails to contacts that will never see them, these statistics become inaccurate. If you plan your budget around these statistics, it will end up being inaccurate as well. With more accurate statistics, you can only divert the funds you need for your email marketing efforts and leave the rest for your other core competencies.
You Help Protect User Data
User privacy is important these days, especially since even a single email can be the key to unlocking their whole profile. Although you want to make sure customers find your services convenient, you also shouldn’t compromise in terms of their layer of security as well.
That’s why you need to learn how to balance convenience and data protection. One way you can do this is by being updated on their latest details.
Think about it: who will receive your brand messages when a customer with a compromised email address buys from you? What about the emails you send that contain their personal information?
When you keep your email lists clean, you help your organization get rid of redundant data that the business doesn’t need. You also help in protecting customers while ensuring you maintain constant communication with them.
You Maintain Good Relations With Your Email Service Provider
As stated earlier, being added to a blacklist is one of the worst punishments any email marketer can receive. That’s why your goal should be to stay away from these lists as much as possible as they can fully block your email communications from reaching recipients.
Popular mailbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL are platforms that help you send out messages to your contacts. The goal of these email service providers is to ensure their users get the best email experience possible and one way they can do this is to implement protocols that identify bad senders.
When you can maintain decent deliverability and an ideal reputation as a sender, providers will see these metrics as signs that you can be trusted. These entities won’t see you as a potential threat to their users and will even ensure that your messages reach their intended recipients when you send them.
How to Keep Your Database Clean and Organized
If you already find yourself in the dilemma of having a disorganized email database, is there still a chance to get it back on track? Although it won’t be easy, there is still a way for you to have a clean email database once again.
You need to take a two-step verification approach that pinpoints any inactive and invalid addresses so you can remove them from your mailing list. The following is the two-step email authentication process you need to do:
Step #1: Verify the Contacts in Your Current Database
Having an email authenticator is like hiring a professional organizer. It analyzes each email record that was made on your campaign and categorizes addresses based on whether they are valid or invalid.
With proper email verification, you can have a clean email database that you can use to increase your inbox delivery rate. This means that your contacts will have a higher probability of seeing your messages, clicking on them, and then converting as paid consumers. When all these stages are successful, you get to benefit from higher revenue and more engaged subscribers.
Once you have verified the contacts in your mailing list, you can use a service such as MailMonitor to perform more in-depth analysis and testing before you send out your emails.
Step #2: Remove Duplicates and Spam Email Addresses
The next step is to verify email addresses at the stage where they get captured to identify bad email data and scrub them from your database. Since new email addresses are added all the time to an active list, it only makes sense for problems to arise, especially when there are many channels involved.
With tools that are capable of performing real-time authentication, you can filter and eliminate faulty addresses as soon as they are collected. When you don’t leverage such a feature, these bad addresses will create more issues down the line.
Email List Cleaning Tactics to Do
Besides the two-step process above, there are also other best practices in email marketing that you can follow to ensure you have a clean email database.
These include:
Extra Step: Segment Your Lists
Segmentation in email marketing is an approach where contacts in your list are separated based on specific parameters. These parameters could be on user behavior, demographics, age, engagement rate, and more.
When you segment your contacts, you get to perform an important part in email list cleaning. This is because segmenting lets you format your email campaigns to be more personalized according to the unique attributes of your subscribers. You can also segregate and focus on certain groups based on where they are in the sales funnel.
You can also separate contacts in your list according to their communication preferences. For instance, you can set Email List 1 to receive content from you on a weekly basis, while Email List 2 is for those that only want to get monthly updates.
Extra Step: Remove Unsubscribed Users From Your Mailing List
An essential practice in email marketing is to remove anyone who is no longer interested in hearing more from you. If a person notifies you that they don’t want to receive any more emails, then you should honor their request as soon as possible.
Failing to comply will have serious consequences since email service providers and anti-spam agencies will start taking notice. This is especially true since annoyed recipients will flag your emails as spam from now on.
When you remove unsubscribed users from your list, you get to avoid spam complaints while also helping ensure your email deliverability metrics are accurate.
Conclusion
Keeping an email database scrubbed from bad data is important for email marketers today. This is because inactive and mistyped addresses will only harm your deliverability.
When this happens, your overall sender reputation suffers, making it difficult for you to send emails to your recipients moving forward. Furthermore, your efforts will have gone to waste, particularly when your emails go straight to junk or spam folders or your IP address has been blacklisted.
The solution for this dilemma is to achieve and maintain a clean email database. Incorporating two-factor authentication along with the extra tips provided should be a great starting point in making sure your email lists are clean.
With clean mailing lists, you can be confident knowing that your email marketing efforts will be more effective once you start working on your campaigns.
