Email list cleaning tips to save money & boost engagement

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Having a huge email database may sound exciting in the beginning, but when it comes to collecting email addresses, quality matters over quantity. To get the expected results from email marketing campaigns, email list cleaning should be at the top of your mind to ensure you keep only the email addresses that matter.

It is an essential aspect of a successful email marketing strategy. It ensures you have a list with legitimate email addresses that can be turned into potential customers.

However, you need the right tools and practices for effective email list scrubbing. If not done correctly, it may affect your ROI and email marketing results.

This article discusses email list cleaning, why it is important, and some best practices for getting a clean email list to improve your campaign effectiveness.

What is email list cleaning?

Email list cleaning or “scrubbing” is the process of regularly updating your email lists by removing fake, duplicate, or invalid email addresses and unengaged or inactive subscribers and honoring unsubscribe requests.

Email list cleaning is part of email list management best practices and helps ensure you’re working with standardized, coherent, usable, and trustworthy data.

Why should you clean your email list? 

Your email list can become cluttered over time and filled with inactive or invalid email addresses that don’t add to your profits. This may lead to vague campaign analysis or hurt your budget. 

This is why email list cleaning is important. You want to make sure your emails are reaching the customers who are most likely to take action and have a positive effect on your profits. 

Here are other ways email list cleaning can be beneficial:

Boosts deliverability

Having a clean email list ensures your emails reach the right inboxes. It reduces invalid email addresses or typos. Cleaning your email list also helps remove spam traps and builds a good sender reputation.

Having a dedicated delivery report — like the one offered by Omnisend — allows you to keep track of delivered emails:

Increases engagement

Email list cleaning should be a priority because it affects engagement, open rates, and click-through rates. 

With a targeted email list, you can reach active recipients who are likely to be interested in your services. The best email list cleaning tools, such as Omnisend, help filter low-quality email subscribers from high-quality ones.

Sending emails to uninterested subscribers can annoy them and waste your resources. It also increases the likelihood of them unsubscribing or marking your emails as spam.

Reduces costs

A clean email list is cost-effective. Many email marketing providers charge based on list size. When you clear inactive or invalid email addresses, you save money. You’ll be paying to reach actual potential customers, not outdated or irrelevant email addresses.

Protects your reputation

Spam complaints can damage sender reputation, making it harder to reach inboxes. Why? As Internet Service Providers take spam complaints seriously, a high number of spam complaints can lead to your emails being filtered as spam or even blocked. A clean email list reduces spam complaints, thereby boosting sender reputation.

How to clean up your email list and keep it clean? 

Audit your campaigns 

Start by analyzing your campaign metrics and comparing with industry benchmarks to see if you have higher-than-average hard bounce rates and/or low engagement. 

If you’re using Omnisend, you also get detailed sales tracking and attribution and a 360^o overview of engagement, ROI, and performance.

Run a re-engagement campaign 

Send out re-engagement emails to try and salvage disengaged subscribers. No threats, no gimmicks, just engaging, automated “Still want to hear from us?” win-back emails, with a follow-up a few days later for non-responders. You’ll be amazed how many decide to stay.

If they’re still not engaging after that, it’s time to let them go.

Clean your lists 

Clean your email lists using bulk email verification and list cleaning services. For example, you can remove inactive or invalid emails like [email protected], spam emails, and catch-alls. Catch-alls are email servers that accept any emails that share a domain, even if they have typos or don’t exist.

You can usually upload lists as a CSV or similar or connect tools directly to your ESP, CRM, or email platform via APIs or Zapier integrations. 

Also, validate catch-alls by sending emails from “disposable” addresses. For example, you can set up an account using a public domain like Gmail rather than your own. After that, delete emails with older domains whose users may have moved on by now.

Check your domain health 

Use tools like MX Lookup to check you’re not on any blacklists. This is especially important if you’re sending from a shared IP so that others’ bad email marketing practices don’t affect your reputation. If you’re sending through Omnisend’s shared domain, it’s easy to check your sender reputation. 

Start running segmented campaigns with your new lists 

Limit sending to validated and/or engaged users for a while to boost your sender reputation and deliverability, and don’t send to lower-quality lists until they are verified.

Use Omnisend segments to identify your most engaged subscribers and target them with engaging content.

Ongoing maintenance 

Establish what counts as a disengaged subscriber. For example, if they didn’t engage with content in the past 3 months. Then, set up rules and triggers in your email platform to automatically identify and unsubscribe them from your most active lists. Don’t delete them altogether, though, to avoid them being added to your list again in the future.

Depending on your marketing platform, you may need to set up rules to remove hard bounces immediately (in Omnisend this happens automatically, so you don’t need to do anything) and determine when to remove soft bounces. Remember, some platforms charge per send, so if emails are repeatedly not getting thorough, the cost can rack up. 

Practice “email sunsetting” to let go of inactive contacts

We recommend sunsetting subscribers who don’t engage for more than 120 days.

Keep lists clean by integrating your email verification and list cleaning tool with online forms, webpages, ESP, CRM, or marketing automation software to perform regular checks on your database. 

Run regular manual spot checks to pick up anything the tech missed. It’s also possible to remove duplicates manually by checking them in a spreadsheet pivot table.

5 email list cleaning best practices 

To keep your email list clean and filled with active email addresses ready to engage with your brand, here are five best practices to keep in mind: 

1. Make email list cleaning a habit 

It’s not enough to clean your email list just once. Make it a regular part of your email marketing routine for the most optimal results.

You can create a monthly or quarterly schedule for email list cleaning. If there are valid subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails in a while, you can create a re-engagement campaign. If that doesn’t work, you may then remove them from the list.

2. Use email verification tools 

Email verification tools ensure that your email list is up-to-date and accurate. Some tools can help you weed out invalid or poor-quality contacts and will flag addresses that are spam traps or are likely to bounce. 

By integrating these tools into your email marketing practices, you can ensure a clean email list that doesn’t take much time to bring you profits. 

3. Segment your email lists

Your email list likely contains subscribers from various categories. To increase engagement rates and deliverability, it is a good practice to segment your email list after cleaning it. 

This will help you customize the emails based on the recipients’ preferences and demands which will eventually lead to better open rates and click through rates. You can segment them based on demographics, purchase history, and more. The goal of segmentation is to create groups that will respond positively to campaigns.

Here’s an example of email segmentation by Omnisend based on country:

4. Encourage engagement

Keeping a clean email list isn’t enough. You also need to encourage your subscribers to engage. How? By creating compelling and relevant content with clear CTAs. You can also add interactive elements like images and surveys to encourage your subscribers to engage. 

For instance, you can send an email requesting feedback on your products or areas of improvement. Regular engagement helps keep your email list active. 

5. Implement double opt-in

This last step works because it ensures only people who are truly interested join your list. Whenever a new person joins, you can send a second confirmation email to verify their subscription.

This simple action can help you filter out fake or incorrect email addresses, ultimately helping you maintain a clean email list. Using double opt-in also helps maintain engagement by keeping only subscribers who are really interested in what you have to say.

When and how often should you clean your email list?

Depending on who you ask, you’ll get different answers to this question. We think once a quarter is a good rule of thumb. However, others recommend anything from once a month to every 6 months, depending on the size of your database, how fast it’s growing, and whether it’s isolated on a single system or shared across multiple tools. Others even recommend pulling new data for each campaign and assuming anything over a few months is invalid. 

It also depends on your industry and metrics. If there are no red flags, cleaning once every few months should be fine. But if you see a spike in unsubscribes, hard bounces, or spam complaints, and plummeting open rates and click-throughs, it’s time for a spring clean.

You should also clean when you inherit a list, change CRM, ESP, or email marketing platform, and before a big campaign.

Best email list cleaning services

Omnisend 

Omnisend offers a highly effective email list cleaning service. With this platform, you can remove low-quality email contacts. This includes bad email addresses, spam traps, and typos. This helps you achieve better open rates and deliverability and reduce costs. 

Additionally, Omnisend’s list cleaning service automatically identifies high-quality contacts versus low ones:

Even better, Omnisend offers a free plan, perfect for starting businesses or new users looking to explore the service. With the free plan, you can send up to 500 emails per month and manage up to 250 contacts. It also offers features like web push notifications, email automation tools, and audience segmentation.

Omnisend rapidly verifies contact lists imported from your ESP, computer, or via the AP and performs real-time validation of emails incoming from marketing platforms, online forms, etc., and automated list cleaning. 

Pricing

Apart from the free plan, Omnisend offers various paid plans based on the number of email subscribers. 

Here’s what the plans look like:

• Standard plan: $16/month, up to 500 contacts and 6,000 emails per month
• Pro plan: $59/month, up to 2,500 contacts and unlimited emails every month

Signing off

Dirty data damages your reputation, deliverability, and conversion rates. The right tools and best practices can help keep your email lists clean. This ultimately enables you to achieve better results from your ecommerce campaigns. 

Get off to a good start by using an email cleaning and omnichannel marketing platform like Omnisend. This ensures you’re always working with reliable data and insights. It also allows you to send tailored messages to the right audience at the right time over the right channel.

Frequently asked questions about email list cleaning

What is the difference between email verification and list cleaning? 

Email verification is the process of confirming that an email address is live and corresponds to a real person who could be interested in receiving communications from you. Email list cleaning means tidying up your email lists by removing fake, invalid, or duplicate email addresses.

Should you purge your email list?

If your email marketing campaigns have high bounce rates and low engagement rates, you should purge your email lists. This helps remove inactive or invalid emails, protect your sender reputation, and improve your results.

How do you keep a healthy email list?

Start by using email verification tools. With such tools, you can validate emails during signup. Also, use list cleaning tools to identify and remove invalid, erroneous, unengaged, or risky emails from your database. Email marketing best practices like segmentation and personalization will also help keep your lists healthy.

What is the best way to clean an email list?

The best way to clean an email list is to use an email list cleaning tool to identify invalid or risky email addresses and errors and identify unengaged subscribers.

How do you know your email list is clean?

You’ll know if your email list is clean when your subscribers are engaged and metrics like opens, click-throughs, and conversions are high while bounce rates remain low.