The end of March marks the official beginning of Spring, when the cold dry winter season has come to a close and the sun seems to linger just a bit longer during the day. With this change in climate, spring cleaning kicks into high gear as we prepare for the beating hot summer months.
When you feel the inevitable urge to bust out the Swiffer mop, don’t restrict your cleaning efforts to your bathroom floors. It’s time to redirect your attention to your email list as well.
Based on the business that you’re in as well as the number of years you’ve been involved in building this business, you might have a subscriber list in the hundreds, in the thousands, or even in the millions. Regardless of list size, my guess is that you’ve spilled your heart and soul (not to mention your hard-earned money) building a consumer database of those that have expressed interest in your company in particular or your industry in general. Newsletter signups are not easy to come by and it is difficult to build a quality optin email database.
Now, what I am about to tell you might not come easy, but will save you from the heartache later on. Before you launch a large-scale email marketing campaign, it is imperative that you strip your list of all abandoned, invalid, or undeliverable email recipients prior to clicking send.
You might ask…
“Why did I go through all of the trouble of getting people to subscribe, when I have to remove a large number of them from my list anyway?
When you should really be asking yourself…
“Why would I risk my sender reputation by sending to a large number of dead emails?”
There’s many different subscriber personalities out there. Call it subscriber schizophrenia if you will.
Subscriber A: These are active subscribers who open your emails with regularity and like to share it with others, whether through social media or other media outlets. These are, without a doubt, your most valued segment of your database. Nurturing this segment by continuing to send weekly promotions, informational pieces, or a simple “thank you” for being an active subscriber will go a long way in securing their loyalty and readership.
Subscriber B: Then there’s those who only open occasionally, only when your subject line or your message blatantly stands out from their cluttered inbox and truly piques their interest. You definitely want to keep these individuals on board, but just be sure to keep a close eye out for their online behavior. Perhaps even consider launching a re-engagement campaign promoting new offers and new content that does a better job of capturing viewer interest and luring them to your website.
Subscriber C: Lastly, you will frequently come across those whose activity and engagement with your offer is lackluster at best. They haven’t even opened your email for months on end. There’s a good chance that these individuals subscribed to your newsletter years ago and have changed jobs or switched their email address since then. When a vast majority of email service providers charge based on the number of emails sent, these old, outdated, and invalid contacts are increasing your marketing cost and reducing your ROI.
In addition to the dead email addresses, did I even mention the bots, honeypots, spam seeds, throwaway domains, or habitual complainers that reside in your list, corrupting it for future use? Without properly discarding these email addresses, you could be potentially blocked or even shut down by your ESP (Email Service Provider) from sending bulk email.
The key to email list hygiene is identifying what’s good and what’s not. That’s where an email list cleaning and validation service comes into play. Sending deliverable emails to people who want to receive them will only help you reach a larger audience and help you in increasing awareness of your business. This will, in turn, allow you to bring more people to your website in an effort to increase sales.
So, are you ready to get cleaning? Don’t procrastinate, get it done before its too late.