Millions of businesses around the world use email to connect with their audience and increase sales. Considering its average ROI of $42, email marketing has become the go-to way for brands to stay top of mind. However, making sure you use an accurate email list is vital to your success. Here are three reasons cleaning your email list will result in higher engagement and a more effective email marketing.
What is email list cleaning?
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Cleaning your list means removing obsolete and risky data from it. In time, some of the email addresses you acquire will go bad – it happens to all of us. People sign up with fake addresses, they change jobs and leave behind their old contacts, or they start marking you as spam. Such types of emails will hurt your reputation as an email sender and cause your messages to go to spam.
An email list cleaning service takes care of this problem and also prevents it from happening. Thanks to their advanced algorithms, email verification services can take your stale list and turn it back into a powerful, profitable business tool.
But what exactly does an email cleaner do and how does it improve your email marketing? Let’s take a look at three of the ways it helps you achieve better results from your campaigns.
An email list cleaner removes invalid addresses
Every list has a few: misspelled and fake emails, or emails that were once good and are now just a dead end. The problem with these emails is that they bounce and send a bad signal to Internet service providers (ISPs), telling them you’re not a legitimate sender. Spammers don’t care about email marketing best practices. They blast out emails without worrying how many will bounce. If you do the same, ISPs will take you for a spammer, too, and that’s the last thing you need when you’re trying to get your marketing messages across.
It weeds out spam complainers
Some people habitually mark emails as spam – they’re either overwhelmed by the amount of email they get, or they forgot they subscribed to your newsletter. While that’s understandable, allowing them to do it regularly will cause your sender score to decrease. As a result, many of your emails will land in spam, and your email campaigns will suffer.
Some email service providers will automatically “clean” these contacts. If yours doesn’t, you can always use an email list cleaning system to prune them out. Plus, you can install an email verification API on your signup forms to check email addresses in real time. Thus, you’ll be able to prevent spam complainers to get on your list in the first place and avert the risk of ruining your reputation.
It gets rid of role-based email addresses
You can easily recognize role-based emails. Usually, they have a format such as office@ or team@ and organizations set them up when they want to receive all their email in one place. The issue with role-based contacts is that they have poor marketing value. In general, these emails are checked by a group of people or an assistant who doesn’t have the interest and time to read your marketing offer.
Hence, emails sent to role-based addresses either get ignored or they get deleted, thus telling ISPs that your content is irrelevant. It won’t be long until your future emails will be directed to spam. When your sender reputation is poor, even your most engaged subscribers won’t see you anymore because you’ll be in their spam folder.
Certain email list cleaning services can detect and remove role-based addresses, so it’s a good idea to use one and make sure your list has only high-quality addresses.
Why email list cleaning matters
As I was explaining earlier, your reputation as a sender is vital to how your emails perform. If you let your email list go stale and continue to send emails to risky addresses, that can dramatically affect your outcome. As a business owner or marketer, you want your emails to reach your customers and subscribers. If they don’t, you’re missing out on all sorts of opportunities.
For instance, let’s say you’ve worked hard to organize a webinar and you’re excited to invite your customers. Or perhaps you wrote an e-book or a white paper and you’d like to share it with the people on your list. So, you send out your email, only to be disappointed in the low engagement it gets. Your bounce rate is high, and your open and click-through rates are as low as your desire to continue with email marketing.
On the other hand, when you take good care of your email list, send great content, and follow best practices, you build a solid reputation. Your emails land in people’s inboxes, where they get a chance to connect you with your prospects. ISPs see you as a lawful, dedicated sender, who takes email marketing seriously. It’s win-win situation: you get your message in front of people, and they take advantage of your relevant content.
How to clean your email list
It’s an easy process and you can be done with it in a few hours or even a few minutes – depending on how large your database is. Find a reputable email verifier, upload your list, and wait until the system removes the bad data. Then, you simply download your fresh list and use it to achieve your marketing and sales goals.
Alternatively, you can use an email verification and validation API. It’s a piece of code you should get from your email cleaning service and that you can copy and paste onto your platform. The API checks every new subscriber instantly, ensuring you collect only valid and safe email addresses.