Doing regular email list cleaning is essential f you want your stuff delivered to your prospects inbox.
Here’s how:
REDUCE your BIG AUDACIOUS LIST!
Bigger is not ALWAYS better.
No matter what the email “guru” told you.
The size of your list doesn’t matter…
IF they’re not engaging with you.
IF they’re not GETTING the emails because the internet Gods send your stuff to spam because you haven’t conformed with this email marketing best practices.
Quarterly Email List Cleaning
Every quarter – (at LEAST) – you may want to run an “unengaged” report.
Simply, this means people who have not opened your emails in the last 3 months.
I use Infusionsoft and thankfully, they've recently put in this search feature as you see here:
It doesn’t matter what service you use – the point is, you NEED to do some proactive email list cleaning to follow email marketing best practices and not get slapped when you send your stuff out.
What To Do With The Unengaged
After doing some major email list cleaning, the question I get from clients is “what should I do with these contacts – I don't want to just delete them”
Sometimes, we spend good money to get these contacts onto our list…so deleting them just because they’re unengaged – hurts.
Here’s what to do:
MOVE them to another email service provider.
Here’s why you do that:
Many of my clients will ask “well, if I'm gonna keep them on another list, why not keep them where they are?”
The reason is, if you have people on your main list that are unengaged, it hurts your deliverability ratio.
For example: If you have 1000 contacts and only 500 engage – that’s 50%.
Over the next 3 months you add 500 more contacts, and people opening jumps to 700.
Good right?
Not really.
Your open ratio actually went DOWN to 47%.
That may not seem like much, but if the trend continues…
The Google, Bing & Yahoo Gods look at this and decide to limit your “importance” and send MORE of your stuff to spam.
Related: 4 Ways to Improve Your Email Marketing Strategy
So, if you DELETE them from your main email marketing platform (in my case, Infusionsoft) and move them to a completely different email marketing service (in my case MailChimp), you STILL keep the addresses.
Why Is This Important When It Comes To Email List Cleaning ?
Two reasons.
It keeps your main email marketing platform clean with only engaged people.
You can upload the unengaged email addresses you have in Mailchimp (or whatever) to Facebook so you can retarget them with advertising.
In other words, you can send advertising ONLY to those people who have engaged with you before…
OR, you can use the unengaged or opted out lists as targets to AVOID in your Facebook ads…because if they've opted out…perhaps they'll give negative responses if they see your ads on Facebook as well.
It's all a test to see what works best for you.
But ad targeting on Facebook is a whole other topic 🙂
Related: Is Your Email Campaign Marketing Scaring People Away?
Anyhoo, I don’t want to make this email list cleaning post all technical.
And, I can already feel I’m going off on all sorts of tangents (thanks A.D.D.), so I’ll stop here for now.
To end this, if you follow a strict standard operating procedure of email list cleaning every 3 months like I’ve outlined here, you’re already miles ahead of others who don’t put the effort and end up in SPAM boxes.