Maintain your email list hygiene

The purpose of maintaining email list hygiene is for marketers to identify and remove contacts that are inactive, meaning they didn’t engage with their last emails. By sending campaigns only to active contacts, you’ll get better email deliverability rates as you’ll have less unsubscribes and spam complaints. But a clean email list also means you’ll dramatically improve the open rates of your email campaigns.

Regularly remove hard bounced email addresses from your contact lists. Unlike soft bounces, a hard bounce is a permanent delivery error caused by an invalid email address (for example a mistyped email or a non-existent destination server). Some Email Service Providers (ESPs) automatically block hard bounces for 90 days in order to protect your sender reputation.

Also, regularly remove from your list people who haven’t opened your marketing campaigns in the last few months. Eventually, you can send a re-engagement campaign to your contacts to make sure none of those inactive subscribers want to keep receiving communications from you. 

How to clean your email marketing list 

First, make sure to use an ESP with advanced features such as real-time statistics and contact list segmentation. Then, follow these recommendations:

• To remove invalid contacts: Go check your last campaign metrics, select contacts that appear as blocks and hard bounces, and delete them from your contact list.

• To send a re-engagement email before removing non-engaging contacts: Create a segment with people who haven’t opened and clicked a campaign in the last six months, and send a re-engagement campaign to this segment. Then, remove from your list only the contacts of this segment that haven’t shown any interest in receiving your emails.

• You can also use an email validation service. These kinds of email verification services identify four types of bad emails to clean email lists: bounces, inactive recipients, unsubscribers, and complaints. This way, you make sure you’re not wasting resources sending emails to typos and spam traps.