Email List Maintenance - How to Keep Your Database Clean and Engaged

A squeaky clean email list is the foundation of your email marketing success. It boosts open and click rates, increases deliverability, and prevents spam complaints.

It is important to regularly scrub your database to identify inactive subscribers and remove invalid email addresses. This prevents your emails from being delivered to the wrong recipients, resulting in poor engagement metrics and a skewed data report.

Your average mailing list depreciates by 22% a year due to email address changes, unsubscribes, and people abandoning old email accounts.

To keep your list as high- performing as possible, it is recommended to scrub your email list at least once every three to six months. This ensures your messages are sent to engaged contacts and improves the likelihood that they will convert into customers.

The best way to clean your email list is through a re-opt-in campaign. By sending a simple email asking your subscribers to confirm their subscription, you can remove those who don’t respond or opt out from your list automatically. This method not only removes disengaged subscribers but also confirms your existing subscriber base is still interested in receiving communications from your brand.

Aside from re-opt-in campaigns, another important element to a clean email list is regular monitoring of your metrics to identify issues. Performing regular checks of your open and click rate, bounce rate, spam complaints, and unsubscribe rates allows you to identify disengaged subscribers early on and initiate re-engagement efforts before they fall off completely.

Inactive email subscribers are a huge threat to your sender reputation and can cause your emails to be filtered as spam. If a subscriber no longer opens or clicks on your content, they are likely to start reporting your emails as spam which will hurt your deliverability and overall campaign performance.

To identify inactive subscribers, it is a good idea to create a data segment that looks for inactive recipients who haven’t opened or clicked on your emails in a certain time frame. Depending on your business, this could be three months, six months, or even a year.

It’s also a good idea to set up automated email campaigns that remove subscribers who haven’t opened or clicked on their emails in a specific period of time. By implementing these types of automations, you can remove subscribers who are no longer engaging with your content and prevent them from affecting your open and click rates.

A clean and active email list is vital to your brand’s success. Aside from improving your open and click rates, a clean email list will improve your deliverability and ensure your emails are being sent to the right recipients.

Performing routine clean ups, monitoring metrics, managing bounce and spam rates, and segmenting your email lists will allow you to maintain your open and click rates while keeping your subscribers happy and engaged.

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