When it comes to email marketing lists, bigger is not always better. If your list suffers, for whatever reason, from a lack of valid email addresses as well as a host of inactives, you are paying for sending emails that will either not be delivered or never be read. As a result, keeping your email list as clean as possible has two clear benefits. First, it keeps the cost of conducting your campaigns down, and, second, it gives you a much clearer picture of how successful your campaigns are. 3 stupidly simple ways to keep your list clean and your costs down are listed below.
- Get rid of unsubscribes and unconfirmeds. If a recipient indicates that he or she no longer wants to receive emails from you and is placed in the unsubscribe section of your list, your email service provider will still count that as a lead on your list. Why pay to keep an address on your list when no emails will be sent to that address? Make sure you take the time to delete unsubscribes from your list in order to avoid this expense. Similarly, unconfirmed email addresses, given by consumers who hoped to be able to receive some benefit or promotion without having to provide a real email address, should also be removed. By failing to complete the email validation process they have indicated that they are not interested in receiving your emails.
- Delete undeliverables. These addresses will typically show up on the bounceback reports supplied by your email service provider. Whatever the reason for the bounceback, whether due to a bad domain, incorrect address, or something else, you don’t want to be paying for leads that you can’t deliver emails to. Strike these addresses from your list as well.
- Track inactives. Some leads will become inactive after a time for one reason or another, while others were created by consumers who only joined your list for the initial promotion and don’t intend to open any subsequent emails you send them. In either case, you don’t want to be paying to send emails to leads who don’t intend to open them, so track your open rates by contact and mark those who don’t open any of your emails for a certain amount of time as inactive. Rather than removing them from the list right away, you may want to send out a reactivation email asking them to “confirm my email” if they want to stay on your list. Those who don’t respond to the reactivation campaign can be removed from the list.